Communists are not taking over Chile. But you wouldn’t know it from watching the media frenzy surrounding 23-year-old student leader and avowed communist Camila Vallejo in Santiago.
Since last year the red-diaper baby, whose parents were supporters of Salvador Allende, has headed scores of street demonstrations demanding free university education, nationalization of the copper industry, and the end of the liberal economic model.
Amazingly, she has put the center-right government of Sebastian Piñera in a defensive crouch.
How this can be in Chile, the poster-child of liberal economic reform, is at first a puzzle. The answer—and this is a cautionary tale for Americans—may lie in Chile’s political and intellectual climate, which is desperately short of voices able to defend the morality of the market and the sanctity of individual rights.
Even while the material benefits of the market economy have been piling up for decades, Chile has been intellectually swamped by leftist ideas. The common principle: Economic inequality is immoral and the state has an obligation to correct it.
via O’Grady: Chile’s Cautionary Lesson for Americans – WSJ.com.
Liberty or Equality 