Thursday, January 27, 2005

Fascism Yields Disappointing Returns in Pension Plan

from The New York Times
"What we have is a system that is good for Chile but bad for most Chileans," said a government official who specializes in pension issues and who spoke on condition of anonymity, fearing retaliation from corporate interests. "If people really had freedom of choice, 90 percent of them would opt to go back to the old system."

4 comments:

J.R. Boyd said...

Chile=10%?

gecko said...

See comments to same here.

Sheryl said...

It seems to me that the whole problem with privatized insurance in general is that once the money has been taken there isn't a heck of a lot of incentive to give it back if the companies can get by with not doing so. They should be heavily regulated if they are to work.

Like my pet peeves with banks. Have you noticed that the interest rates they offer customers these days are so low that the fees they charge to access ones own money frequently make having a bank account more costly than keeping your money stashed under a pillow?

The biggest sham is direct deposit. Never opt for direct deposit of your pay check. It's just begging for your bank to require fees on retrieving your money.

The real problem with all these privatizaition schemes is that we are so caught in these "free market" ideals that we don't consider the elements that are necessary for a free market to work.

J.R. Boyd said...

Noam Chomsky weighs in: "Quite an amusing article. The author only failed to point out that it was all predicted in advance, and when the military rulers imposed the system, they made sure that the military would be exempt and would keep the old system. They are not as foolish as the Chicago boys who were advising them."