Mark Ames: Shameless Oligarchs Plunder Our World!

At the end of the 1990s, after the total collapse of the mass-privatization experiment in Boris Yeltin's Russia, some of the more earnest free-market proselytizers tried making sense of it all. The unprecedented collapse of Russia's economy and its capital markets, the wholesale looting, the quiet extermination of millions of Russians from the shock and destitution,  the terrible consequences of imposing radical libertarian free-market ideas on an alien culture, turned out worse than any worst-case-scenario imagined by the free-market true-believers. Of all the disastrous results of that experiment, what troubled many Western free-market true-believers most wasn't so much the mass poverty and population collapse, but rather the way things turned out so badly in Russia's newly-privatized companies and industries. That was the one thing that was supposed to go right. According to the operative theory, developed by the founding fathers of Libertarianism/Neoliberalism, Friedrich von Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman and the rest, a privately owned company will always outperform a state run company, because private ownership and the profit motive incentivise the owners to make their companies stronger, more efficient, more competitive, and so on. The theory promises that everyone benefits except for the bad old state and the lazy. That was the dominant libertarian theory framing the whole "shock doctrine" privatization experiment in Russia and elsewhere. In reality, as everyone was forced to admit by 1999, Russia's "privatized companies" were stripped and plundered as fast as their new private owners could loot them, leaving millions of workers without salaries!