Charly Boy,

It's a nominal left-of-center government. Chile is a solid free-market society. And I don't care if it's a man or a women or if the party in charge uses the term "socialist"... as long as the economic policies are clearly free-market oriented. Pinochet might have experience a personal disaster at the end of his days, yet his contributions to Chile's progress are dramatic.

The beginning of wisdom about economics, 'About Time,' is there is no such thing as a completely planned economy or a fully free market.

Also, there's more than one market. I'm for the market in goods and services, but I'd like to abolish or severely regulate or restrict capital and labor markets. Basically, I'd like workers to own and/or control their own factories, divide up profits as they see fit, but compete in the marketplace for customers for their products.

It's called economic democracy, or the socialist market economy. Unlike the 'free marketeers,' it holds there's no such thing as an 'externality' (no free lunch, price things at their true cost) and that markets, however creative and dynamic, often fail. And dealing with market failure is the main reason for government, and to have socialists leading government rather than tyrants like Pinochet.

Mexico's economy and its problems are very much linked to the US. Hows the lament go? "So far from God, so close to the United States."

carl wants self-managed capitalism

No, 'Te He,' a critical part of capitalism is that workers are paid a wage and alienated from their tools, the means of production, and someone other than them takes the profit.

Here they own their tools and workshops, and wage-labor is abolished. For income, they take a portion of the value they produce, while the rest goes to improving and maintaining their tools.

You got the self-managed part right, but the rest is a 'successor system', something new under the sun, and a transition to something even better.

Variations on it are being deployed in Mondragon, Spain, Italy, Venezuela, Vietnam, China and Argentina.

And as its succeeds, it works against the joblessness and misery that compels workers to leave their homelands.

Only the Chilean Chicago Boys have successfully managed to modernize a South American economy. We don't need more Allendes, Perones, Chavezes or other populist statists. The concept of Mondragon is not inherently bad. As long as it is the result of private agreements, I am all for it. Let the coops compete with the corporations... let the customer benefit.