Social Security Scam Keeps Playing on and on and on

If Chile can reform their Social security why can't we? We can't even START the conversation!

Posted 09/29/2011 06:33 PM

Cain's 'Chilean Model'

Election '12: Herman Cain's victory in Florida's straw poll is notable, among other things, for his advocacy of "Chilean Model" Social Security reform in a state filled with retirees. It ought to be a wake-up call to all candidates.

Aside from the insta-analysis about Cain's victory being a protest vote against Texas Gov. Rick Perry, it's worth noticing that — in Florida, no less — both Cain and Perry, who finished first and second in the weekend's GOP straw poll, were the two most outspoken candidates about confronting the U.S. crisis in Social Security.

It completely ends the notion that addressing the issue of unfunded pension liabilities — in Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare — is the third rail of politics.

Voters migrated from Perry to Cain, but there were multiple Tea Party favorites to choose from. In moving to Cain, they went from a moderate to a strong stance on Social Security reform.

Perry did call for a national dialogue on the matter. But Cain went much further, at least three times in debates calling for "The Chilean Model" to replace Social Security, bringing the idea to as many as 15 million viewers.

Chile's system, enacted in 1981, took government out of the pension business altogether and replaced it with a system of personal retirement accounts.

It's one of most successful fiscal reforms in history.

It outperforms Social Security on returns, yielding about 9.23% compounded annual returns over 30 years under private management. READ THE REST AT IBD

Chile's Freedom and Small Government Promotes Life vs Haiti's Big Government Promotes Death

America is at a crossroads. We can either continue with Obama style Big Government with his insistence on spending the United States into oblivion and controlling more and more of our lives or we can go the way of small government, limited government and government that is not a hindrance to the individual's life and stays within its bounds as proscribed by our Constitution.

How Milton Friedman Saved Chile

Milton Friedman has been dead for more than three years. But his spirit was surely hovering protectively over Chile in the early morning hours of Saturday. Thanks largely to him, the country has endured a tragedy that elsewhere would have been an apocalypse.

...By contrast, Saturday's earthquake in Chile measured 8.8. That's nearly 500 times more powerful than Haiti's, or about one million Hiroshimas. Yet Chile's reported death toll—711 as of this writing—was a tiny fraction of the 230,000 believed to have perished in Haiti.

It's not by chance that Chileans were living in houses of brick—and Haitians in houses of straw—when the wolf arrived to try to blow them down. In 1973, the year the proto-Chavista government of Salvador Allende was overthrown by Gen. Augusto Pinochet, Chile was an economic shambles. Inflation topped out at an annual rate of 1000%, foreign-currency reserves were totally depleted, and per capita GDP was roughly that of Peru and well below Argentina's.

What Chile did have was intellectual capital, thanks to an exchange program between its Catholic University and the economics department of the University of Chicago, then Friedman's academic home. Even before the 1973 coup, several of Chile's "Chicago Boys" had drafted a set of policy proposals which amounted to an off-the-shelf recipe for economic liberalization: sharp reductions to government spending and the money supply; privatization of state-owned companies; the elimination of obstacles to free enterprise and foreign investment, and so on...READ the rest here at WSJ

Will Free Enterprise or Socialism Prevail in South America?

The situation in South America is at a crossroads and the choice is freedom, entrepreneurship, and growth or socialism, government run economy and stagnation. Chile will be the next country that must choose between; a free economy run by millions of people making billions of decisions or a few politicians making the decisions for everyone; individualism and the free mind or statism and the inability to use your mind. Let's hope Chileans having lived under both systems will know that freedom is better than chains. Mary O'Grady covers Latin America and always does a remarkable job showing us the issues in that part of the world.

...Yet lurking just beneath the surface there may be other more powerful factors at work, not the least of which is Chile's declining productivity under four successive Concertación governments, and a growing sense that for the first time in 20 years, economically speaking, life for Chileans is no longer getting better. Mr. Piñera, who got 44% of the vote to Mr. Frei's 30% in the first round, has promised to reverse these trends.

This matters to all of Latin America. Chile is the region's poster child for success through openness, competition, sound money, limits to government and equality under the law. Should the model begin to produce mediocre results, enemies of liberty will use it to discredit freedom.

...One of the most dramatic changes was the privatization of the pension system. Another key reform gave the central bank independence, ending the curse of hyperinflation.
It is often said that the modernization of the Chilean economy under Pinochet was so successful that even the left, once in power, didn't dare undo it...

...What is certain is that if Chile continues to emphasize the politics of redistribution over entrepreneurship, it will lose its edge. (Another Test for the Chilean Model - Read at WSJ).