Milton Friedman did not save Chile
Naomi Klein
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/mar/03/chile-earthquake
Democracy in Chains
MacLean_Democracy.jpg
Penguin Random House 2017
https://history.duke.edu/book/democracy-chains
-snip-
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323162837_The_Other_9-11_The_Destruction_of_Chile's_Democracy_1973_and_its_Test_of_Democratic_Socialism
Americans provided more than political and military aid. The new government was instructed by economists like Milton Friedman and James Buchanan. Chilean economists, called the “Chicago Boys,” who had been trained at Friedman’s home base, the University of Chicago, applied what Friedman at the time called “shock treatment.” Chileans had been told the coup was intended to counter policies imported from Cuba, but conservatives targeted a different enemy: the welfare state.
[Slide12-Friedman]
“‘Some forty years ago,’ Friedman told Pinochet, ‘Chile, like many another country, including my own, got off on the wrong track...’ by trying to ‘do good with other people’s money’.”
58 Under the guidance of Friedman, Buchanan, and their followers, Chile became “a laboratory of free market fundamentalism.”
59 Policymakers sharply reduced the money supply; privatized state industries and government services, like education; reduced tariffs and subsidies, dismantled labor unions; issued cheap credit to make up for rapidly falling wages; sharply curtailed regulatory power; limited judiciary powers; and forced 5 universities to become “self-financing.”60 Their social security system was converted to individual retirement accounts run by private companies.
61 [Slide13-Pinera]
José Piñera, who put it into effect as Pinochet’s labor minister, wrote a laudatory article about it for the NY Times
62 in 2004. Piñera, now working at the Koch-funded Cato Institute, was identified only as a pension expert. In 2008, our Social Security Bulletin described it as “a model for pension reformers around the world.”
63 [Slide14-DemoSS] When the Chilean economy went into a tailspin in 1982, those who had invested their retirement in failing mutual funds lost everything.
64 The World Bank reported that those retiring in 2000 had paid half their pension contributions in fees.65 School vouchers for K-12 schools introduced fees.66 It took until 2016 to reverse these and reinstate free higher education.
67 [Slide15-Buch]
In 1980, Buchanan helped design the dictatorship's new constitution constraining popular government. It has proved resistant to reversal.
68 It was so important to Pinochet that its legitimacy was a condition for the transition after he lost a plebiscite in 1988.
69 [Buchanan cooperated with the Koch brothers to achieve similar results here. Twenty-eight states of 34 needed have passed resolutions for a new convention.
70] His advice included austerity, credit restraint, deregulation and destruction of unions. However, economic crisis in 1982-71 forced a policy shift. Buchanan received the Nobel in economics in 1986, Friedman in 1976.
72 Demonizing Socialist governments is based on their lack of democracy. But what if a Socialist government could greatly improve living standards and create an admired society while it maintained democratic standards? That was the threat of Chile.
“For most of the 20th century, many Latin Americans thought democracy and socialism were the same thing – the fight for the vote was indistinguishable from the fight for welfare – but it was especially the case in Chile, where communists and socialists had built a modern social democratic state.” Pinochet’s coup offered Friedman and the Chicago Boys “a chance to establish, as [their intellectual mentor, Friedrich] Hayek put it, an untainted form of ‘democracy and liberty, clean of impurities’”73
It was the first test of Friedman’s theories, which he described in 1982 as “the Miracle of Chile,”74 and a field test for neoliberalism. A Chilean journalist says, “You can’t imagine Margaret Thatcher’s reforms, in the United Kingdom, and Ronald Reagan’s, in the United States, without Chile.” The Chicago Boys remain proud of their work, and “can’t understand why Chileans are not thankful for what they did.”
(PDF) The Other 9-11: The Destruction of Chile's Democracy [1973] and its Test of Democratic Socialism. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323162837_The_Other_9-11_The_Destruction_of_Chile's_Democracy_1973_and_its_Test_of_Democratic_Socialism [accessed Jan 04 2019].
And his new found asshole in the white house thinks ist just great also...................he to can go fuck himself............
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