Posted on 04/30/2011 6:52:33 AM PDT by IBD editorial writer
May Day — socialists' paean to class warfare — evokes memories of Soviet tanks in Red Square and leftist radicals rioting. But Chile celebrates the actual empowerment of workers.
May 1 marks the 30 years since Chile became the first nation to privatize its social security system. By turning workers into investors, the move solved an entitlement crisis much like the one America faces today.
"I like symbols, so I chose May Day as the birth date of Chile's 'ownership society' that allowed every worker to become a small capitalist," wrote Jose Pinera, former secretary of labor and social security and the architect of this pension revolution. He is now a senior fellow at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C.
(Excerpt) Read more at investors.com ...
Obama hates and fears this idea of privatizing social security - he says it's stealing grandma's check and the only alternative is to either raise taxes or do nothing. What he doesn't want you to know is that the third option, privatization means no cuts and much bigger returns for all.
If Chile can make this work, there is no reason we can’t.
Has anyone bothered to say “Thank you, General Pinochet?” I didn’t think so...
From the article:
“In 2005, New York Times reporter John Tierney worked out his own Social Security contributions on the Chilean model and found that his privatized pension would have been $53,000 a year plus a one-time payout of $223,000. The same contributions paid into Social Security would have paid him $18,000.”
Plus his heirs would keep whatever was left in his fund after he died.
Now if anybody proposed replacing our present Ponzi scheme with the Chilean system, they’d be demagoged to death for trying to “destroy Social Security”.
Third world US....
Actually, thanks to the late Milton Friedman and the Chicago Boys are in order!
Correct. But General Pinochet deserves thanks, too. He saved his country from communism - a really virulent, merciless, brutal strain of it, even viler than Hugo Chavez’s. He also made free markets possible. Thanks to General Pinochet are in order.
As Lady Thatcher and the great Ronald Reagan understood perfectly well!
Chile celebrates the actual empowerment of workers.
Yes there is. We don't have a General Pinochet...yet. He eliminated the commies and socialists and gave his nation a future.
And it probably the NY Times reporter still couldn’t tell which was the better system!
That is exactly the plan I have proposed here on FR - before even knowing the details of Chile’s system (that money left would go to heirs).
I should run for President.
Without Pinochet, any policy views of the Chicago School would have been a dead letter. Good ideas have always been around, but there is almost no one with the understanding, courage, and power to implement them.
May 1st is also Law Day, instituted by President Eisenhower to celebrate the rule of law, in contrast to communist dictatorship.
This move vaulted Chile from the third world to the first world in one generation. ObaMao is trying to do the same thing to America in reverse.
We might have to have one soon, if we cant purge the libtards...
Pinochet deserves a heck of a lot more credit than he has even been given. He really fixed that nation. I mean he even managed to fix it well enough that even successive socialist administrations after he left have not been able to touch the structural reforms which have made Chile into an economic powerhouse.
Now if Chile just had decent gun laws, I might consider moving there.
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Sharron Angle proposed this system during her campaign,however she got ripped by the left simply because it was implemented by a “bloody dictator called Pinochet”. We conservatives should urging our politicians to change our current system to something like this and at the same time educating our friends on the benefits of system like Chile’s.
My thoughts also.
I am in out down here very often and even though there is some trashy culture hangers-on, Chile is excellent, except for private gun laws which may also be a legacy of Pinocet.
Yet there are persistent rumors that Obama wants to seize all 401(k)s...
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