Comment on Eric Hobsbawm

From a Facebook friend: “What really galls is that the same people who fawn over this guy no doubt buy into Naomi Klein’s demonization of Milton Friedman.”

Because being a libertarian who once gave economic advice to Pinochet is evil, but being a life-long Stalinist reflects “good intentions” (or, better, yet, just shoot the Stalinism down the old memory hole, so that it doesn’t appear at all in a lengthy obituary).

UPDATE: As a reminder, Friedman wrote in 1975, the same year he advised the Chilean government, “I approve of none of these authoritarian regimes—neither the Communist regimes of Russia and Yugoslavia [to whom, along with China, he also gave advice] nor the military juntas of Chile and Brazil. . . . I do not regard visiting any of them as an endorsement. . . . I do not regard giving advice on economic policy as immoral if the conditions seem to me to be such that economic improvement would contribute both to the well-being of the ordinary people and to the chance of movement toward a politically free society.”

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