the economic model urged by the society’s thinkers and implemented by their local colleagues made it especially disastrous. Chile’s now unregulated banks engaged in reckless lending that threatened to sink the entire economy when the reckoning arrived.37 The only thing that averted a total collapse was Pinochet’s firing of the Mont Pelerin Society zealots, in particular Sergio de Castro, Buchanan’s leading host, whose proposed solution to the free fall included cutting the minimum wage and other deflationary measures that seemed too risky even to a dictatorship.
