José!

This afternoon, we had the privilege of meeting and listening to Dr. José Piñera speak to us at a brown bag session at Mercatus. Dr. Piñera is known world-wide for his pioneering work when he was Chile’s labor minister from 1978 to 1980. He successfully privatized Chile’s social security system and has traveled the world over to meet with political leaders (including Presidents Clinton and Bush and Prime Minister Putin of Russia) encouraging them to do the same.

Pension privatization has been a fantastic success in Chile and, in large part due to Dr. Piñera’s work, a total of 100 million people in 25 different countries now have access to personal savings accounts for their retirement. What’s so great about this is that it secures property rights to those who choose to contribute (people have the option to stay in whatever social security system was in place beforehand), meaning that the money they contribute is legally their’s (unlike Social Security).

The Wall Street Journal had this to say about him:

In the early 1980s, Mr. Piñera pioneered the use of private accounts as labor minister of Chile, and he has since served as an informal adviser to about 20 other countries that have adopted them.

The 56-year-old Mr. Piñera combines the nuts and bolts know-how of a Harvard-trained economist with a proselytizing style that prompted the Chilean magazine Capital to dub him "Jose the Evangelist."

Over the years, those qualities have helped Mr. Piñera influence governments representing a wide ideological spectrum. He has advised Margaret Thatcher's Tory government in England, as well as Socialists in Sweden and the Solidarity labor government in Poland.

"The world is imperfect and moral courage is not to stay in universities or abroad criticizing the 'men in the arena,' but rather dare to engage an imperfect government, turn it around with all the imaginable difficulties, and deliver freedom and democracy," he says.

Dr. Piñera was a hilarious and charismatic speaker who not only had a terrific sense of humor, but also a strong conviction about advancing liberty around the globe through pension reform. He exuded a very real joy in what he was doing. I had a chance to speak to him for a bit after his presentation and he was tremendously friendly and engaging. He told me rather than using a logo for his organization, he uses his favorite poem by Walt Whitman, “THE SONG OF THE OPEN ROAD”.

As he was leaving, he gave me a signed copy of his small booklet, “Empowering Workers: The Privitization of Social Security in Chile”. He signed it:

To Brian,
for Liberty,
Jose

How neat is that?