For Harberger, who had spent decades overseeing the training of economics students from Latin America, this relationship between political and economic freedom was a 'dilemma'. Latin Americans, he told the symposium, were beset by a 'predilection to romanticism', a 'tremendous, incredible vulnerability to demagogy' and a collective tendency towards 'self-pity'. Military governments, he contended, were 'best at leading them to think their way out of that, but it is a terrible dilemma for us as freedom-loving individuals'. If romanticism was a barrier to economic freedom, Harberger wondered, was it legitimate to use political repression to shatter it?

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 313