Liberty Alone

One of the anti-liberal left’s favourite charges is that Milton Friedman supported Pinochet’s totalitarian regime. Its recently been dug up again by Naomi Klein in her latest book.
To anyone who knows anything about Friedman’s political views should be obvious that Friedman would never support a totalitarian regime. He was an indefatigable defender of freedom. He was instrumental in getting the draft dropped in the US, correctly identifying it with slavery. He fought long and hard against the ‘War on Drugs’ and the damage it does to freedom and so many people.

Anyone who knows anything about his economics knows that that it goes hand in hand with his politics. He advocated freedom and individual liberty, his economic policies were not just utilitarian, they were based upon a vision of freedom and he believed (correctly in many instances) that his economic policies would lead to freedom if followed.

As a campaigner for freedom he would talk to anyone who would listen. In this role he spoke to people all over the world, including not just some people in Chile, but to communist governments, including China.
What actually happened in Chile then? In Friedman’s own account:

“MILTON FRIEDMAN: And I gave a talk at the Catholic University of Chile under the title ‘The Fragility of Freedom.’ The essence of the talk was that freedom was a very fragile thing and that what destroyed it more than anything else was central control; that in order to maintain freedom, you had to have free markets, and that free markets would work best if you had political freedom. So it was essentially an anti-totalitarian talk.

INTERVIEWER: So you envisaged, therefore, that the free markets ultimately would undermine Pinochet?

MILTON FRIEDMAN: Oh, absolutely. The emphasis of that talk was that free markets would undermine political centralization and political control. And incidentally, I should say that I was not in Chile as a guest of the government. I was in Chile as the guest of a private organization. [...]

I must say, it’s such a wonderful example of a double standard, because I had spent time in Yugoslavia, which was a communist country. I later gave a series of lectures in China. When I came back from communist China, I wrote a letter to the Stanford Daily newspaper in which I said, ‘It’s curious. I gave exactly the same lectures in China that I gave in Chile. I have had many demonstrations against me for what I said in Chile. Nobody has made any objections to what I said in China. How come?’”

So, a man advises people, who he believes are wrong, to change their attitude is vilified for it. It is true, he made some mistakes in the way he handled the situation - I think he should have used the opportunity to condemn the abuses of Pinochet’s government, but he gave advice to try and improve the lives of the people of Chile, not to support a corrupt regime. Yet he gets attacked for it incessantly. That is unfortunately due to the hypocrisy of both the left and the right. Too many on the right supported Pinochet because of his pro-American stance, too many on the left hold the same double standards about totalitarian regimes, just the other way round. Much of the modern left also dismisses free market economics as an evil right-wing conspiracy and somehow equate it with totalitarianism instead of seeing it as a means to improve the lives of the poor and to increase freedom.

Brian Douherty wrote a good article in Reason back in 2006 addressing this.

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