Friedrich Hayek and dictatorship

"We gave a number of possible reasons for why Hayek failed to speak out about human rights abuses. Given the string of countries that he visited on his trips (others of which also had authoritarian governments in place with their own human right records), and his visits to confer with former Chilean presidents on his second visit, it may be that he hoped autocratic regimes that practiced what he considered to be sensible economic policies would find a way back to liberal democracy. Constitutional constraints on unlimited democracy might provide the means to do so. Chile had adopted a constitution in 1981 that promised to hold a referendum that would allow a return to democratic elections in 1988. This was just the sort of result for which Hayek hoped. And Chile’s success, after following economic liberalization, set a good example."

"Hayek says that the problem with classical liberalism was that it was not pure enough. The government needed to restrict itself to establishing the rule of law and to using antitrust to break up monopolies. It was the overreach of the government beyond those limits, via central banking and social democracy, that caused all the trouble. A democratic government needs to limit itself to rule of law and antitrust–and perhaps soup kitchens and shelters. And what if democracy turns out not to produce a government that limits itself to those activities? Then, Hayek says, so much the worse for democracy. A Pinochet is then called for to, in a Lykourgan moment, minimalize the state."

"Hayek chided the critics of the Chilean junta for their supposed sin of apparent omission: their supposed proclivity to denounce Pinochet without simultaneously roundly condemning dictatorial regimes such as the USSR and North Korea. Again, however, this is not to deny that Hayek himself does appear to provide much support for Pinochet and his economic policies: indeed, much the same charge that Hayek leveled against the international media in 1978 can be readily leveled at Hayek’s own lamentable failure to roundly condemn the legion human rights abuses of any and all dictatorial regimes."

"The Austrians place no value on democracy, recognizing that voters can make choices that undermine their notion of "reason," and therefore a liberal republic should not permit popular sovereignty to override the sanctity of private property and the principles of the minimal state. I recall vividly Hayek (who was a great economist but a poor policy analyst) commenting on the Pinochet overthrow of democratic government in Chile (Pinochet brought a gang of Chicago economists into town to implement the principles of laissez-faire markets, torturing and murdering thousands who had different ideas) commenting that he would prefer a [laissez-faire style] liberal dictatorship to an illiberal democracy."

"Hayek stressed the danger of hubris, of thinking you know more than you do, of imposing your idea of the world on others, and the importance of letting those closest to a problem use their local, tacit knowledge to help resolve it. He should have done the same here: he should have let the Chileans determine the level of their government’s involvement in economic life, using their own democratic means, even if that meant going further along the road towards socialism than he would have preferred."

"In Modern times there have of course been many instances of authoritarian governments under which personal liberty was safer than under 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 (with the exception of Israel, Singapore and Hongkong), 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 had been under Allende. Nor have I heard any sensible person claim that in the principalities of Monaco or Lichtenstein, which I am told are not precisely democratic, personal liberty is smaller than anywhere else! That a limited democracy is probably the best possible known form of government does not mean that we can have it everywhere, or even that it is itself a supreme value rather than the best means to secure peace, a defensor pacis or instrument of peaceful change of government. Indeed our doctrinaire democrats clearly ought to take more seriously the question when democracy is possible."