The Chicago Boys in Chile: Economic Freedom's Awful Toll

[Hydra]

11. Thank you Octa!

It's a privilege to to be here on DU to learn what's really going on in the halls of power and taking that to the streets and educating people. When I came here in the 2000s, posts by you and others helped me turn an unformed sense of something "not right" about the country and the world into something more concrete and actionable. Daylight hurts the vampires, which is why your current post had such a great little gem in it:

A second axiom was that socialist planning could not provide a prosperous economic environment, and especially that prosperity could not be gained by breaking away from what now is called the Washington Consensus. Under Allende, Chile sustained a hefty 8.9 percent increase in its GNP and at first succeeded in reducing the country’s inflation rate. During his nearly three years in office he gained support by providing the poor with better access to housing, education, food and health care than previously.

This has been quoted at me almost word for word by Capitalism defenders here- that planned economies are "impossible" to run efficiently, that we need the "invisible hand" to do it...the Golden Calf, so to speak of the believers. Beware threatening their sacred cow :p