ABSTRACT
Milton Friedman lays out his notion of the natural rate of unemployment, a concept that fixes the ideal rate of unemployment in relation to inflation. Friedman thus provided intellectual basis for the worldwide implementation of structural adjustments in vulnerable economies that benefited neocolonial enterprises. The spread of inflation-targeting monetary policy in OECD countries like South Korea manifests then not just in structural reforms, as in the kind demanded in the 1998 IMF bailout of the South Korean economy, but also in Korean cultural forms as well. The specific illustration of inflationary pressure as whiskey drinking reminds us of earlier naturalist accounts of capital accumulation as the bodily ingestion of inappropriately large amounts of food, drink, or other substances, against which someone must cry "that's enough." The point is less to critique inflation targeting as such, but rather to call attention to what happens when such protocols take on the force of natural law.
