Chile Forum

john wrote:

patagoniax wrote:

admin wrote:.. local goverments getting some local authority ...

The first thing that local governments in Chile do with any sort of funding or authority is engage in some heinous act of regionalism that is intended to handicap, discredit, alienate, or directly harm some other region. There are already half-baked separatist movements evolving in Aysen and Magallanes, and though they are without any real hope of getting anywhere, every year it seems that they gain some greater degree of popular support. The country would not be well served by becoming further Balkanised, through the granting of greater regional powers.

Hmm, had you pegged as a States' rights type.

I wonder what might have given you such an idea. I think I have been fairly consistent in suggesting that regionalism is not simply a potential problem in Chile but one that is active and current and growing. The national government here should be taking stronger steps to head off the fractionalisation of the country and any move to decentralise should take into consideration the tendencies of local governments here to abuse the powers they do have.

yes, there is tax revenue through property taxes for local towns, but it is pretty trivial and they really do not control the rates. They do get to set the expansions of what is zoned urban, but that is about it. Perhaps car registrations and such are controlled locally. Also why cities really nail you on parking, because they do control that. The big money in Chile is the IVA sales tax and they really have no control over that. It is not like a local city gets to jack up property taxes or implement a local sales tax, and so on. Think about all those little towns in rural areas of Chile where most of the land is property tax exempt or pays little to nothing if they do pay tax.

A family friend in the States a couple of years ago tried to give me a 5 acre piece of wooded property, and I declined it simply because the property tax would outstrip the value of the property pretty fast. By contrast I pay like perhaps $200 a year total on all the properties I own in Chile. One is completely exempt. Not going to pave a lot of roads with that.

admin wrote: A family friend in the States a couple of years ago tried to give me a 5 acre piece of wooded property, and I declined it simply because the property tax would outstrip the value of the property pretty fast.

No doubt forero John would comment on this sort of thing since he appears to be in favour of the sort of abusive property tax situation in California prior to the voters' revolt there that brought about controls on such practices. Unfortunately the legislature there failed to understand the most basic of relationships between revenues and expenditures, but that is a topic for another time.

Regarding the Territorial Tax in Chile (Impuesto Territorial) which feeds local governments more or less directly, that is only about 4 percent of total tax revenues in Chile. On the other hand, as admin inferred, the IVA is more substantial, at about 40 percent of all tax revenues. But local governments receive dedicated revenues beyond the Impuesto Territorial, including commercial licencing ("patentes comerciales" - which make up over 25 percent of local government revenues) and vehicle transfer tax, as well as vehicle registration fees. This often results in a substantial revenue stream (depending on the community) but as often as not it is squandered.

Throughout Chile it is possible to see the disturbingly low level of responsibility in local governments' use of their funds, and thus perhaps an argument to avoid further decentralisation. In many areas the bulk of such monies is used in dubious "beautification" programmes that favour local pituto-connected contracting for such things as cute wooden street signs that are essentially illegible beyond 3 metres, and unnecessary reworking of the plaza in front of the alcalde's office, while the streets in the workers' barrios are unpaved and alternately seas of mud or dust. The notion that all will be right with Chile when local governments get more money and power is a canard, a gross overestimation of the capacity for the eternally provincial Chileans to sensibly govern themselves.

Here in frutillar the big to do was the advertising along the lake. Seems the Mayor sold the rights to some company for like 5 years at around 20 million pesos and some sort of fuzzy swap for a van or something. An outside firm had determined that the real value was around 60 million pesos.

The company with rights, has resold the advertising space to the likes of Claro and Jumbo (no jumbo in Frutillar by the way). So last summer we were all treated to a really frigen ugly claro banners all along the beach between the tourist and the view. It is not even Claro's market. Foreign tourist here for a day and people with money going to the theater. They all have contracts with better cell phone providers.

On the flip side, he padded the local vote by getting government money, building houses, then promptly moving in a bunch of criminals from Santiago to rape and pillage the town. He is not from here, but somehow managed to win the local election with the highest percentage of any mayor in the south. Hell, if he gave me a house and moved me to Frutillar, I would vote for him too.

Freedom advocates? Naw, just another 'libertarian' cult engaged in the dissemination of misinformation to justify the rape, pillage, and plunder of the environment.

yea, not for it or against it. Just don't care, and the relevance of agenda to Chile is marginal at best given the geopolitical structure of country.

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Of course, if you do the math for that sort of "sustainable development" it turns out that you have to eliminate about 5 billion people from the planet to make it work, and then make the survivors content with a mean life-span of 34.6 years. Everybody likes the Mr. Natural concept but nobody is willing to invite the engineers to run the numbers.

We need to be careful what we wish for. Ironically, for all that wishful thinking, the result of "local government" and local control in Chile does not necessarily result in greater benefit to Joe Sixpack, or in this case, José Fulano de Tal.

In practice, allocation of authority to local government here as elsewhere almost invariably results in additional layers of taxes and restrictions upon Joe Citizen Landowner, under the guise of "local community involvement." One need not be much of an attorney to recognise that in the US, an enormous amount of Supreme Court activity deals with reminding those local governments of the impropriety of their unfettered proclivities toward abuses, that their local restrictions upon Joe Sixpack are in fact contrary to the rights that are presumably conferred at a national level. So I would not count on the allocation of authority to the local level, whether in Chile or in Western Elbonia, to provide much more than additional costs, bureaucracy, favouring and funding of in-power pitutos, restrictions, and constraints -- since these are after all the natural products of governance. Anyone in Chile who has seen their personal land-use freedom disappear under a "plan regulador" - which is prepared and approved by the regional government - will understand some of the real-world evils of local governance in this toy country.

In time we may come to realise that in Chile, the lack of delegation of this sort of dangerous additional authority to the local busybodies is one of the features that allows us the degree of relative freedom that we do have here. And if anyone construes this to mean libertarianism I will swiftly kick your silly arse.

As I always say: Think globo, act loco.

All this sustainable development and environment agendas have long now started to come out as they really are: another political maneuver to control the masses specially during hard financial times. Listen to Jim Puplava et al on Financial Sense.

http://tinyurl.com/3gyp4ek

Thanks all for the excellent posts.

For me, it's one in the plus column that so few responded to this thread. I take it that either there has been little interest in Agenda 21 and ECLEI in Chile or the sustainability department of the NWO doesn't see much return in investing in Chile. Either one is fine with me, though I hope it is the later. Agenda 21 and ECLEI are on their way out as a hot meme and I hope will die before Chile is infected (and damages any home grown efforts at rational planning efforts towards conservation and sustainability).

As for the discussion on local guv vs. far away guv, what has been the stabiilty of this balance? From posts elsewhere, like Px's comments on the current civil unrest, it sounds like the central government has a weak response to eruptions in the provinces (much less in the capitol city), a PC response I am guessing. In the past, this certainly was not the case with the authoritarians Allende and Pinochet; they reached far and deep, correct? Did local governments have more or less power and in what ways? Is the current permissive attitude towards the protests something new or another swing to one side of a past equilibrium point?

For Mr. Earthwalker. I've been following your earthbag project with great interest. Being against Agenda 21 doesn't mean one is a redneck in a subdivision in LA. Your characterization of the FreedomAdvocates founder is flawed in many ways, but this is not the place for detailing that; suffice it to say, he has a lot of experience with Agenda21. As for Pappy Bush and Boy Bush, they are both strongly pro-Agenda 21. When a fascist like Pappy Bush stands side by side with a fascist (and friend) Bill Clinton in strong support of a global program like Agenda 21, I suggest that one should consider that perhaps there is more to the story than what most good intentioned followers of green fashion believe.