Confiscation, nationalization, and wealth redistribution have the usual results, and after decades of examples like this, some people are still surprised.

To a collectivist, wealth is a natural resource, existing somewhere in the ether, and the only problems governments have is keeping the rich from sucking most of it up.

A farm just "makes" food, just like factories "make" products. Why wouldn't it do so no matter who owned it or ran it?

...Under the heading of "Allende's Legacy," an article in The Wall Street Journal (April 19, 1974) offers some concrete, real-life examples of what happens when income, wealth and power are distributed equally among all men, regardless of their competence, character, knowledge, achievement, or brains.

"By the time the military acted to overthrow the Allende government, prices had soared more than 1,000% in two years and were climbing at the rate of 3% a day at the very end. The national treasury was practically empty." The socialist government had seized a number of American-owned industrial firms. The new military government invited the American managements to come back. Most of them accepted.

Among them was the Dow Chemical Company, which owned a plastics plant in Chile. Bob G. Caldwell, Dow's director of operations for South America, came with a technical team to inspect the remains of their plant. "'What we found was unbelievable to us,' he recalls. 'The plant was still operable, but in another six months we wouldn't have had any plant at all. They never checked anything.

We found valves that hadn't been maintained leaking corrosive chemicals that would have eventually eaten away practically everything.'...Worse yet, the highly inflammable chemicals handled at the plant were in imminent danger of blowing up.

'Safety went to pot,' Mr. Caldwell says. 'The fire-sprinkler system was disconnected and the valves taken away for some other use outside. Then they were smoking in the most dangerous areas. They told us, "You didn't have any fires while you were here before, so it must not be as dangerous as you said."'"

I submit that the mentality represented by this last sentence, a mentality capable of functioning in this manner, is the loathsomely evil root of all human evils.

Apparently, some mentalities in the new Chilean government belong to the same category: they have the same range and scope, but the consequences of their actions are not so immediately perceivable, though not much farther away. In order to avoid labor disputes, the new government has frozen all labor contracts in the form and on the terms established under the Allende regime. For example, the Dow Company's contract includes a "requirement that all the plant's plastic scrap be given to the union, which then sells it. 'We hope to get that one changed,' a company official says, 'because it's a clear incentive to produce almost nothing but scrap.'"

Then there is the case of a big Santiago textile firm. "Its contract with 1,300 workers virtually guarantees bankruptcy. The textile firm's employes get a certain amount of cloth free as part of their wages and can buy unlimited quantities at a 37% discount; at those prices the firm loses money. Under President Allende the workers sold the cloth on the black market at huge profits, and it was an important factor in assuring their backing for the Allende government."

- Ayn Rand, "Egalitarianism and Inflation," The Ayn Rand Letter, June 3, 1974.