Film Review of Economic Freedom in Action: Changing Lives

Abstract

Recently, an initiative led by the Fraser Institute (as part of the Free to Choose Network) has begun to further influence economics and business education in schools throughout Canada and the US. In February 2014, the Fraser Institute released an educational film titled Economic Freedom in Action: Changing Lives, in Canada. This film follows the lives of five entrepreneurs from different countries (Zambia, South Korea, Slovakia and two stories from Chile) claiming that free market capitalism, “economic freedom” and individual entrepreneurship have allowed the protagonists to raise themselves out of poverty and achieve material wealth. However, the Fraser Institute ignores the problematic contradictions in its advocacy of free market capitalism and “economic freedom”. Marie-Antoinette, not recognizing that grain markets control access to bread, the staple of common people, proposes they eat cake (brioche). Similarly, the Fraser Institute and other neoliberal think tanks, refusing to acknowledge that capitalism, free market or otherwise, is the cause of much of the material inequalities, propose free choice and individual entrepreneurship as solutions to global poverty and structural inequalities. Shortage of jobs? No access to grains? Let them eat cake.