Purity or Progress?
Reason's Brian Doherty has an excellent article on Milton Friedman's supposed crime of advising Pinochet. Friedman didn't actually advise Pinochet in any substantive way; he gave a lecture in Chile and had a meeting with the dictator. But that's not the main point of the article. Here's a bit:
Nothing about Chile's economic successes excuses or mollifies Pinochet's crimes. Even Friedman's staunch libertarian fans can wonder about the ultimate propriety of his association, however brief or tenuous, with the dictator. As Austrian economist Peter Boettke once told me, many economists in his tradition--most of whom are hardcore libertarians--find the notion of working in even something as innocuous as public finance distasteful--like "bean counting for the mafia." Friedman didn't harbor such visceral disgust for government or those who govern. He was a policy realist, and tried to deal with the world as it was--to mesh his policy radicalism with the gears of power as they existed.
Friedman was ready and willing to tell the people responsible for all the wrong policies of the world what they needed to do to set things right, which meant he had to talk to them, making open assaults on their crimes ill-advised. He tried to move the world in a freer direction from the point reality presented him with.
Read the whole thing.
Brian's piece captures a great divide among libertarians, one that sometimes gets nasty. Some of us--and I'm definitely in the Friedman camp--want a better world, even if the improvements are only incremental. Others, who call themselves "hardcore" or (for the really tendentious) "principled," make no distinctions among different degrees of imperfection--it's all non-utopia and, hence, worthless. Besides, complaining is easy. Change is hard.