By John Fund
Tuesday, September 06, 2022
Chile, the narrow sliver of a nation that hugs South
America’s Pacific coast, has experienced a miracle over the last 40 years as it
peacefully emerged from a dictatorship and implemented free-market policies
that made it the richest country on the continent. Poverty has fallen from 45
percent to 6 percent of the population. Even if economic inequality and high
living costs have triggered discontent lately, per capita income since 1990 has
tripled to $24,000 a year.
That miracle was created by Chilean students of Milton
Friedman. They created the most free economy in the developing world, built on
a foundation of property rights, free trade, a low flat tax, privatization of
the social-security system, and the deregulation of key industries.
But over four decades the Left has steadily infiltrated
the nation’s cultural institutions — schools, universities, churches, and media
— and the result of this indoctrination paid off last year when voters approved
a complete rewrite of the 1980 constitution. Their project got a huge boost
last December, when 56 percent of voters elected 35-year-old former
student-protester Gabriel Boric as the new president of Chile. The Communist Party is a
part of his governing coalition.
Boric pledged to back the work product of delegates to
the constitutional convention who drafted a document with 388 articles that
would have systematically dismantled Chile’s free-market economy. Taxes would
have soared, the country’s successful private-pension system would have been
gutted, and radical action to address climate change would have become a
constitutional state duty.
A referendum was held Sunday, with a majority being
required to make the new constitution the law of the land.
But Boric and his pals ran into roadblocks. The fact that
“Nature” would be given rights in the document, that police and a national
health system would have to operate with an undefined “gender perspective,” and
that the government would be tasked with implementing a host of other
far-reaching provisions demonstrated just how wrongheaded it was. Farmers might
have lost the property rights to water on their land. Compensation for
expropriated land would not be set at a market price but at the price the
government of the day deemed a “just” one.
As the debate went on, it became clear the document
“guaranteed” over 100 fundamental rights ranging from “nutritionally complete”
food to “neurodiversity” to separate judicial systems for indigenous peoples.
Economists estimated its mandates would have increased government spending by
between 9 percent and 14 percent of GDP per year.
Two former left-wing presidents even spoke out against
the new charter’s overreach. “The general sense became that the proposal was
ditzy or dangerous, or perhaps both,” Dario Paya, a former Chilean ambassador
to the Organization of American States, told me.
The more that the 17 million Chileans examined the
document, the less they liked it. The proposed constitution was crushed in Sunday’s voting, winning only 38 percent
approval and losing in all 16 regions.
President Boric says he will try to work with other parties
to come up with a new document. But 56 percent of voters
disapprove of his record, which features soaring inflation, rising crime, and
stumbles by his “woke” advisers. The Chilean stock market jumped 5 percent on
Monday after the vote, and analysts predict the recent massive capital flight
from the country will now start to return.
Any repeated attempt by Boric and his left-wing allies to
foist a new left-wing document on voters is likely to fail and only erode his
poll numbers more. There is growing support for just making amendments to the
current constitution instead.
The election results, meanwhile, blow up many of the
assumptions that Chilean leftists had about their own voters. They thought that
creating separate systems of justice and the chance for autonomous rule for
indigenous people would be popular. But 74 percent of voters in La Araucania,
the home of the indigenous Mapuche people, rejected the constitution written by
elites to supposedly “liberate” them. There were few takers among those they
were ostensibly helping.
Similarly, the Marxist elements of the Boric government
were convinced that the “class struggle” they champion would see millions of
lower-income Chileans support the new constitution. Nothing could have
been further from the truth.
A study by two academics at the University of Santiago found
that in the neighborhoods dominated by the lowest fifth of income earners, only
25 percent of voters approved the constitution. In the neighborhoods dominated
by the top fifth of income earners, the constitution won 39.5 percent, higher
than the national average. All over the world, from Britain to America to
Germany, high-income people are increasingly voting on lifestyle and value
issues such as environmentalism and abortion rather than, say, levels of
taxation.
These remarkable numbers contradict the vision of those
who wanted to install “a class division in the country,” concludes Miguel Angel
Fernandez, a coauthor of the University of Santiago study. “The economic
situation was less important than other factors (such as religion) or indeed
the lower-income sectors did not see in the rejected constitutional draft a
real opportunity to improve their well-being conditions in peace and
tranquility.” Marxists and identity-politics activists would call poor people
who vote against them the victim of “false consciousness” imposed on them by
elites, but in reality many poor people simply don’t buy what they are selling.
The University of Santiago scholars say that, for those
considering another attempt at constitutional reform, their findings “lead us
to think of a path of common minimums rather than the imposition of ideas from
different groups on the majority of the population.”
In other words, a document that probably looks a whole
lot more like the classical-liberal model of the current constitution than the
fantastical one overwhelmingly rejected by the Chilean people.
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