In the late 1970s, Nobel prize- winner for economic sciences Milton Friedman was filmed in the Library of the University of Chicago for the opening scene of the ‘Free to choose’ documentary that would air in the US on the PBS network in 1980. As the camera pans across the room, we see that Friedman is holding court with 20 men and three women. This is the same library where the Chilean Chicago Boys had recently been schooled in Friedman's and Hayek's pro- market orthodoxy before returning home to Chile to develop the economic policies that underpinned the Pinochet dictatorship that had violently seized power in 1973. Freidman had visited Chile and met with Pinochet in 1975, and Hayek followed in 1977, the same year that the filming of ‘Free to choose’ began, and the same year that Pinochet's military junta ensured the unopposed implementation of Friedman's and Hayek's economic models by banning all political parties and torturing or murdering many of those who continued to oppose them. As the documentary continues, Freidman's voice introduces us to an aerial shot of New York City: ‘Once all this was a swamp covered in forest. The Canarsie Indians who lived here traded the 22 square miles of soggy Manhattan Island for $24 worth of cloth and trinkets. The newcomers founded a city, New Amsterdam at the edge of an empty continent.’

The aptly named first episode of the documentary series, ‘The power of the market’, then continues with a description of how the US conferred a previously unknown level of freedom on the European migrants who came to settle in New York and then the rest of the US. Friedman's description of the Canarsie lands is more modern than Adam Smith's ‘uncultivated land’ and ‘naked and miserable savages’, who we met in Chapter 5, though the same meaning is there: these were lands to be ‘improved’ by the power of the market. For Freidman, this power is a force for good, but perhaps it was not for later generations of the Canarsie and their cousins across the continent, who watched Europeans grow rich on the destruction of their ancestral lands, culture and people.