Freed of the naysayers, Pinochet and de Castro got to work stripping away the welfare state to arrive at their pure capitalist utopia. In 1975, they cut public spending by 27 percent in one blow—and they kept cutting until, by 1980, it was half of what it had been under Allende.27 Health and education took the heaviest hits. Even The Economist, a free-market cheerleader, called it “an orgy of self-mutilation.”
