I actually agree with you as well, for the most part
Damn, man, is this an historic day? I don't know that I would class myself in the same sort of "free market fundamentalism" that Stiglitz is arguing against in relation to the IMF (although I haven't read the book, just the article you linked to). I don't think the IMF is really doing anything good either. I know the IMF is supposedly helping free up capital for emerging economies and so on, but to me it's something similar to welfare - although the IMF puts some conditions on its "loans", they don't actually reform the conditions in the countries where the money is needed. It is also rife with greed and interventionism, which does no good for said countries.
The IMF certainly isn't a way to free markets, in my opinion. No more than Keynesian economists fiddling with the economy is free-market-based either.
If we had some way to actually understand all the ramifications of every economic decision that was made, and could adhere to strict guidelines about how and when to prompt a sector of an economy, I'd be all for Keynesian interventions. Maybe someday we will when we understand chaos theory better and have an AI computer system that has so many inputs (including human emotions and desires) that it could all be calculated.
But I feel the same way about a good, solid democratically-elected republican government. They are both good in theory but both tend to concentrate power in the hands of people that for the most part don't have anything but their own power, wealth or ideals (which are not necessarily shared with the rest of the population) at heart, which causes decisions to be made on the wrong things while ignoring some of the most basic of human desires as not part of the equation. Or, those sentiments are used to whip up emotions of those, the electorate, who give their permission to do things to the rest of the population.
Free market is free market. It isn't any longer free when people should go around tweaking it (even with "loans" to impoverished countries, whose policies are set by set by not-so-poor countries, even if their hearts were in the right place) - at that point it is no longer a free market.
As far as actually getting people/populations out of their mess without intervening on such large scales - hell, I have no idea what the answer is and what is the best way to go about it wholesale, but I try to do everything I can on an individual scale, where I can.
