A pair of fascinating old interviews with Friedrich von Hajek on his attitude to the Pinochet regime in Chile — one, two — which he inspired and advised.
I’m really not sure what to think about this. Chris Dillow has done a good job about the rightness of Hayek’s theories on the need for markets due to the falibility of individual knowledge, but I have a hard time understanding how he could be so sure that it was worth all those Chileans who were tortured and killed to establish Pinochet’s allegedly liberal dictatorship:
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 … As a means of establishing a stable democracy and liberty, clean of impurities. This is the only way I can justify it [dictatorship] - and recommend it.
On Pinochet's death, the worst (and the best) that Slovaks were willing to say about him was that he was controversial (as Lemuel put it). It’s not just that he killed a lot of Communists, or first introduced the famous pension reform. For the Slovak right think tanks he is the man who made the Reagan, Thatcher and their revolutions possible and they share his contempt for democracy. They worry about how to stop the people grabbbing the keys to the treasury and voting themselves a party. Not long ago, I read an article in tyzden about the prospects for liberty and their main right wing intellectual (the head of INEKO, I think) said that the one thing they wouldn’t privatise would be schools, so as to maintain a traditional culture. In other words, we must make sure the masses know their place. There is much to be said for “wisdom of the ages” and that people would benefit from established rules of thumb more than what some egotistical lefty thinks are the dictates of pure reason. But wouldn’t a market in education pick that up? It’s a pity the Hayekians don’t listen to their master instead of being in such a hurry to get to the Liberal state:
here is perhaps no single factor contributing so much to people’s frequent reluctance to let the market work as their inability to conceive how some necessary balance, between demand and supply, between exports and imports, or the like, will be brought about without deliberate control. The conservative feels safe and content only if he is assured that some higher wisdom watches and supervises change, only if he knows that some authority is charged with keeping the change “orderly. (Why I am not a conservative)
0 komentárov:
Zverejnenie komentára