Wednesday, January 26, 2005
The World Looks to America, We Look to . . . Chile?
I must confess some befuddlement at reading that Bush's Social Security reform scheme is based on a Chilean model developed under Augusto Pinochet. It's beyond me to assess the success or failure of the Chilean system - the above Reuters article does so to some degree, as does this New York Times article
What is odd to me is this administration citing anything done by another country as a model for us. The new rhetoric of Washington thoroughly eschews looking elsewhere for models. Conservatives roll their eyes when told about European systems. It's true that Latin America is more wedded to the free market than Europe, but this is not an administration that has really paid much attention to Latin America otherwise. In a different era, we might have worked more closely with Vicente Fox or more stringently against Hugo Chavez. Latin America is on the backburner, again.
What the use of Chile as a model suggests is this administration's incredible flexibility. It will use rhetoric premised on American exceptionalism and supremacy for 95% of the time and then turn on a dime and hail another country as a model. This will stupefy advocates of abolishing the death penalty or instituting public health care, but being a Bush administration means never having to worry about intellectual consistency. It must be nice.
I must confess some befuddlement at reading that Bush's Social Security reform scheme is based on a Chilean model developed under Augusto Pinochet. It's beyond me to assess the success or failure of the Chilean system - the above Reuters article does so to some degree, as does this New York Times article
What is odd to me is this administration citing anything done by another country as a model for us. The new rhetoric of Washington thoroughly eschews looking elsewhere for models. Conservatives roll their eyes when told about European systems. It's true that Latin America is more wedded to the free market than Europe, but this is not an administration that has really paid much attention to Latin America otherwise. In a different era, we might have worked more closely with Vicente Fox or more stringently against Hugo Chavez. Latin America is on the backburner, again.
What the use of Chile as a model suggests is this administration's incredible flexibility. It will use rhetoric premised on American exceptionalism and supremacy for 95% of the time and then turn on a dime and hail another country as a model. This will stupefy advocates of abolishing the death penalty or instituting public health care, but being a Bush administration means never having to worry about intellectual consistency. It must be nice.
