Perhaps Weevil can tell us how many people Allende “disappeared”.

“In 1970, 20% of Chile’s population lived in poverty. By 1990, the year ‘President’ Pinochet left office, the number of destitute had doubled to 40%. Quite a miracle.”

Quite a dishonest quotation, too. Pinochet didn’t seize power until late in 1973. From 1970 to 1973, Allende was in charge. Given the disastrous effects of his economic policies (e.g. triple-digit inflation), it seems likely that the poverty rate went up in those years. How much of the increase in poverty can be attributed to Allende and how much to Pinochet? I don’t know: perhaps ‘illiberal’ can tell us.

If i am an advocate of misogyny and sexism and enjoy raping women and i said that i received such extraordinary insights about the opposite sex from Shakespeare what might be your response?

Can you conclude that Shakespeare is just as guilty as anyone of providing the fuel for my fire?

Such nonsense is not worth the 0s and 1s.

Let me end my talk by abusing slightly my status as an official representative of the Federal Reserve. I would like to say to Milton and Anna: Regarding the Great Depression. You’re right, we did it. We’re very sorry. But thanks to you, we won’t do it again.

Yes, a legacy.

To answer that we would first have to agree on what to take as an authoritative account of what Nazi ideology actually was. If we say that it comes solely from Hitler, then no, I don’t think Nietzschean philosophy would have been important in the forming of his ideology. First, they disagreed on some crucial points. Nietzsche was not an anti-semite and certainly not a German nationalist. Further, Hitler was a Christian and would have been deeply offended by some of N’s more vitriolic attacks on that religion.

It’s a little crass (though not uncommon) to pick a single point that seems similar and to declare one’s influence on the other. I’ve simply seen no convincing evidence that Hitler read much if any of N’s work (WP doesn’t count – it was too much of a hackjob by his sister.)

he wrote, “I do not regard it evil for an economist to render technical economic advice to the Chilean government to help end the plague of inflation, any more than I would regard it as evil for a physician to give technical medical advice to the Chilean government to end a medical plague.” He also notes that years later, when he offered similar economic advice to China, there were no similar protests, even though the left-wing Chinese dictators were no less oppressive than Pinochet.

My main point was that there is flourishing scholarship around Keynes and Post Keynesian thought, work which should be distinguished from the “hydraulic” Keynesianism of the textbooks as well as from “New Keynesianism.” Hyman Minsky’s work is one introduction to it.

Along the lines of our main thread I can recommend Milton Friedman’s Monetary Framework: A Debate with His Critics (Chicago 1975) one of whom is prominent Post Keynesian theorist Paul Davidson.

I think it’s a bit unfair. The guy did allow for something called “neighborhood effect” – a loophole similar to “general welfare” clause in the US constitution. Theoretically, pretty much any government regulation and social program can be justified under this rubric. So, I don’t think Capitalism and Freedom is an extremist book.

His love for Pinochet’s junta is a different matter.

“In 1973, the year the General seized the government, Chile’s unemployment rate was 4.3%. In 1983, after ten years of free-market modernisation, unemployment reached 22%. Real wages declined by 40% under military rule.

In 1970, 20% of Chile’s population lived in poverty. By 1990, the year “President” Pinochet left office, the number of destitute had doubled to 40%. Quite a miracle.

Pinochet did not destroy Chile’s economy all alone. It took nine years of hard work by the most brilliant minds in world academia, a gaggle of Milton Friedman’s trainees, the Chicago Boys. Under the spell of their theories, the General abolished the minimum wage, outlawed trade union bargaining rights, privatised the pension system, abolished all taxes on wealth and on business profits, slashed public employment, privatised 212 state industries and 66 banks and ran a fiscal surplus.

Freed of the dead hand of bureaucracy, taxes and union rules, the country took a giant leap forward … into bankruptcy and depression. After nine years of economics Chicago style, Chile’s industry keeled over and died. In 1982 and 1983, GDP dropped 19%. The free-market experiment was kaput, the test tubes shattered. Blood and glass littered the laboratory floor. Yet, with remarkable chutzpa, the mad scientists of Chicago declared success. In the US, President Ronald Reagan’s State Department issued a report concluding, “Chile is a casebook study in sound economic management.” Milton Friedman himself coined the phrase, “The Miracle of Chile.” Friedman’s sidekick, economist Art Laffer, preened that Pinochet’s Chile was, “a showcase of what supply-side economics can do.”

It certainly was. More exactly, Chile was a showcase of de-regulation gone berserk.

The Chicago Boys persuaded the junta that removing restrictions on the nation’s banks would free them to attract foreign capital to fund industrial expansion.

Pinochet sold off the state banks – at a 40% discount from book value – and they quickly fell into the hands of two conglomerate empires controlled by speculators Javier Vial and Manuel Cruzat. From their captive banks, Vial and Cruzat siphoned cash to buy up manufacturers – then leveraged these assets with loans from foreign investors panting to get their piece of the state giveaways.

The bank’s reserves filled with hollow securities from connected enterprises. Pinochet let the good times roll for the speculators. He was persuaded, as Tony Blair said this month in another context, “Governments should not hinder the logic of the market.”

By 1982, the pyramid finance game was up. The Vial and Cruzat “Grupos” defaulted. Industry shut down, private pensions were worthless, the currency swooned. Riots and strikes by a population too hungry and desperate to fear bullets forced Pinochet to reverse course. He booted his beloved Chicago experimentalists. Reluctantly, the General restored the minimum wage and unions’ collective bargaining rights. Pinochet, who had previously decimated government ranks, authorized a program to create 500,000 jobs. The equivalent in Britain would be a government program for 4 million workers.

In other words, Chile was pulled from depression by dull old Keynesian remedies, all Franklin Roosevelt, zero Margaret Thatcher. (The junta even instituted what remains today as South America’s only law restricting the flow of foreigncapital.)”

http://www.gregpalast.com/tinker-bell-pinochet-and-the-fairy-tale-miracle-of-chile