n November 9, 1989, the world watched in awe as the Berlin Wall fell. Chancellor Helmuth Kohl, who was visiting Poland, returned immediately to his country, while his hosts jumped for joy upon learning the reason. In Berlin, Germans living on both sides of the wall embraced, congratulated the police, and experienced the emotion of freeing themselves from a tyranny whose first consequences had begun to be felt in Russia in 1917. Thus fell communism, which today is practiced only in the irascible and hereditary enclaves that persist in Cuba and North Korea.

 

The end of a utopia is precisely what was celebrated in New York on November 9 last year. With Mario Vargas Llosa as the central speaker and in the most important city of the freest country in the world.

 

At that Freedom Day celebration sponsored by the Atlas Foundation, with visitors from all over the world, we could see the sparkle in the eyes of a Lithuanian girl.

 

She told us that a few months after the fall of the Wall, in 1990, her parents, pooling all their savings, traveled to Washington to seek help in forming a libertarian think tank that would participate in the auspicious stage ahead for their country. Immersed in poverty but free, it was beginning to leave behind the tyranny of communism.

 

And this same girl, gratefully, told us that her country Lithuania had looked with interest at Chile's experience in 1980. They then convinced José Piñera, who in those years was carrying out an admirable crusade around the world explaining the benefits of a private pension system with individual capitalization, to advise them on their pension reform.

 

Thanks to that, she assured, today Lithuania had escaped the painful fate of Greece, Portugal, Italy, and so many European countries that, by maintaining pay-as-you-go pension systems theoretically based on solidarity, had bankrupted their public treasuries, plunging their countries into a crisis of uncertain duration and consequences for their entire population.

 

When one hears some confused people in Chile say that because the value of pension funds fluctuates and falls for a few months we should return to a state pension system, one cannot help but think of what the former Polish Finance Minister said at that same dinner. Poland, which also reformed its pensions, privatized along the Chilean model, is one of the most dynamic in Europe