Chile Forum

Apologies if this has already been posted, but it didn't seem to have been yet:

http://www.cato.org/publications/commen ... enaissance

The CATO institute discusses factors such as small government and free markets in Chile as reasons for its prosperity and compares and tracks that success against other countries such as Argentina and Mexico. If anyone can't reach the link, I can post the text of the article.

Interested in hearing comments of others on the facts and conclusions of the article.

pl

They do have a serious glass half full / half empty political view of Chile.

For instance, is the Chilean government really small? Well, yes and no.

There is only 16-17 million people, and considering how few people there are in Chile the government is pretty big. Even the politically conservative in this country, are pretty darn left wing and socialist by American standards.

Does Chile privatize a lot of stuff?

Yea, but, again I believe a lot of that is out of necessity. Again, small country population wise. There are a lot of public goods I don't think the government could provide, given the budgets. Imagine what it would cost the government to build and maintain all those nice new highway for instance. On the other hand, the private education system is kind of a disaster, but I don't think Chile is in a real position to replace it with a full blown public education system. The government still owns a bank, a copper company, runs a public health care system, and so on, and so forth. Americans would go ape shit, even on the far left about a lot of that stuff. A lot of that stuff only works in Chile, because of a lot uniquely Chileans things and situations. It is not like your going to be able to scale up very well a lot of these things or copy them to another country.

If you want to compare Chile, it would likly be more fair to compare it against similar sized countries in Europe or an individual state in the U.S. to determine if the size of the government is big or small, and how well it is doing. In fact, it might be better to compare it to some large cities around the World, given the centralized nature of the political structure.

One of the fundamental problems with comparing Chile to the neighbours is, the neighbours have a lot more people and a whole different set of problems to solve (or not solve).

Well, the second sentence in the article lost me already: "A socialist government in the 1970s had crippled the economy and destabilized society, leading to civil unrest and a military coup." - OK - if we ignore the fact that the US Government funded a destabilization program as well as the strikers that crippled the economy, and the coup; if we blame the Allende government for the CIA's engineering and execution of the economic crippling and social destabilization, that might hold a little water. As it is, the statement is an unrepentant propagandist lie banking on the ignorance or dishonesty of its intended audience.
I realize that might sound incendiary to those for whom believing otherwise is more comfortable, but it's not just keeping up with the facts about the role of the US in supporting the Chileans who would not tolerate greater equality, but also basic economic realities, such as the fact that 'economic recovery' in Chile is not very different from how it is defined in the US - Alan Grenspan's own words in a report some years back about another economic recovery cited greater worker insecurity as a positive contributing factor - poor people have lower real wages, longer hours, and less access, while richer people enjoy greater dividends from their investments.

In Chile, you can't ride a bus unless you use a pre-paid card, but you have to pay for the plastic card yourself in addition to loading money onto it in advance for fares. Pre-pay = capitalists floating money - i.e. they're getting your money before you 'spend' it, and sure as hell not paying you interest on it while it floats.

In Chile, everyone can have a bank-account - it's called a 'Cuenta RUT'. But there is a 'service charge' every time you make a cash withdrawal from it. unless you're using it to spend the money at stores owned by the government's 'investment buddies' such as Wal-Mart (Lider). So the bank takes a percentage of your cash or WalMart does - on every transaction. Basically, a poor-tax.

Virtually every system I've seen in place thus far that benefits from privatization actually benefits capitalists at an additional cost to users. It's sort of a pre-emptive profit-taking that contributes to the increasing poverty of 95% of the country while enriching 5%. Noam Chomski describes how this process works in great and lucid detail all over the world. A GINI Index of 54.2 places Chile 14th in the world, worse off than most of South America and 2/3ds of Africa. I'll go through & analyze the content a bit, but the level of social inequality and differential access in Chile is obscene beyond words, and I'm guessing from that opening statement that the CATO report is very much designed to be 'Bill O'Reilly academics' to make the profiteers feel better about the misery they spread.

xilantro wrote:Well, the second sentence in the article lost me already: "A socialist government in the 1970s had crippled the economy and destabilized society, leading to civil unrest and a military coup." - OK - if we ignore the fact that the US Government funded a destabilization program as well as the strikers that crippled the economy, and the coup; if we blame the Allende government for the CIA's engineering and execution of the economic crippling and social destabilization, that might hold a little water. As it is, the statement is an unrepentant propagandist lie banking on the ignorance or dishonesty of its intended audience.
I realize that might sound incendiary to those for whom believing otherwise is more comfortable, but it's not just keeping up with the facts about the role of the US in supporting the Chileans who would not tolerate greater equality, but also basic economic realities, such as the fact that 'economic recovery' in Chile is not very different from how it is defined in the US - Alan Grenspan's own words in a report some years back about another economic recovery cited greater worker insecurity as a positive contributing factor - poor people have lower real wages, longer hours, and less access, while richer people enjoy greater dividends from their investments.

In Chile, you can't ride a bus unless you use a pre-paid card, but you have to pay for the plastic card yourself in addition to loading money onto it in advance for fares. Pre-pay = capitalists floating money - i.e. they're getting your money before you 'spend' it, and sure as hell not paying you interest on it while it floats.

In Chile, everyone can have a bank-account - it's called a 'Cuenta RUT'. But there is a 'service charge' every time you make a cash withdrawal from it. unless you're using it to spend the money at stores owned by the government's 'investment buddies' such as Wal-Mart (Lider). So the bank takes a percentage of your cash or WalMart does - on every transaction. Basically, a poor-tax.

Virtually every system I've seen in place thus far that benefits from privatization actually benefits capitalists at an additional cost to users. It's sort of a pre-emptive profit-taking that contributes to the increasing poverty of 95% of the country while enriching 5%. Noam Chomski describes how this process works in great and lucid detail all over the world. A GINI Index of 54.2 places Chile 14th in the world, worse off than most of South America and 2/3ds of Africa. I'll go through & analyze the content a bit, but the level of social inequality and differential access in Chile is obscene beyond words, and I'm guessing from that opening statement that the CATO report is very much designed to be 'Bill O'Reilly academics' to make the profiteers feel better about the misery they spread.

And your point is...................................

Socialism that doesn't work=good
Capitalism that does work=bad

And by the way every major city in the world has gone to some form of prepaid transit card or prepaid passes, well most have.

Welcome to the forum, all this has been hashed out many times, use search so don’t get down if most don’t take the bait.

I think you mistake this for the www.allChaves.net/farleftforum.
Maybe you're thinking Sean Penn, Danny Glover, Harry Belafonte and Bill Maher might be online here to back you up.
Boy do you over rate the CIA.

You for your part, really lost me at:
"As it is, the statement is an unrepentant propagandist lie banking on the ignorance or dishonesty of its intended audience."
You actually smear anyone who disagrees with you up front.

Px hardly scratches the surface of the gross ineptitude and corruption of the KGB and Castro backed Unidad Popular. Chile under Allende was Just another in a long list of failed communist States. 0 for how many? Unless you consider Cuba a success, simply for being brutal enough to still exist.
None of your academic over thinking will ever change that.

I've gotta say that online banking, and other banking services, ubiquitous ATMs, etc, have made my life a lot easier. I'm willing to, think I should, pay for that benefit. Though I agree it is often way too expense, and interest rates are abusive, so I grant you that.

You can't possibly overrate the CIA. They're one of the many powerful tools of the psychopaths-in-charge.
(and why your blog is so valuable, nwdiver - nothing like a good wine to help cope with insanity)

xilantro, many of your points are noted in this efficient little canuck-written summary I read last night:
Who Really Runs the World? Conspiracies, Hidden Agendas and the Plan for World Government
http://lewrockwell.com/orig10/marshall16.1.html

Flat 300 pesos for a CuentaRUT ATM withdraw. If you take out more than 30K at one time, that is less than 1%, not bad for such a service. I see $300 pesos or more difference on various single items from store to store two blocks from each other. Of course, if you use RedCompra to buy stuff, that's a $0 peso gouge, even a better deal.

seriously? The stored value in the bus tickets are the biggest exploitation of the poor?

All those guys that pay upfront for their first class plane seats or their leer jet contracts must be really getting screwed.

As for fairness the financial system, let's see. In the last 12 months or so we got the new consumer protection laws and agency for finanical products up and running, a bunch of limits on various forms of double interest and charging, a cap on the max interest rates that banks can charge, a limit on who and for what reasons credit reports can be used, and pile of other stuff I can not even recall because I was not even paying attention to it.

On the poor end of society in the last 12 months, we got some sort of minium wage increase coming down the line (still not sure what that will be), at least one direct payment from the government to counter a sudden pop in inflation for food, and every time I open the paper there is a new pile of payments for this and that to the poorest end of society. There is a bonus for being a kid in a poor family. There is a government payment for being a working women under a certain level. There is a government payment for making less than whatever. That is just the stuff people do not have to do anything new to get but go pick it up. There are truckloads more money for anyone that wants to do a little paperwork. Like free house, start company, get some training, so on and so on.

Do you know what my housekeepers dilemma is? Should she sell or rent the house the government gave her for free? That is because she has another dilemma. Does she keep on working as housekeeper part time, or focus on the new business she started because she got a government grant and now it is making good money. That would make like the 3rd housekeeper in 3 years, that has quit because they started their own business with some government grant money or some women's education program.

Conservative right wing capitalist Pinera, has gotten more social programs passed and in to operation than Bachelette ever did, that really got down to the poor people. She just made a lot of promisses, then payed her buddies. The "socialist" in Chile are really good about keeping their capitalist consultant buddies well paid with government contracts for doing nothing. Pinera did do a pretty good job of increasing the unemployment lines with "consultants" when he came back in to office (whole consultant companies that just folded up in the days after he entered office), and they did prosecute more than a few where it was really needed.

Still none of this has anything to do with this report.

My bone to pick with that report, is using Chile as some sort of example for why their political agenda in the U.S. is right. It is the republican 'big government vs. small government', 'socialist are going to rape your dog', 'free market capitalism will save your sole from the godless communist', bla, bla, show on the back of Chile's success.

Every country needs a particular sized government for their needs, and it is big or small relative to that need.

Really, it is the U.S. centric view of all things in the World, even if they have absolutely nothing to do with the United States. I wonder how they spun the Taliban making their women wear burkas to further their political agenda state side?