Egypt’s sorry excuse for “democracy” has gone the way of the pharaohs after Friday’s military coup. Good riddance. Coups are the only way out of fake democracies. But what’s the way out of coups?

The big risk in Egypt is that the same corruption, special interests and disillusion will return after the military coup that threw the Muslim Brotherhood’s odious Mohamed Morsi out of power.

Egypt’s men in uniform again showed that only two political forces really matter in Egypt — Islamofascists like Morsi and the secular military.

As political scientist Daniel Pipes notes, civil society doesn’t really count. So the concerns of Egypt’s people — corruption, red tape, economic misery — could go unheeded and another revolution will return.

Yet a template from recent history shows just how to end the cycle of military and militants that will make Egypt’s citizens matter.

The example is Chile.

Like with Morsi, Chile in 1973 was ruled by a so-called democrat, Salvador Allende, who after barely winning election revealed he didn’t intend to govern democratically. A Marxist, Allende moved fast to ram through radical, Cuban-style “reforms” on an unwilling public.

Allende foreshadowed Morsi, demolishing political institutions, trampling the free press, disrespecting minority rights, ignoring the constitution, disregarding the separation of powers, trashing property rights and ruining the economy. Also, Allende was in thrall to a failed and inhuman foreign ideology — communism — just as Morsi was to Islamofascism. In both cases, the only exit was a military coup.

Had Chilean military commander Augusto Pinochet simply handed the country back to “democracy” without changing the root causes of the turmoil and tyranny, the cycle would have had a replay.

But he didn’t. He used his military government as an incubator for free-market changes, transforming his country into not just Latin America’s best economy, but also Latin America’s most durable democracy. Pinochet — who stepped down dutifully after 17 years upon losing a referendum — understood that economic freedom had to precede political freedom. He employed a brilliant group of mostly University of Chicago-educated young Chilean economists, known as the Chicago Boys, to transform the society by cleaning out thousands of weedlike laws choking Chile’s economy — on labor, mining, currency, fishing, vineyards, startups and pensions.

They made the central bank independent and instituted hard-core fiscal discipline that has left the country debt-free and pushed its credit rating toward triple A.

Thousands of businesses were freed to open and operate without thickets of regulations — resulting in the spate of Chilean products now seen in America’s supermarkets: wine, fruit, fish.

Source: Investors Business Daily