[lbo-talk] Wall Street Journal: Milton Friedman's ghost saves Chile

[Somebody Somebody]

Again, to state the obvious, nobody on the Wall Street Journal editorial board would ever admit that Cuba's effective hurricane response system is evidence that Karl Marx's ghost has saved the country. On the other hand, the poor response of North Korea to flooding in 1995 was naturally evidence of socialism's failure. 

At the same time, it's undoubtedly true that Chile has prospered over the last thirty years or so. At the time of the Chilean coup in 1973, the country was already one of the better off parts of Latin America, but nevertheless since then it has leapfrogged over Mexico, Argentina, and Venezuela. I said earlier that it's now about where Portugal was a generation ago, and indeed when I checked the data, it's GDP per capita and living standards appear to confirm that intuition. Assuming it recovers economically in the next couple of years, it should catch up the most developed nations in another generation or so.