| Chile's response to financial troubles; a model for USA? | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Mar 2 2010, 10:14 AM (140 Views) | |
| Quasimodo | Mar 2 2010, 10:14 AM Post #1 |
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Since Chile is in the news, here is an example of how Chile dealt with its own financial crisis in the 1970s: "Bitter experience taught Chileans contempt for the notion that the power to elect a government is a satisfactory substitute for the freedom to run one's own daily life. Thus one of the main objectives of each of the reforms was precisely to reduce the intrusiveness and discretionary power of government. . . The [reformers] actually increased traditional welfare state benefits for the very poorest of the poor, but it virtually eliminated them for everybody else. The reason went far beyond saving money and struck directly at the view that government can be a source of economic benefit. For citizens, there would be no employment as grantors of benefits and no premium in learning the complex paths to maximizing benefits. . . And, in direct contradiction to the logic of Third Worldism, the [government] shrank the size of the state [down to only 150,000 government employees--a decrease of 75% from the number of bureaucrats who had been employed sixteen years before the start of the reforms] Just as important, the government officials who remained had far fewer favors to give and far less discretionary power than their predecessors." --The Character of Nations, by Angelo Codevilla |
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7:41 PM Jul 10