Chill Out, Hayek! – Part 1
In The Reactionary Mind, Corey Robin claimed – drawing on Naomi Klein and Greg Grandin – that Hayek “admired Pinochet’s Chile so much that he decided to hold a meeting of his Mont Pelerin Society in Viña del Mar”, the seaside resort in Chile where General Pinochet’s CIA-assisted military coup against the democratically elected left-wing government of Salvador Allende was planned. This claim was denounced on Twitter as “made up” by none other than ‘@FriedrichHayek’ himself! (Probably just a fan rather than the man himself resurrected and tweeting… as usual, Hayek’s admirers simply deny his complicity with the Chilean junta, when they can’t get away with just neglecting to mention it. As Robin discovered, they have lots of excuses – he was an old man at the time, etc – all of which turn out to be so much bad faith when you look at them.) Checking, Robin discovered that it is more accurate to say that Hayek attended the meeting where the decision to hold the MPS’s 1981 conference in Viña del Mar was made and, at least, did not oppose it. His position in the Society was still prestigious enough that, at the very least, an objection from him would carried a lot of weight. No such objection seems to have been forthcoming. And indeed, we’re being scrupulously fair to the point of charity by even being this circumspect. Nothing in Hayek’s behaviour suggests he would’ve been likely to object.
Hayek had already been to Pinochet’s Chile – a laboratory for the experimental free-market neoliberalism of Milton Friedman and the ‘Chicago Boys’ – in 1977 to receive an honorary degree, and to lecture. Hayek spoke to the public and, says Robin, to “businessmen and government officials, including Pinochet himself”.
He described the leaders of Chile under Pinochet as “educated, reasonable, and insightful men”.
The admiration was mutual. Robin uncovered subsequent letters to Hayek from his hosts, business academics who were also high-ranking people in the junta, fawning over Hayek, telling him how influential his ideas were in their country, including in high circles, and proposing that the MPS hold their 1981 meeting in Chile.
To quote from the Austrians essay, to be included in Phil’s forthcoming Neoreaction a Basilisk:
…And so it came to pass. Numerous luminaries of conservatism, free-market fundamentalism, and the dawning neoliberal counter-revolution attended. They hobnobbed with the top brass and the big bankers of Pinochet’s dictatorship, along with the regime’s fellow-traveller intellectuals. They enjoyed the opera. They drank wine. They pontificated about the much-maligned land of Chile, and – like any starry-eyed communist fellow-traveller of the 30s who’d just visited the Soviet Union and taken care to look at it only through the slim gaps between their fingers – they came away convinced that they’d glimpsed utopia. A utopia in which thousands of political dissidents had been, and continued to be, ‘disappeared’ into a grotesque, institutionalised system of state-run torture, rape, and murder. Not that the MPS people denied the tyranny.
A year (or so) ago, the unthinkable happened. So, of course, we podcasted about it.
At long last, here is the first episode of a new strand of the ‘Wrong With Authority’ podcast supergroup, in which we (sadly we were Murphyless this time, but we expect to be fully Jamesed-up in future episodes) record commentaries on the movies that shaped and misshaped us, movies released between the first inaugurations of Ronald Reagan and George Bush the Elder.
Okay, so Phil is now editing the full text of the Austrians essay for 
The early Austrian School was actually subject to a split. It stemmed from the first wave of the followers of its founder Carl Menger. Mengerians Friedrich von Wieser and Eugen von Philippovich were both a bit like Fabian socialists in their outlooks. Wieser, for instance, seems to have believed that marginal utility (the radically subjective basis of modern mainstream economics) provided a theoretical foundation for progressive taxation. But Wieser’s brother-in-law and fellow teacher, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, was of the classical liberal tradition. Böhm-Bawerk was a strident anti-Marxist who developed many of his own theories – which became foundational to the subsequent Austrian School – in the course of his criticisms of Marx. Böhm-Bawerk is still routinely credited by some with having demolished Marx… which he accomplished by systematically misreading, misunderstanding, and misrepresenting him.
As some of you will be aware, especially those of you who’ve been following my whining about it on Twitter, I’ve recently been finishing up something I’ve been writing about the Austrian School of economics (y’know, Mises, Hayek, Rothbard, right-libertarianism, etc). It’s my side of a collaboration with Phil for his next book. It’s taken a long time (my fault) but I just finished. One of the reasons it took so long was because I kept falling down rabbit holes, so to speak. The good thing about that is that it has left me with excess material I can write up. And here’s the first bit. 
If you’d like to hear me read a Weird tale, click 
At long last, 
Wrong With Authority, the podcast where four white guys talk about movies based on real historical events, returns… and this time we’re talking about Mississippi Burning (1988), a travesty of the story of three civil rights workers – Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman – who were murdered in Mississippi in 1964 by the Klan/cops/state government (all essentially the same thing at that point).
Someone – I think it was Nick Mamatas – recently made a sarcastic Facebook or Twitter post, expressing mock-surprise that a “multi-million dollar Hollywood movie isn’t the Communist Manifesto” (or words to that effect). The thing being mocked there is the way in which it seems that some on the Left will criticise an expensive (and, the studios hope, profitable) product of the mass-market corporate capitalist culture industries for not being something it was obviously never going to be, and never could be.