Constitutional social rights in Pinochet’s Chile empowered private enterprise over state provision.

Evidence

This is most obviously true of Article 24, which proclaims the ‘right of ownership in its diverse aspects over all classes of corporeal and incorporeal property’, including ‘rights of private citizens over waters’; or Article 22, which outlaws discrimination in favour of state companies. On closer inspection, even what first appear to be social and economic rights (to health, education and social security) are actually rights of private enterprise to compete in offering relevant services on the same terms as the state. The right to education, for instance, gives parents the ‘preferential right and duty to educate their children’, and private companies free rein in establishing education providers. The result of these education rights, as their architect Piñera celebrates on his website today, has been the ‘prevalence of private education’ in Chile. Such rights were based on a blend of neoliberal market ideology with the Catholic principle of ‘subsidiarity, which entailed that the state would fulfil only those functions that could not be fulfilled by intermediate institutions or the private sector. Consequently, the constitution stipulated that educational and other intermediate institutions should be free of politics, and introduced penalties for those who violated this stricture. Going further, it declared it unconstitutional to use or incite political violence or ‘advocate the establishment of a totalitarian system’. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 369

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘subsidiarity’ as the Catholic-principle bridge between neoliberal ideology and constitutional rights design.
• XREF: Fits the reader’s human-rights discourse literature: how nominally social rights become market-access rights — connects to critiques of privatized welfare under austerity. — connects to: Pinochet’s junta permitted human rights groups while exterminating the left — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 307; Chile’s 1979 Seven Modernizations privatized social reproduction as a private responsibility — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 354; Chilean constitutionalism weaponized individual rights to protect markets against democratic masses. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 358 (+3 more)
• SEED: Angle: the right to education rewritten as a parental right that licenses private provision — a template for reading contemporary school-choice discourse.

Broader Connections

• Chile’s 1980 constitution embedded Hayekian free-market ideals within a repressive state structure. #corroborates (0.85) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1591
• Chile’s constitution fused Hayekian economics with patriarchal authoritarian concepts #expands (0.75) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1593