Chilean Chicago Boys saw authoritarianism as safeguarding market freedom from politics.

Evidence

Despite their apolitical presentation, the Chicago Boys followed Friedman in attributing a series of what I have called ‘(anti)-political virtues’ to a competitive market order, among them the absence of coercion, impersonal rule, non-discrimination, and, pre-eminently, individual freedom. Their advocacy of free-market reform was predicated on a stark dichotomy between politics (defined by coercion and conflict) and the market (which enabled non-coercive, mutually beneficial, voluntary social interchange). Pablo Baraona, a Chicago graduate who later became minister of the economy, outlined this dichotomy in the starkest terms. Chile’s problems, he argued, were all attributable to politics – ‘the quest for power for its own sake and increasing unrestrained demagoguery’. In contrast, the market was ‘the economic manifestation of freedom and the impersonality of authority’. The leading ‘Chicago Boy’, Sergio de Castro, who served as both minister of economy and minister of finance under Pinochet, believed that (economic) freedom was best secured by ‘authoritarian’ government with its ‘impersonal’ mode of exercising power. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 327

Categorization

• XREF: Links to the broader theme of market ethics debates and right-wing appropriations of economic liberalism. — connects to: Chicago Boys openly deemed authoritarian coercion necessary for austerity — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 357; Chile’s Chicago economists justified the junta on freedom and rights grounds, not just economics — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 308