by Rick Lowe
George Reisman is the author of Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics (Ottawa, Illinois: Jameson Books, 1996) and is Pepperdine University Professor Emeritus of Economics and wrote this excellent piece about Hugo Chavez and how his policies are destroying Venezuela.
Here is an excerpt:
Finally, Chavez doesn’t know, and undoubtedly doesn’t want to know, that if he would then want prices actually to fall, and for goods to become more and more affordable by more and more of his countrymen, what he would need to do is make a 180-degree turn in the rest of his policies. What this means is that he would have to replace his policy of socialization/nationalization with privatization, and his policy of ever increasing regulation and controls with economic freedom. These are the polices that would provide the incentives and opportunity to rapidly increase production and thus make goods more and more abundant and thus lower-and-lower-priced and ever more affordable.
But all of this is way too much to expect. Because this is, after all, the same Hugo Chavez who apparently slept through the collapse of the Soviet Union and of socialism almost everywhere in the world but Cuba and North Korea, where it’s still maintained by dictatorship in the face of starvation. As such, he’s a man who gives new meaning to the expression “out of it”—he’s so far out of it, so incredibly ignorant, that one may wonder what century he’s in and what planet he’s on.
Click here for the Cox & Forkum editorial relating to the caricature of Chavez.
Click on the image to enlarge it.
