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PARTISAN REVIEW
Free Markets Make Free Men
Whether by luck or foresight the Mont Pelerin Society gets
full symbolic value from the spots it chooses for its confer–
ences. . . . the biggest symbolic break occurred toward the
end of 1981, when Senor Pedro Ibanez, speaking for the
Mont Pelerin Regional Committee, welcomed some two
hundred members and guests of the society to a regional
meeting in ViTia Del Mar on the breathtakingly beautiful
Pacific coast of Chile.
. . . By a fortunate circumstance a whole younger generation
of Chilean economists had studied at the University of
Chicago under Milton Friedman. By another lucky chance
the head of the military junta that took over in 1973, General
Augusto Minochet, had a really open mind about economics.
The story is that Pinochet holed up in the presidential palace
for a year with Professor Paul Samuelson's Keynesian text–
book, only to reject Samuelson for a blueprint presented by
Friedman's Chilean "Chicago boys." Friedman himself
made a now legendary trip to Chile in 1975, where he lec–
tured Chileans-including Pinochet-on monetary theory in
particular and "freedom to choose" in general. Fired by
Friedman's persuasiveness, an authoritarian government
became the guarantor of what soon became the freest econ–
omy in all of Latin America, if not of the world.
John Chamberlain, "The Chilean Example,"
National Review,
April 2, 1982
We Knew It Was Wrong
To Learn a Foreign Language
Leonard Peikoff, intellectual heir to Ayn Rand and a noted
Objectivist philosopher, believes that all of the economic and
social crises that we've witnessed over the past several years
have their roots in the massive importation of German philos–
ophy into this country in the period after the Civil War. The
first consequence was the proliferation of statist movements.
