Friday, December 15, 2006

Pinochet

The Economist, the house magazine of old fashioned liberalism and maybe neo-liberalism too, gets it right:

No ifs or buts. Whatever the general did for the economy [Pinochet] was a bad man...

...it took the return of democracy in 1990, with its ability to bestow legitimacy, to create an investment-led boom and a large fall in poverty. Elsewhere in Latin America, free-market reforms were enacted by democracies...

...Even if history bothers to remember that he privatised the pension system, that should not wipe away the memory of the torture, the “disappeared” and the bodies dumped at sea. His defenders—who include Britain's Lady Thatcher—really should know better.

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