Chile's Free Market Miracle: A Second Look by Joseph Collins

Chile's Free Market Miracle: A Second Look Reviews

• 
  Rhuff

  Although a quarter century old, this book is a necessary spotlight on the "free market counter-revolution" originating in the Chicago School of the 1970s. As this regime has undulated like octopus tentacles across the allegedly "Free World" - especially the former socialist world - it's still relevant. In making a profit off every conceivable social transaction, from health care to education and transportation, social security to "land reform", Chile saw the greatest redistribution of wealth in its history: from bottom to top. Those wanting to trace the rise of the One Percent can do so in the mechanisms of capital extraction from man and nature, leaving both bare to the chill, empty wind of the bloody hand of the market.
  
  What is astonishing - though perhaps it shouldn't be - is how easily the "new market democracies" were suckered into this same con artist economy. Poles, Russians, Czechs, etc., are not stupid people. One reason was the reaction against Soviet-imposed socialism. Another was the naive trust in Chicago School-trained advisers whose negative press at home was not translated abroad. Anything associated with Ronald Reagan was "good," thus Reagonomics as well.
  
  Since this book's release there has been a groundswell of revolt at the New World Order that first broke skin in Chile, but it has a long way to go to return to the stability of the 1970s, let alone grow beyond imposed austerity. Central banks may have shed the jackboots and torture chambers of Pinochet to rule the rabble; they hardly need such gothic mechanisms once the judicial and political processes have been thoroughly marketized as well.
  
  Worth a read by a new generation to see what it's up against; why Donald Trump emerged as the neo-Pinochet of the US.