To the dismay of every economic minister in Latin America, he introduced the free-market policies that produced the Chilean economic miracle.

To me, this speaks volumes. Why would it be to the dismay of EVERY economic minister? These are people who are supposed to know a little something about economics. These are people who are supposed to be social scientists and you'd think they'd have a little intellectual curiosity as to whether a different system would or wouldn't work.

So... do you think these "economic ministers" (almost certainly all socialists) were dismayed because they feared disaster for the poor Chilean people? Or do you think they were dismayed because they feared it would be a success?

My guess is that they were mostly not socialists, but statists (and stasists).

But the psychology is the same. Elites afraid to let go of control.

Oh, and one other thing John. I'd like to suggest an improvement to your headline for this post. It is a small change but I think it would be much more accurate if it read:

"We were right, they were—and are—wrong, again"

Actually, that article, and the "received conservative wisdom" about Pinochet, are both complete bullshit, as this article makes clear:

"In 1973, the year General Pinochet brutally seized the government, Chile’s unemployment rate was 4.3%. In 1983, after ten years of free-market modernization, unemployment reached 22%. Real wages declined by 40% under military rule.

In 1970, 20% of Chile’s population lived in poverty. By 1990, the year “President” Pinochet left office, the number of destitute had doubled to 40%. Quite a miracle..."

As Palast goes on to point out, after 9 years of Pinochet's rule, in 1982 and 1983, GDP dropped 19%. And be sure to read about the brilliant "privatization" of Chile's banks that emptied the nation's coffers and destroyed the pension system.

To reverse the disaster he'd created, Pinochet nationalized banks and industry, often without compensation, and re-instituted the minimum wage and collective bargaining rights for the unions. In other words, he re-imposed the "socialism" that he had fought to destroy.

And, of course, this economic analysis doesn't even touch on the murder and torture Pinochet's gang committed. Are you really willing to be counted with moral midgets like Mark Steyn, who recently said:

"As for General Pinochet, if there’s a lesson in all of this it’s that dictators should kill more people rather than fewer."

Is the "free market" some sort of god to you, to which you are willing to sacrifice thousands of lives? Was Chile just another Napoleonic omelet?

Palast has it right:

"[T]he myth of the free-market Miracle persists because it serves a quasi-religious function. Within the faith of the Reaganauts and Thatcherites, Chile provides the necessary genesis fable, the ersatz Eden from which laissez-faire dogma sprang successful and shining."

Pinochet was a fascist monster, and our country's support for him was a disgrace, as is your thoughtless parroting of this neo-conservative fairy tale. (I won't say conservative, for I fear to disturb Edmund Burke's already restless sleep.)

Perhaps it's your turn to "start to think," and stop repeating right-wing talking points rather than learning for yourself what actually happened.

I am indeed repeating "right-wing talking points." I've encountered those points from a good many sources, so it is reasonable for me to do so. But they could be wrong--I'll be looking for more information. (Contributions welcome.) And unlike certain people, if I find I'm wrong I'll publicly retract and apologize, as I have occasionally done in the past.

Your comment about Steyn is wrong. It is obvious from the context that he is not advocating that dictators kill people but making sarcastically the point that it was his failure to kill people who were his enemies that partly put Pinochet in more hot water than other leaders who have killed far more people. You are a writer, you should be able to see that. (In fact no conservative writer I've encountered discussing him has failed to criticize Pinochet's murders and other wrongs)

More interesting to me is that you are once again criticizing me without revealing what you yourself believe. It's a pattern. Perhaps even an unbroken streak since early 2003.

What do YOU believe about free markets? Or other forms of economic organization? You come out with jabs and sneers, but you never make a case for what YOU believe. If anything. Which is rather odd for someone who used to call himself a libertarian...

The neo-cons at the Washington Post quoted above compare Pinochet with Castro, whose enemies are dead or still languishing in prisons, and whose country is mired in unending poverty, yet who is still often lauded by leftists and Hollywood idiots. So where do YOU stand? What do YOU think about Mr Castro? He's also murdered his thousands, at the most conservative estimates, and imprisoned tens-of-thousands. Are you going to attack him with the venom you just showed for Pinochet? I bet never. And what do you do when your pals say sweet nothings about Cuba? Do you tell them that Castro is a Communist monster? Hmm? Or do you nod and smile and go along with the crowd?

You sneer at Reagan and Thatcher, but who are you FOR? Isn't it time we got a little honesty and openness from you? Or are you above everything? Superior to all mere human striving? (And do you maybe fit my description here?)

"Is the "free market" some sort of god to you...

Of course not, but I do admire it greatly, don't you? I mean after all, is there a region in the developing world where the countries with the free'est markets don't also have the highest rates of economic growth and the lowest rates of poverty and infant mortality? (Can we even agree that those are good things?)

Maybe it’s just a coincidence that Chile has the most successful economy in Latin America and also ranks first in that region in the Economic Freedom Index (http://www.heritage.org/index/indexoffreedom.cfm), but it seems to be a pattern that repeats itself in Southeast Asia, Central Asia, and Eastern Europe.

Free markets are the greatest enemy that poverty has ever known. Do you disagree with that statement? I am confident that even the vast majority of liberal economists would not disagree.

I'll leave you with the thoughts of two very liberal economists. Paul Krugman has this to say about globalization and capitalism: http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/smokey.html

Robert Heilbroner (if you've never heard of him he wrote economic textbooks and is probably to the left of John Kenneth Galbraith) had this to say:

Capitalism has been as unmistakable a success as socialism has been a failure. Here is the part that's hard to swallow. It has been the Friedmans, Hayeks, and von Miseses who have maintained that capitalism would flourish and that socialism would develop incurable ailments. All three have regarded capitalism as the 'natural' system of free men; all have maintained that left to its own devices capitalism would achieve material growth more successfully than any other system. From [my samplings] I draw the following discomforting generalization: The farther to the right one looks, the more prescient has been the historical foresight; the farther to the left, the less so.

Dave,

I grant you that Pinochet was a hard case, but Allende and his cohorts weren't much better. Pinochet's only saving grace was that: 1) he had sense enough to know that he had to relinquish power someday; and 2) he cared enough about his country to leave it a better place than he found it.

Too bad one can't say as much about Castro, as John notes.

And Chile in the last days of Allende was hardly an Eden, Dave. Please see:

http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/004624.php

(tip o' the hat to the Instapundit)

So much for Chile being a socialist-paradise-in-the-making in those days, as the quasi-religious (to use Palast's term against him) stories on the Left would have it.

Sheesh. This is what I get for getting up at 4:30 AM after four hours of sleep, and being on my feet all day....

Make that TWO saving graces on Pinochet's part.

:)

Well, some interesting responses.

First off, John, your mention of Castro is simply neocon ADD: "look, over there, a communist dictator!" (For the record, I do not approve in any way of Castro's thuggery, anymore than I approved of Pinochet's.)

Your attitude towards Pinochet is a prime example of the moral relativism that is standard in right-wing discourse: what's intolerable in a left-wing dictator is acceptable in a right-wing dictator, as long as it leads to the correct results.

As Jim Henley notes:

"Revolutionary socialism theorized that economic reform was so imperative that it justified murder and authoritarianism to achieve. If that theory was odious, and it was, the notion that “revolutionary capitalism” justified the same measure is odious also."

And I'm aware that most "conservative" writers don't overtly approve of Pinochet's murderous ways, but that merely makes their apologetics for his reign the height of hypocrisy. Witness the odious Jonah Goldberg prescribing an "Iraqi Pinochet" as a solution to the mess there. What a beautiful example of the moral bankruptcy of the Right, which has insisted, ever since the WMD excuse for our aggression faded away, that we went into Iraq to give them democracy. Now, it seems, the best we can do is give them another dictator--but at least he'll be our son of a bitch. Pfui. It is to spit.

Mike, you wrote that:

"Maybe it’s just a coincidence that Chile has the most successful economy in Latin America and also ranks first in that region in the Economic Freedom Index (http://www.heritage.org/index/indexoffreedom.cfm), but it seems to be a pattern that repeats itself in Southeast Asia, Central Asia, and Eastern Europe."

It has little to do with Pinochet, I think. As the Economist notes:

"With Chileans cowed, the Chicago Boys could work as if in a laboratory, with no regard for social costs. They made mistakes: a fixed exchange rate and unregulated bank privatisations triggered a massive recession and financial collapse in 1982-83. More pragmatic policies and a renewal of growth followed. But it took the return of democracy in 1990, with its ability to bestow legitimacy, to create an investment-led boom and a large fall in poverty. Elsewhere in Latin America, free-market reforms were enacted by democracies."

As for my attitude about the so-called "free market," well, it's rather like Churchill's about democracy. But it's important to note that

1) There is no such thing as "the free market." The phrase is a reification of an ideological perspective, and has no real existence. There are many markets, all of them creatures of the interplay of culture and government, and none of them are "free;" and

2) We live in a society, not a market. There are measures of the good that are not reducible to monetary terms, and such a reification cannot account for them.

In practice, what John and his ilk refer to as the free market is the same sort of situation that Jesus and the prophets inveighed against, a game rigged to benefit the wealthy at the expense of the poor.

So, if you want to know what I believe, John, you merely need to be a lot more familiar with the Bible than you are. Read, mark, and inwardly digest the prophets. Likewise with the rabbi from Nazareth. Ask yourself how their words might be applied in a modern capitalist democracy (which I freely agree is likely the best starting point for a just society--but only a starting point). And try to keep in mind the relative importance of human beings versus "the free market" or any other ideological formulation.

Finally, Hale, as for Pinochet having "cared enough about his country to leave it a better place than he found it," I deny that utterly. He was a thug who murdered and tortured in order to enrich himself and his cronies--IIRR the Chilean goverment recently discovered 10 tons of gold in an overseas account that he'd squirreled away.

"So, if you want to know what I believe, John, you merely need to be a lot more familiar with the Bible than you are. Read, mark, and inwardly digest the prophets. Likewise with the rabbi from Nazareth..."

Mush and evasion. People find support for ALL theories in the Bible, so saying this is just a way of not answering the question. You don't have any beliefs, any positive vision about what should be done in the real world. If you did you would write. Writing comes from belief, from faith.

You would obviously like to be advocating leftist policies. You tepidly condemned Castro because I pressed you, but immediately flipped back to attacking the right---that's a subject you can write about, at least negatively, one where you are filled with interesting venom and hatred.

But you are stuck. You obviously want to follow the left party line, nothing else inspires you. But you can't, because you know too much. You know it's all a big failure and a spiritual catastrophe. You are stuck because you believe something you don't believe.

The whole span of our lifetimes has been filled with leftist experiments. Stalinism, Maoism, euro-socialism, big-government liberalism, Liberation Theology, "people's movements" in a dozen flavors. But yet there is no place you can point to with pride and say, "See, it works."

"But it took the return of democracy in 1990, with its ability to bestow legitimacy, to create an investment-led boom and a large fall in poverty". So, are you going to start writing positively about Latin American democracy? As I have often done? Nope, you won't. It's been one of the most astonishing success stories of our lifetime, but you don't give a damn. It doesn't fit your theory, so you can't write.

You are stuck. I may be foolish, wrongheaded, morally-imbecilic or even crazy, but I'm not stuck. You are. Like millions of people in our generation, you absorbed your beliefs uncritically in the 60's and 70's, and now you are poisonously bitter because the world has left all that stuff in the dust.

Actually, this is a topic that fascinates me. Once I began to notice it, I could see it everywhere. One of my sisters is in the same fix. She dotes on NPR, and talks vaguely of moving to Europe, where things are less barbarous. And though she's surrounded by fascinating changes in the world, she's just bewildered and hurt...

OK Dave, since you have a problem with the term "free market" let's just stick with "capitalism".

Actually, I'd be thrilled if the typical leftist's attitude toward capitalism was similar to Churchill's toward democracy. Unfortunately, I don't think it is, and I don't think yours is. How else to explain this: the free market... a game rigged to benefit the wealthy at the expense of the poor.

I can only assume this is a faith-based conclusion that results from your religious beliefs since there is no evidence to support it. Everywhere in the world the nations with the free'est markets generally have the lowest rates of poverty. This is true across cultures. I'll ask again, can we agree this is a good thing?

Getting back to Krugman's article, the poor were there, subsisting on garbage, before the "free-market" was introduced. After it was introduced, according to Krugman (who even I'll concede is a first rate economist), the choices available to the poor were expanded and they became richer.

How in the world can that be construed as being "at the expense of the poor."

I've just posted some information on Pinochet and Chile sent to me by an friend who is also an economist.