Chile, which was recently hit with a massive Earthquake and is dealing with some chaos in the aftermath, is no Haiti. Unlike Haiti, Chile is a modern 1st world country that has a thriving economy. This is due in large part to Augosto Pinochet who removed the Totalitarian Progressive regime of Salvador Allende. He realized the way to remove the appeal of Progressivism was to modernize Chile’s economy. He did this by putting Chilean Economists of the “Chicago School” in charge. Chileans who learned economics in the University of Chicago at the hands of Milton Friedman.
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.
Earthquake magnitudes are measured on a logarithmic scale. The earthquake that hit Northridge in 1994 measured 6.7 on the Richter scale. But its seismic-energy yield was only half that of the 7.0 quake that hit Haiti in January, which was the equivalent of 2,000 Hiroshima-sized bombs exploding all at once.
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.
Read it here: How Milton Friedman Saved Chile
Thanks to Pinochet’s strong leadership and Chicago Boys economic tutoring at the hands of Milton Friedman, Chile enjoys the highest standard of living in Latin America. Chileans once immigrated, now Chile is filled with Immigrants from Argentina, Peru and Bolivia. Their privatized Social Security has enabled many Chileans to retire wealthy and enjoy the fruits of their years of work. Chile is an example for all nations, even America, to model after.
