Sam_Stone:
I’d accept that if I thought they had really changed. But there are still people on the left who apologize for the Soviets, and there are still plenty of people on the left who praise Communist states elsewhere, such as in Cuba and China, and many who defended the Communist state of Vietnam.
And yet we had this conversation before, you did not thought so before when pressed on your insistence that most of the left thought the same regarding communism.
Sam_Stone:
Let’s take Chile, for example. Progressives supported Salvadore Allende, and Conservatives opposed him. Allende followed the socialist playbook. He announced fiscal stimulus packages, raised taxes on the rich, nationalized industry and the banking system, instituted new ‘worker rights’, etc. In the words of another famous leftist, his solution to Chile’s problem was to ‘spread the wealth around’, in the belief that putting more money in the hands of the workers would stimulate the economy through consumer spending. Sound familiar? He financed this with higher taxes and by increasing public spending and printing money to pay for it.
Conservatives said that if he did that, capital would leave, private investment would collapse, and the nationalized industries would be run inefficiently and be unable to compete. And that’s exactly what happened. Allende was a disaster for Chile and became highly unpopular, which paved the way for a military coup by Pinochet.
I can not help but noticed that you forgot to mention the support Pinochet got from conservatives.
Sam_Stone:
By 1990 Chile returned to democracy, and since that time it has moved steadily towards a capitalist economy. Today it’s ranked as the 7th most free nation in the world by the index of economic freedom (higher than the United States). It has the highest per-capita income in Latin America, and it is much better off than its neighbors in pretty much every measure of human productivity, health, and happiness. Even Chile’s recent putatively socialist governments largely kept their hands off the economy. Chile privatized its pension system (something conservatives support and progressives oppose), and the result is a high savings rate and high rates of domestic investment in the economy.
But while the reform’s supporters argue it has been a major success story, officials both inside and outside Chile now increasingly question whether the high costs and modest investment returns have doomed Piñera’s original promise: a decent retirement income for workers at a savings for the government. Last year, the World Bank, which until recently encouraged countries to privatize pensions, published a highly skeptical report on private retirement systems in Latin America; Truman Packard, one of the report’s authors, says the bank has told the Chilean government that it must spend more to subsidize the private system and “increase its role in preventing old-age poverty.”
The bank found that exorbitant fees and other costs charged by private pension fund managers eat up as much as 15 percent of the contributions made by average Chilean workers, and even more for poorer workers. Investment returns have been far more modest than the hefty 11 percent return claimed by the private managers. The Chilean government’s pension superintendent says actual returns for someone earning Chile’s minimum wage were only 3.7 percent between 1994 and 2000.
A recent report by the Chilean government brought more grim news, forecasting that as many as half of all workers won’t be able to save enough to receive the minimum pension when they retire—even after paying into their accounts for 30 years—and will therefore rely on government subsidies. More than 17 percent of Chile’s retirees now continue working because they can’t afford to live on their pensions, according to that study, and another 7 percent want to work, but can’t find jobs.
A system that fails half of the population, says economist Dean Baker, codirector of the Washington-based Center for Economic and Policy Research, can’t claim to have succeeded: “It hasn’t provided security to people.” Piñera himself didn’t respond to numerous requests to comment on the dismal statistics. But his economics mentor Harberger shrugs at the data. “That [Chileans] weren’t able to save enough money,” he says, “is one of those things.”
Sam_Stone:
In the meantime, Chile’s regional neighbors continued to flirt with command economies and communism, with progressives cheering them on. The most recent example is Venezuela, and there have been many debates on this board with progressives defending the Chavez regime again criticism from conservatives. Under Chavez, and despite massive new oil finds and large increases in the price of oil, Venezuela’s economy is cratering and it has the highest inflation in the region. It may also be headed for sovereign default .
Once again I can not talk for others that are shallow, but in my case I’m on the record of only defending Chavez because the alternative was to once again seeing the specter of the United States once again supporting the subversion of democracy with a coup, now as the opponent of Chavez is on the record of keeping some of the Changes that do benefit the people it is clear to me that the opposition has finally learned what progress means, it does not means that we should forcibly return to all the old ways.