Diversity in the Neighbourhood

I have an ex-military neighbour who’s so right-wing while self-describing as a centrist (or as they like to call themselves - fiscal conservatives) who one time mentioned without a hint of irony that he was kind of fascinated with Augusto Pinochet.  That although he seemed to bully his critics and political opponents and generally appeared to not be a very nice guy, he did indeed spur strong economic growth in Chile.  My neighbour had been to Chile once or twice with the military and observed that “the people” really didn’t have that much bad to say about the guy.

Is it just me but I seem to recall back in the olden days there was a little more room for political curiosity and healthy skepticism?  The climate seemed more open for dogs to play with cats and colouring outside the lines was not quite so threatening a concept.  Regular Joe’s seemed to have more room to be inquisitive and prone to scratch the surface in order to gain some purchase on what makes things tick.

Itch relief and mechanical discovery in the case of the Pinochet reign would indicate militarily taking control and ousting a democratically elected government with the backing of the US and installing economics that included banning unions, killing dissenters, getting rid of certain tariff protections, imprisoning dissenters, privatizing a large number of government industry including social security and selling well below market value to (you guessed it) people within his own circle, torturing dissenters, and all the while amassing a personal fortune over the seventeen years of his iron-fisted dictatorship.  Did I mention he killed dissenters?

Pinochet used the influence of the “Chicago Boys”.  The Chicago Boys were a number of American educated Latin-American economists that had studied and believed in a libertarian free-market system of deregulation and privatization applied to heavily controlled economies.  

It’s worth noting that the Heritage Foundation credits them with transforming Chile into Latin America’s best performing economy and one of the worlds most business-friendly jurisdictions.    I just broke out in hives typing the Heritage Foundation.  I just did again.  It’s also worth mentioning that this training program was conceived back in the 1950’s by the US State Department as a kind of apprentice program between the University of Chicago and Chile’s Catholic University.  And again it’s worth noting that while the original project from the 50’s has ended the training program continues to this day.

I wonder when Milton Friedman, arguably considered one of the greatest western economists, was loading these boys up with all this good wholesome economic theory whether he clearly understood the symptoms usually associated to a “heavily controlled economy”.  I imagine it was a pretty sweet gig being one of the “smartest” dudes around and your behemoth government, so existentially terrorized by any other form of socio-economics outside of free-market capitalism, hands you a continent and a half of perfect petri-dishes in which to perform your experiments on like real people with like real lives.

Remember  - no irony, he meant it.  Should I admire that kind of conviction?