Jennifer Burns: evaluation

Transcript context

…You mentioned Friedman in Chile. What’s the bottom line on that whole episode, in your opinion? I think most of it was manufactured as a campaign against Friedman because ultimately, his impact was similar to what any Western-trained economist would have had. He was not the architect of the junta. He was not particularly connected to Pinochet. He came in after an economic catastrophe and prescribed what pretty much any Western-trained economist would’ve prescribed to stop inflation. He was then tagged as the architect and Western endorser of the regime, which was not the case. I think he came to stand in for people’s discomfort with the idea that the Nixon administration had perhaps supported the coup. There’s another piece of it, that the dream of Allende was there could be a peaceful road to socialism. The coup seemed to suggest that that was not true, that the peaceful road to socialism could not happen. If the coup was not inevitable because it was manufactured by Western economists and Western governments, then perhaps we could get back on the vía chilena and make our way to the peaceful redistribution of property and power and the success of a socialist government. I think he got really tangled up in all these questions about, is it possible to have a peaceful transition to a socialist or communist government? Making Friedman the problem enabled you to focus on Friedman or Nixon, rather than the very real problems created by the Allende government in Chile. You used the word prescribed. Just physically, literally, what did he do? What’s the thing he did there?…

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