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Under Pinochet and Piņera, the country's workers were given a choice between entrusting their future to a government that shot them if they protested, or taking the hint and going private. Significantly, the two occupational groups allowed to keep their government-financed pension schemes were the Chilean military and security forces.

In the U.S., his public speeches play upon Generation X angst. Piņera declares that the current system is "extremely unfair to your younger generation." What he does not explain is that if he has his way, they will be paying twice: First, they will have to pay to support the present retirees, while themselves giving up any hope that the next generation will pay them. Then they have to devote the same resources to build up their own "fully-funded" pensions. But Piņera is hoping the U.S. will use its newfound budget surplus to cushion the transition to privatization.

Economists who are attached to the real world know that the surplus is not simply free money. It could be used to backfill a tax cut. Most Western countries might think it could go for a health-care program, since most nations have a far better subsidized system than does the United States. The least sensible use of it would be to divert it towards an already highly inflated bull market that at some point has to reconnect heavily with gravity.

American Social Security recipients, present and future, have so far not proved receptive to Piņera's worldwide crusade. In Latin America, which Piņera holds up as a paragon of privatization, people have serious historical reasons to distrust their governments. Too many Latin American countries have been run by dictators like Pinochet, and countless other leaders have looted their national treasuries to pay pensions to their supporters and cheat their opponents.

Piņera is desperate to get an industrialized country to buy into his scheme, and so are his backers. He is currently selling hard in Britain, where Margaret Thatcher paid big cash incentives to persuade employees to opt out of company and government supplementary pension schemes. He brushes aside the little detail that the British pension sellers are now having to repay billions of dollars, because in their eagerness to earn the commissions, many of the scams -- sorry, schemes -- that they sold left the bearers worse off than if they'd stayed with their original plans.

Nor does he mention New Zealand, a country where almost everything has been privatized, but where voters last year overwhelmingly rejected a Piņera-inspired proposal.

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