Milton Friedman and Augusto Pinochet

Megan McArdle has been blogging on the relationship between Milton Friedman and Augusto Pinochet. She writes

Oh, Lordy, the nuts with a shaky knowledge of history, but the talismanic word "Pinochet" have crawled out of the woodwork to assert that Milton Friedman did, too, cause a dictatorship!

There are several problems with this theory:

1) Milton Friedman spent all of an hour with Augusto Pinochet

2) This occurred years after the coup.

3) The "Chicago Boys" reforms didn't even start until 1975, although I believe they did hand the brick to Pinochet the day after the coup. The Chicago Boys were not behind the coup; rather, they helped Pinochet undo the Allende nationalizations after he had already taken power. Early Pinochet economic reforms were along standard right wing Latin American crony capitalism lines. In fact, many of the reforms that the Chicago Boys put in place, such as opening trade, acted against traditional entrenched business interests.