Between the critical junctures that disrupt history, what we see more often are critical episodes - events that accelerate existing trends rather than divert them. Hurricane Katrina was one. It briefly opened political space for reform, only to be swiftly captured by Milton Friedman, who actively sought ways to test and implement free-market reforms. In the USA, his unfettered belief in drastic reductions in public spending found testing grounds in the ruins of New Orleans. This pattern of promoting neoliberal market policies amid crisis and disorientation became the empirical foundation of Naomi Klein's theory of Disaster Capitalism - an economic system of privatized wealth, war, and disaster reconstruction that is losing its incentive for peace and social equality. Klein connected the rapid market transformation in Chile, Iraq, and Russia to economic devastation and political terror that followed. Yet, her reliance on the narrative shock of policy implementation methods diverted attention from assessing such policy on its economic merits. Drastic neoliberalist policies needed a crisis opportunity on the starting lines. Today, they have matured into a persistent ideology hailing individual freedom.
Polanyi anticipated the damage of disembedding the market well before Friedman’s influence and the wave of neoliberal shock. The premature opening of markets destroyed nascent industries; rapid privatization opened the door to foreign exploitation in Chile and to oligarchic rule in Russia, which today runs the oil business known as the Russian Federation. The rip-the-band-aid approach to reduction in social protection left millions in poverty, including my home region in Ukraine, where rampant alcoholism served as a distinct marker of people's economic hopelessness post-Soviet breakdown. Klein intuitively understood that the calamitous consequences of economic shock treatment seemed almost natural companions to the window of exploitation opened by the free-market crusade.
The damage was predictable. Yet, Klein allows the brutality of political terror to do the work without following through analytically, as if the need for a crisis itself is evidence of a policy's illegitimacy. One of the most potent examples Klein provides is the transition to the school voucher system in New Orleans as the disoriented residents dealt with the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. While Klein primarily focused on how this transition required a disaster to advance, school vouchers remain on the policy radar 20 years after Katrina. In February 2026, Texas opened applications to its new $1 billion school voucher program, Education Freedom Accounts. Wherever vouchers spread next, their critique must rest on their impact, not on the circumstances of their introduction.
At their core, vouchers represent neoliberal logic penetrating the community structure. Those with resources benefit from defecting from the collective agreement. Still, when their resistance to redistribution enters local schools, its acceptance requires more - a crisis to start and the language of freedom to live on. It is a shift from rules that governed social order long before the competitive capitalist economy emerged - tradition, redistribution, and reciprocity.
Vouchers systematically disembed education from all three rules. It is a policy that solidifies inequality under the banner of personal choice and gives a clean exit to those who desire stratification without the moral weight. Vouchers and tuition grants do not set a ceiling on the cost of education, but can establish a floor price in the private market, simultaneously subsidizing students who never attended a public school in the first place. In the case of Texas Education Freedom Accounts, fiscal analysis showed that 87% of the applicants are expected to be students who already attend private schools. As wealthier parents cover the leftover difference out-of-pocket, low-income children are left behind, often along with other disadvantaged students. It is no wonder that the voucher movement took hold during the desegregation period, when state tuition grants enabled families to use public funds to attend private schools that were free to deny admission to “undesirable” students. The focus on horizontal freedom (parents’ ability to choose a particular school) has an adverse effect on vertical mobility, exacerbating existing social inequalities.
Friedrich Hayek highlighted that the free market inevitably breeds inequality that is partly a matter of luck. Hayek knew that spontaneous order, rather than conscious human design, leaves no single entity to blame for an individual's poverty. The helplessness of such unfortunate individuals in the face of implacable forces was described by Steinbeck in the opening chapters of The Grapes of Wrath. Steinbeck's tenant farmers, evicted after a drought, search for someone to hold responsible, only to be told it is the bank: “The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It’s the monster. Men made it, but they can’t control it.” A society that made this book a staple failed to internalize its lesson, accepting Hayek’s spontaneous order that makes poverty appear as fate rather than a systemic outcome.
Admittedly, Klein's framework of Disaster Capitalism claimed no attempt at exhaustive policy analysis, but rather to raise alarms when a critical episode occurs. However, the emotional framing keeps the conversation at the level of shock and coercion, crowding out the policy scrutiny that crisis conditions make all the more urgent. Anchoring vouchers to the traumatic imaginary of Hurricane Katrina misses the disturbing truth. Galeano asked: 'How can this inequality be maintained if not through jolts of electric shock?' The mature form of this ideology no longer needs to be enforced at the point of a gun or in a moment of crisis. It quietly naturalizes new hierarchies under the mask of personal freedom, spontaneous order, and the monster men made.