http://www.justiceinperspective.org.za/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=78&Itemid=123

January 2008: On 12 August 2003, President Ricardo Lagos acknowledged the use of torture and offered a formal apology for it, finally giving torture victims the recognition that they needed.

By March 2005, it was determined that 27,255 Chileans would get government compensation: US$190 per month and free education, housing and health benefits for the victims and their relatives. [HRW]

It was also made known that Riggs Bank, which had agreed to be bought by the PNC Financial Services Group Inc., will pay $9 million to create a fund for victims of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, who once routed money through the bank [AP]

Amnesty International has criticised the Commission for its limited mandate (excluding foreigners and those tortured for non-political reasons), and argues that the Commission should also include a truth-seeking aspect, since torture victims were excluded from the Truth and Reconciliation process. [AI]

So they are basically still digging to the bottom of it. How much of this stuff would or could have been known to Hayek is anyone’s guess. It’s easy to be smart in hindsight (especially w.r.t. economics).

Then how you explain that in 17 years of military government only 1500 socialists were killed?.

I’m not sure where you got that number from. Amnesty documents:

Following the return to civilian rule in 1990, two institutions were created to contribute to establishing the truth about disappearances, extrajudicial executions and deaths from torture by state agents. The National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation and its successor, the National Corporation on Reparation and Reconciliation, documented the cases of more than 3,000 victims of these human rights violations.

There’s a similar story here: http://www.beyondintractability.org/case_studies/Chilean_Truth_Commission.jsp?nid=5221

The Rettig Commission was aided in its work by a staff of sixty. It also got assistance from NGOs that provided information (Hayner 2001). It had freedom to move about to gather information and testimony (Quinn 2001), but received little help from the military (Hayner 2001; Quinn 2001). In total, the commission investigated 3,400 cases of death and reached definitive conclusions on all but 641 (Ensalaco 1994). It attributed 95% of the rimes to the military, which Hayner (2001) asserts debunked the military’s justification it was responding to ‘internal war.’ While the commission did not name perpetrators, provisions were made that they would be made public in 2016 (Quinn 2001). They were not able to determine the fate of many other disappeared, largely due to lack of cooperation by the military (Mattarollo 2002).

Quite likely more people disappeared than were ever investigated, with some families fleeing the country and others too suspicious of the government to speak up, even years later. The work of digging up the dead was done under the watchful and begrudging eyes of the same military who planted them, and who were very insistent that no one would actually carry any blame. The book, “Chile Under Pinochet” (which you can find samples of on google) says,

The politics of human rights had now become the politics of counting. Sola Sierra’s figures far exceed even those released by the corporation. “There are tremendous discrepancies in the work of the corporation in classifying new cases,” she said. “There are situations in which two people were arrested by the same unit, on the same day, in the same place, but the Corporation does not classify them as human rights violations, or as disappearances. It simply says that there are cases where there are no facts to prove them to be violations.”

I think it is safe to presume that any official figures are extremely conservative, but they are all bigger than 1500.

There were also considerably more arrested, beaten up a bit and released, which tends to make people a bit nervous about speaking up. All in all there was a very clear systematic use of violence and fear (including many cases of torture) against political enemies (regardless of exactly which ones might be socialist), and it doesn’t take a genius to work out the chilling effect of such a campaign. Because the military government had control over the court system, people learned that they could not get justice through the system, making them even less likely to speak out (and this situation still remains somewhat in force).

As I said above, if efficiency is your prime concern, then sacrificing the life of many thousands is small compared with a nation of millions. This is the heart of Socialism — the individual exists to serve the collective, and some individuals serve best as an example to others. It’s a technique that works in some situations (particularly warfare), why else do we celebrate Anzac Day?

If your prime concern is fairness, justice and the rule of law (in the sense that all citizens are equal under law) then killing even one political opponent is unacceptable.

FFS, Hayek’s major contribution to 20th century thought was to reveal the Marxist roots of Nazism!

Then how you explain that in 17 years of military government only 1500 socialists were killed?.

A state like Pinochets is quite incompatible with market liberalism, as unwanted people are disposed of or imprisoned on mere suspicion of guilt.

I guess that depends on the elusive definition of “market liberalism”, whilst I fully agree that Pinochet found it a convenient tool to be able to cause his political opponents to vanish, a successful marketplace does not really require fairness. It merely requires sufficient levels of competition to prevent monopoly takeover and sufficient freedom to keep the wheels turning. If efficiency is the primary directive, then it’s hard to find fault with Hayek’s approach.

The modern concept that equal opportunity is an end in itself (i.e. a belief in intrinsic fairness) and that people should not be exploited merely because it is possible to do so, would have been laughed at by the vast merchants and traders throughout history. Even in a modern context, it’s much closer to a dream than to reality (a nice dream, but sadly impractical). Can you imagine trying to explain to the head of the Medici family in Medieval Venice that the guys unloading barges would get an equal say in political affairs? You would have been universally regarded as a fruit loop, not even radical enough to be dangerous. Maybe the church would have killed you just on principle, because they liked to have a monopoly on public insanity (unless you could prove you had gone out of your mind through a process of starvation, whipping and sexual desperation, in which case they would perfectly understand).

More recently I have not been able to find a single person even in much maligned Chile who did not agree that personal freedom was much greater under Pinochet than it bad been under Allende.

Not a single person who was willing to speak about it in public, and survive long enough to be heard.

Except illegally or marginally, they have failed to operate in traditional societies, communist countries, and (largely) the Arab Muslim world.

The Grand Bazaar, Istanbul: trading pretty much continuously for over 500 years to the present day, under Muslim rule. Of course, slaves were not allowed to trade (they were the merchandise) so maybe that’s a free market, maybe not, but certainly free enough for basic economics and supply/demand optimisation to take effect. Constantinople before that was a trade hub, and the Muslims were smart and determined enough to not just take it, but keep the trade wealth intact.

Really, the entire Caliphate was a trade-oriented empire, read any story from the Arabian Nights and you see trade and wealth as central themes. Admittedly, they were also a stratified and status oriented society, but merchants were a well-understood and well-accepted part of that system. Modern Islam has taken a few steps toward puritanism for reasons best known to the Arabs. Every Feudal society hits this conceptual stumbling block when they discover that a row of worthless peasants carrying nothing but cheaply mass produced machine guns can obliterate the best of the best elite warriors. After that comes some redefinition of self-worth, and the Arabs decided to go for piety and self-sacrifice. *shrug* My best guess anyhow.

Come to think of it, most likely Istanbul turned to a constitutional secular government at just the right time to save it from a dose of 20th century Puritanism, be that as it may, Turkey is a Muslim country and has been for a very long time.

As for traditional societies, it’s pretty hard to find a village without a village marketplace, and inter-village trade fairs are a well established part of both history and folklaw. Now this type of trade is not well developed, as compared with the big imperial trade but if you think about it, trade and transport go hand in hand; empires build military forces, military forces build high-quality roads (and clobber the bandits). Nothing to do with the political system, nor the inclination of people to exchange goods, everything to do with available infrastructure.

This is nothing more than giving a tick to a regime that has done something right, which is done frequently without people inferring endorsement of the whole lot.

What I don’t think Don or you have shown is any real evidence that there is – as per Naomi Klein’s theories – some real link between ‘neoliberal’ ideas and authoritarian governments, or as I would argue that in a contintent that has had more coups than we’ve had elections the authoritarian regimes simply reflect the weaknesses of the local political culture.

Yes, I am. Pinochet’s Chile was not one, however. Hong Kong under British rule perhaps. Even today, Hong Kong has reasonably high levels of freedom, despite being formally under an authoritarian regime.

Market liberals advocate market institutions, and these can and do exist in a wide variety of social and political systems.

A state like Pinochet’s is quite “incompatible” with market liberalism, as “unwanted” people are disposed of or imprisoned on mere suspicion of guilt. Would you also endorse Saudi Arabia (often lauded as a truly classical liberal economy) even though it does not allow women to work as freely as they want to (things are a little on the improve)? You object to trade unions which at least have a reasonable case for intervention but you then half-endorse Pinochet?

History does however suggests that generally democracies have far better records on liberty than non-democracies, and therefore liberals should be (and are) overwhelmingly on the side of democracy against authoritarian alternatives. In the Australian context, as I noted, classical liberals are firmly against the major threat to democratic decision-making, the move to judicial decision-making on ‘rights’.

When Hayek says that Chile under Pinochet is a great success its natural to read this as an endorsement of the whole package, not just the nations economic performance.

Indeed Don. A better example of von Hayek plugging Pinochet’s qualities as a protector of not just economic but individual rights was a letter of his in the London Times (3 Aug 1978, p15:)

I have certainly never contended that generally authoritarian governments are more likely to secure individual liberty than democratic ones, but rather the contrary. This does not mean, however, that in some historical circumstances personal liberty may not have been better protected under an authoritarian than under a democratic government. This has occasionally been true since the beginning of democracy in ancient Athens, where the liberty of the subjects was undoubtedly safer under the “30 tyrants” than under the democracy which killed Socrates and sent dozens of its best men into exile by arbitrary decrees.
In modern times there have of course been many instances of authoritarian governments under which personal liberty was safer than under many democracies. I have never heard anything to the contrary of the early years of Dr Salazar’s early government in Portugal and I doubt whether there is today in any democracy in Eastern Europe or on the continents of Africa, South America or Asia (wiih the exception of Israel, Singapore and Hong Kong), personal liberty as well secured as it was then in Portugal. More recently I have not been able to find a single person even in much maligned Chile who did not agree that personal freedom was much greater under Pinochet than it bad been under Allende.

Indeed, as my recent survey showed classical liberals are on the democratic side of debate in Australian politics, with social democrats and to a lesser extent libertarians wanting to transfer power to unelected judges.

On selling markets on efficiency grounds, most classical liberals (though not all, if my survey is a guide) do have a comprehensive view of liberal ideas and institutions. However, in practical politics a whole package is almost never adopted, and there are no mass conversions of opinion. Things have to be taken issue by issue, as opportunities arise. Given most people are not ideological liberals, often ideas have to be sold on efficiency grounds.

Market institutions may be “compatible with a wide range of political ideologies and systems” but the movement’s arguments have never been confined to selling markets as a useful technology for improving efficiency — have they?

When Hayek says that Chile under Pinochet is “a great success” it’s natural to read this as an endorsement of the whole package, not just the nation’s economic performance.

The problem with the comments about the Pinochet regime is their implications for how Hayek’s abstract liberal or libertarian principles should be interpreted in practice. If Quiggin’s interpretation is right, then the free market movement has been taking unfair advantage of the ambiguity of words like liberty and freedom.

Personally, I think there’s a fair bit of tension between the liberal principles Hayek sets out in books like the Constitution of Liberty and his comments about Chile. If I had to choose between Hayek and his principles, I’d choose the principles.

Not really. The striking historical fact about market institutions is that they have shown themselves compatible with a wide range of political ideologies and systems: from authoritarian regimes like Chile and China, to large but benign welfare states in Scandinavia, to social democratic governments like Hawke-Keating or Blair-Brown, to mild conservatives like Howard or Thatcher.

Except illegally or marginally, they have failed to operate in traditional societies, communist countries, and (largely) the Arab Muslim world.

There are interesting arguments about whether economic freedom creates pressures for social and political freedoms, but clearly there is no automatic relationship.For example, my CIS colleague John Lee argues that the Chinese communists have succesfully co-opted the middle class that would create political pressure in other countries.

The relationship between market institutions and authoritarian regimes in Chile and China does not raise questions for market liberals, because the authoritarianism is not coming from the liberalism – it is coming from local political factors that are unrelated.