Venezuela slides further towards disaster
Hugo Chavez is following in Mugabe’s footsteps and seizing land to ‘redistribute’ and install collective farming.
This policy has recently been tried in Zimbabwe and has been a spectacular failure, taking the country from being the breadbasket of Africa to being a country of rampant inflation and massive food shortages.
Of course, Zimbabwe isn’t the only country to have tried this. China tried it during the ‘great leap forward’. What were the results? Famine and death.
It was even tried by some early settlers in the Americas. They tried collective farming and almost starved, it was only when private farming and the ability to trade was introduced that they prospered.
Collectivisation and nationalisation is a recipe for disaster. The disaster may be staved off due to Venezuela’s oil wealth, but that will only serve to prop up a rich, corrupt elite and prevent the liberal reform which would disperse wealth more and provide opportunity for the masses.
I’m sure the left in the west will continue lauding Chavez, even as his errors become manifest, if only because he’s anti-American and claims to be standing up for the poor against the exploitative capitalist.
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March 26th, 2007 at 8:50 pm
Actually, the main reason ‘the left’ continue to support Chavez is because he’s been repeatedly overwhelming elected in open elections.
The Venezuleans seem to be quite happy with what he’s doing!
March 27th, 2007 at 8:49 am
Of course, its conveniently forgotten that he attempted a coup before he was elected.
And that he’s given himself the ability to rule by decree (handy to remove any possibility of challenge from the few opposition politicians remaining).
He’s shut down media outlets which opposed him.
He speaks a lot of rhetoric which goes down well. He won two elections, but Mugabe has won many too.
The people remaining in the country like his rhetoric. He has enough oil money to spend to mitigate the effects of his policies, but in the long term he spells disaster.
The middle classes are fleeing Venezuela as fast as possible. It is the middle classes who generate wealth through investment, whose money funds welfare and pays the wages of the poor and allows them to rise above poverty.
The left like Chavez because he’s anti-American and a socialist. Democracy has nothing to do with it, just as it never has in the past with leftist dictators.