Copper and Spending in Chile

Randy at Beautiful Horizons is pissed off, and I'm fully with him. The windfall of income from copper that Chile is currently witnessing, and the issue of how to deal with it, touches upon two important legacies of Pinochet that I didn't mention before.

First, there is the social security issue. Anybody with a brain knew that, after re-election, Bush was all about privatizing social security, proclaiming it as part of his "mandate" (how's that working out for you, W?). While many Americans felt that it was a bad idea, they didn't always know why. However, Chile provided a fine model. Pinochet privatized social security there in the early 1980s, and it did well for awhile. Indeed, that was what Bush had partly based his model on. The problem is, while he was proclaiming privatization and pointing to Chile, Chile's social security was entering a crisis it still hasn't exited. Privatization has unfairly helped the wealthy while basically completely screwing over those who really need it (the physically and mentally disabled/handicapped/challenged, the poor, abandoned children/mothers, etc.). As should come as no surprise, now, Pinochet's privatization was basically a mechanism for the rich to get richer and to help private companies have to pay less money to the government.

Secondly, there is the issue of military spending. Randy hits it right on the head - it's ungodly that Chile spends so much for the military (and yes, this is an American talking, but our military spending isn't even of this universe). The fact that they put so much into military spending, yet Pinochet never even used ONE CENT of government on even ONE HOSPITAL in 17 YEARS is so infuriating that words can't even describe it. Hell will have to be even more inventive with him than I'd imagined....