In the Chilean case, what is most striking about the relation between the economists and the junta’s repression is not that they ignored it, but how willingly they embraced it. Friedman wrote to Pinochet to assure him that Allende’s regime represented the ‘terrible climax’ of a trend towards socialism, and that the general had been ‘extremely wise in adopting the many measures you have already taken to reverse this trend’. In 1977, the Chicago human capital theorist, Gary Becker, wrote of his pride in his Chilean students, whose ‘willingness to work for a cruel dictator and start a different economic approach was one of the best things that happened to Chile’. … Hayek told the right-wing Chilean newspaper El Mercurio that, while he did not support permanent dictatorship, he saw Pinochet’s ‘transitional dictatorship’ as a ‘means of establishing a stable democracy and liberty, clean of impurities’.

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 329