Can someone explain what really happened in Chile, with Friedman and the Chicago Boys, from an Austrian/Misesian/Praxeological point of view?
All I have ever heard are leftist critics launching rancorous polemics and mainstream right-wing apologists adoringly defending Friedman.
So, what really happened?
Thanks
Read The Klein Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Polemics by Johan Norberg for a comprehensive refutation of this slander against capitalism and Milton Friedman.
Excerpt: Klein cites the influence of Milton Friedman’s economic views on Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship in Chile in the 1970s as evidence that free markets rely on tyranny and torture. She writes that Friedman acted as “adviser to the Chilean dictator.”13 This is wrong. Friedman never worked as an adviser and never accepted a penny from the Chilean regime. He even turned down two honorary degrees from Chilean universities that received government funding because he thought it could be interpreted as a support for the regime.
However, he was in Chile for six days in March 1975 to give public lectures, invited by a private foundation. When he was there he also met once with Pinochet for around 45 minutes, and wrote him one letter afterwards, arguing for a plan to end hyperinflation and liberalize the economy. That was the same kind of advice Friedman gave to communist dictatorships like the Soviet Union, China, and Yugoslavia, yet nobody would claim he was a communist.
The Mises Institute’s Art Carden has also written about it here.
Both these fellows beat me to exactly what I was going to post. Good job, gentlemen.
Not exactly a statistical sample or an analysis but here is my understanding verified by a Chilean businessman:
Allende, a communist, was elected in 1973 in a close race. Allende ruined the Chilean economy pissing off the business community. The business community supported a military coup by a really uncool dude Pinochet. Pinochet conducted a version of the Spanish (Most Uncivil) Civilwar of the 1930s and take over by a military dictator over elected idiot Communists. Pinochet did not immediately hand over power to civillians but was interested in doing so in the most effective manner. He was very sympathetic to the ideas of the Chicago School of Economics. Eventually Pinochet handed over power to a civillian government.
Lost in all this mess was the propery theft and other thuggish behavior by the Allende government. This was made worse by the hyperinflation that took place in the country.
My opinion is that the concept that was lost here is that this was one battle in the 20th century war between Communism and Fascism. The interesting thing in Chile is that the Fascists gave up power to a civillian government and skipped the repeated hyperinflations of other countries most notably Argentina.
Pinochet was not a fascist. I wish people would stop abusing this word. There have been maybe 10 fascist governments in human history, and the only one that presently exists even de jure is the People’s Action Party in Singapore which, de facto, acts more like a protection racket than its actually fascistic platform.
What was Pinochet?
A military man and an anti-communist. I don’t think he had any worked out ideology, though he seemed favorable towards neoliberalism.
Sounds like Hitler/Mussolini?
But he can be given the same ideology as people with similar ideas?
Just the organizing of the economic sector I presume?
Sounds like Hitler/Mussolini?
Not really, Pinochet was not an ideological leader, he detested Socialism but he was not commited to a “transformation of society” to something different.
If it werent for the infuence of the Chicago School probably Chile would have reverted to a pre-Allende economic model after 1975.
But he can be given the same ideology as people with similar ideas?
?
Just the organizing of the economic sector I presume?
Pretty much, its very hard to advocate for social liberty when you are related to a dictatorship.
This is confusing, Pinochet didnt like socialism and was a military man("*A military man and an anti-communist*", just like the two aforementioned), but he didnt want to chang anything, just kill the people who where responsible for it?
Maybe.
“A military man and an anti-communist”, just like the two aforementioned, i.e. they were military men and anti-communists.
Doesn`t that equal fascism to some extent?
Sounds like Hitler/Mussolini?
Do you actually know anything about Hitler or Mussolini? Hitler had a very brief military career, never rose to any rank of prominance and had no officer training or integration into the military at all. Mussolini was a journalist and an opportunist.
Just the organizing of the economic sector I presume?
What?
maybe it is better to list the reasons why Johnny thinks of him as a fascist and Ricky’s reasons why he is not a fascist…
I consider the free and easy use of the word fascism to be a figment of the Left’s dominance after the second World War. It is pretty much a useless term (as ‘totalitarianism’ is, for that matter). And, no offense to Flynn or Professor Salerno, but the so-called ‘economics of fascism’ were never implemented by any fascist government, their de facto economic policies were Progressive-Liberal in nature and origin. National Socialist Germany was not fascist, nor was its economic ‘policy’.
My view of what fascism is stems from Gottfried. Fascism is a specific post-war ideology that arose in south-central Europe in response to the destruction of the First World War, a reaction against the depridations of democratic governments and a response the rising threat of Communist parties. By the time the German government overthrew the Italian regime it was dead and only exists (to the extent that it does) in assorted revisionist, quasi-fascist ‘third position’ parties.
Another vastly abused term, by the likes of Jonah Goldberg and Glenn Beck, is Progressive. They use ‘Progressive’ and ‘Fascist’ to describe everything they disapprove of, and often interchangably to the vast irritation of any competent intellectual historian.
Peter Brimelow was correct to observe in last weekend’s Internet chat that neoconservatives believe not in fascism but in “Goldbergism” when they push for open borders and an aggressive foreign policy in the name of human rights. Jonah Goldberg, one of their major political theorists, has explained on NROnline that European conservatives like Joseph de Maistre were really on the left, seeing that they rejected “human rights,” which is the essence of a conservative belief system. No matter how silly Goldberg’s interpretation may seem, what he enunciates is the current neoconservative dogma that justifies imperial expansion. And it is hard to grasp anything fascist about Goldberg’s redefinition of conservatism. Goldberg arrives at his view from reading the English social democratic historian Isaiah Berlin, who plays up the derivation of fascist thinking from Maistre’s attack on the universalism and abstract ideals of the French Revolution. Although Berlin overstates this connection, he is nonetheless justified in perceiving the fascists as being connected to European counterrevolutionary traditions. The neoconservatives are not only not connected in any way to such traditions but are clearly on the side of what Michael Ledeen calls the “creative destruction” of the social and cultural traditions of other peoples.
Without judging the merits of this project, it seems that those who pursue it are not definable as fascists. They may in fact be far more destructive but are not a subgenus of interwar fascists who have landed up in our society. Depicting them as such depends on an underdetermined definition that serves strictly polemical ends. Just because all modern Western industrial states have large administrations that socialize the family and feature public education does not make them “fascist.” Fascists took advantage of a political paradigm they shared with non-fascist modern governments, in order to achieve in some cases counterrevolutionary ends. But they did not initiate the welfare state, which flourished without the fascists, on the Euro-American left. Nor were the fascists unique in having military dictators and wars of expansion. Both Tom Woods’s The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History and Tom DiLorenzo’s study of the Great Emancipator as state-builder provide illustrations of Lincoln’s authoritarian manner that show bad European habits could crop up here as well. But that happened generations before there was a fascist movement.
It is not accurate to refer to Abraham Lincoln as a “fascist,” because he applied military force to quell the Southern secession and ruled as a military dictator. Political leaders can do things that are open to condemnation without being fascists. It would also not be irrelevant to cite the case of one of Lincoln’s precursors, Oliver Cromwell, who also slaughtered secessionists, to reunite the United Kingdom, and whom the young Lincoln saw as someone he wished to emulate. Yet curiously the two men, long viewed as being alike in their nationalist fervor, connection to an Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture, and role as social modernizers, have contributed to very different cults. After being identified for centuries with republicanism and Protestant sectarians, Cromwell became a hero for rightwing English nationalists, including the fascist followers of Sir Oswald Mosley in the late thirties. Lincoln, by contrast, has become a god figure for the Left, from the communist Abraham Lincoln Brigade fighting in the Spanish Civil War down to the civil rights movement and his current apotheosis, as the incarnation of global democratic ideals. My friend Tom Di Lorenzo has made this last point clear by debating Lincoln-admirers, who invariably bring with them leftist agendas. But neither Cromwell nor Lincoln produced the twentieth-century cults that sprang up around their putative achievements. The Irish are certainly entitled to dislike Cromwell and his son-in-law for devastating their land during the English Civil War and like Paul Craig Roberts, I cannot find any sane reason for a Southerner whose family suffered during Lincoln’s invasion of the South to revere this brutal nationalist. But neither figure belonged to the twentieth century or to its ideological wars; and both have been co-opted to symbolize battles that are no longer theirs. Like Cromwell, Lincoln was neither a fascist nor a neocon
Pete
Brimelow was correct to observe in last weekend’s Internet chat that neoconservatives believe not in fascism but in “Goldbergism” when they push for open borders and an aggressive foreign policy in the name of human rights. Jonah Goldberg, one of their major political theorists, has explained on NROnline that European conservatives like Joseph de Maistre were really on the left, seeing that they rejected “human rights,” which is the essence of a conservative belief system. No matter how silly Goldberg’s interpretation may seem, what he enunciates is the current neoconservative dogma that justifies imperial expansion. And it is hard to grasp anything fascist about Goldberg’s redefinition of conservatism. Goldberg arrives at his view from reading the English social democratic historian Isaiah Berlin, who plays up the derivation of fascist thinking from Maistre’s attack on the universalism and abstract ideals of the French Revolution. Although Berlin overstates this connection, he is nonetheless justified in perceiving the fascists as being connected to European counterrevolutionary traditions. The neoconservatives are not only not connected in any way to such traditions but are clearly on the side of what Michael Ledeen calls the “creative destruction” of the social and cultural traditions of other peoples.
Without judging the merits of this project, it seems that those who pursue it are not definable as fascists. They may in fact be far more destructive but are not a subgenus of interwar fascists who have landed up in our society. Depicting them as such depends on an underdetermined definition that serves strictly polemical ends. Just because all modern Western industrial states have large administrations that socialize the family and feature public education does not make them “fascist.” Fascists took advantage of a political paradigm they shared with non-fascist modern governments, in order to achieve in some cases counterrevolutionary ends. But they did not initiate the welfare state, which flourished without the fascists, on the Euro-American left. Nor were the fascists unique in having military dictators and wars of expansion. Both Tom Woods’s The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History and Tom DiLorenzo’s study of the Great Emancipator as state-builder provide illustrations of Lincoln’s authoritarian manner that show bad European habits could crop up here as well. But that happened generations before there was a fascist movement.
It is not accurate to refer to Abraham Lincoln as a “fascist,” because he applied military force to quell the Southern secession and ruled as a military dictator. Political leaders can do things that are open to condemnation without being fascists. It would also not be irrelevant to cite the case of one of Lincoln’s precursors, Oliver Cromwell, who also slaughtered secessionists, to reunite the United Kingdom, and whom the young Lincoln saw as someone he wished to emulate. Yet curiously the two men, long viewed as being alike in their nationalist fervor, connection to an Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture, and role as social modernizers, have contributed to very different cults. After being identified for centuries with republicanism and Protestant sectarians, Cromwell became a hero for rightwing English nationalists, including the fascist followers of Sir Oswald Mosley in the late thirties. Lincoln, by contrast, has become a god figure for the Left, from the communist Abraham Lincoln Brigade fighting in the Spanish Civil War down to the civil rights movement and his current apotheosis, as the incarnation of global democratic ideals. My friend Tom Di Lorenzo has made this last point clear by debating Lincoln-admirers, who invariably bring with them leftist agendas. But neither Cromwell nor Lincoln produced the twentieth-century cults that sprang up around their putative achievements. The Irish are certainly entitled to dislike Cromwell and his son-in-law for devastating their land during the English Civil War and like Paul Craig Roberts, I cannot find any sane reason for a Southerner whose family suffered during Lincoln’s invasion of the South to revere this brutal nationalist. But neither figure belonged to the twentieth century or to its ideological wars; and both have been co-opted to symbolize battles that are no longer theirs. Like Cromwell, Lincoln was neither a fascist nor a neocon.
This is confusing, Pinochet didn
t like socialism and was a military man("*A military man and an anti-communist*", just like the two aforementioned), but he didnt want to chang anything, just kill the people who where responsible for it?
Correct, when the military took over the country it wasnt because they wanted to have fun it was because the chilean parliament called for the army to restore peace and order from a socialist regime that had broken the constitution and the laws of the republic.
Pinochet should have relinquished power 6 months after the coup but power corrupted him.
“A military man and an anti-communist”, just like the two aforementioned, i.e. they were military men and anti-communists.
Yes
Doesn`t that equal fascism to some extent?
Anti-communism is not the same as fascism or liberalism. Pinochet didnt try to create a corporate state or create a command economy, after 1975 he let the economy run free for the most part.
Many regimes in LA in the 70s were anti-communist but very few were actually commited to implement free markets reforms and none did it to the extent of Chile.
Well, as far as Friedman himself is concerned, we can hear that from his own mouth.