John C. Medaille apparently wrote: > Hayek himself had no qualms about working with Pinochet. > So its a bit questionable to cite the socialist tyrants > and ignore Hayek's buddy. Please back this with some kind of reference or citation. It is true that Friedman, Buchanan, Tullock, Hayek, and Brunner were connected with the Centro de Estudios Publicos, a market-oriented think tank in Chile. It is also true that there is one infamous quote of Hayek's: "Personally I prefer a liberal dictator to democratic government lacking liberalism." That statement has often been quoted tendentiously to insinuate that Hayek endorsed Pinochet and, more repugnantly, had not qualms about Pinochet's brutal human rights violations. The statement can be found Hayek's 1981 interview with the newspaper El Mercurio. The question he was asked was, "What opinion, in your view, should we have of dictatorships?" Here is Hayek's response: "Well, I would say that, as long-term institutions, I am totally against dictatorships. But a dictatorship may be a necessary system for a transitional period. At times it is necessary for a country to have, for a time, some form or other of dictatorial power. As you will understand, it is possible for a dictator to govern in a liberal way. And it is also possible for a democracy to govern with a total lack of liberalism. Personally I prefer a liberal dictator to democratic government lacking liberalism. My personal impression ? and this is valid for South America - is that in Chile, for example, we will witness a transition from a dictatorial government to a liberal government. And during this transition it may be necessary to maintain certain dictatorial powers, not as something permanent, but as a temporary arrangement." This statement does not endorse Pinochet, but uses Chile in 1981 as a possible case in which certain dictatorial powers may be a necessary transitional step to democracy. Of course to assess Hayek's claim we would then have to discuss what was happening under Allende (democratically elected and overthrown with US complicity), why foreign powers were meddling in Chile, etc. His claim may or may not have been defensible in the context of the time and of the knowledge he had of Chile's circumstances. It is hard for most people today to see past Pinochet'scompletely inexcusable and horrific brutality to objectively assess his other contributions to Chile's history. I actually sympathize with this: I have this same problem assessing Pinochet, just as I tend to focus on Castro's roughly comparable thousands of executions and human rights violations, and thereby overlook how he transformed one of the richest islands in the Caribbean into one of the poorest. But as economists, the economic outcomes should interest us as well. In sum, on the evidence that I am aware of, it is *not* reasonable to assert that Hayek endorsed Pinochet or was his "buddy". However, Hayek must have been aware of Pinochet's shocking human right's violations of the previous decade. We would like to see some clear signal of condemnation in the interview, and we do not. Assuming the published interview is complete, I assess this as a modest moral failure on Hayek's part. On the other hand, we should ask about the *context* of his 1981 statement. The 1980s were a period of growing individual liberty, increasing reliance on the market, and strengthening democratic institutions (to the extent that Pinochet was denied the presidency in 1988). A reasonable reading of the interview is that Hayek endorsed this transition and expected and looked forward to the end of dictatorship. This expectation proved correct. Cheers, Alan Isaac