During his 14 years as president, Mr. Chávez nationalized swaths of farmland to form collectives, took control of agriculture supplies, and set limits on food prices as part of his socialist project to ensure affordable food for all.Now, to socialists' amazement, the country imports 70% of its food supply and is increasingly exposed to nutritional disaster. The government naturally blames "widespread supermarket shortages on hoarding by businesses who want to create instability and bring down the government."
(1) Concern for the poor.
(2) Price controls.
(3) Supply crash.
(4) Allegations of hoarding.
(5) Doubling down centralized economic control.
(6) Famine.
Where have we seen this before?
7 comments:
Where have we seen this before?
A: Everywhere it's been tried.
So get me from (1) to somewhere better. Concern for the poor is legitimate, and if we are concerned about them it's because they aren't doing well enough under the present model.
What to do about that instead? More of the same doesn't get us past (1), because 'the same' is why they are suffering. Agreeing that this approach never works and is stupid, what's the better approach?
I realize the first answer is 'private charity,' which is also a good! But what I'd really like is a way to fix the systemic problem, so that (1) ceases to be the kind of concern that motivates massive reforms. "The poor will always be with you," but maybe we can reduce their numbers to cases (like those with severe mental illnesses who really cannot work) small enough in scale that there's no danger of a socialist revolution.
The technique has always been a failure. Venezuela provides a present example, the USSR provides an earlier, far larger example. That's part of what irritates me so much about Progressives and their policies. They have, to coin a phrase, constructive knowledge of the outcomes of their ideas, yet they push for them anyway.
A valid concern is what to do about the underlying situation, as Grim points out. There are, IMNSHO, to parts to that solution. "The poor will always be with you" wants a definition of "poor" before we can set about dealing with them. Today's poor in the US, for instance, are orders of magnitude better off than both their 3d world counterparts today and the poor in the US of 100 years ago. Simply being at the bottom of the economic totem pole is a poor definition of "poor." I suggest "poor" as being "unable to make do on their own economic resources in their present society."
Next, how to help those poor? Again, IMNSHO, a largely unregulated--free-capitalist market, which allows/requires everyone, including the poor, to make their own decisions regarding their economic (and other) resources and holding them responsible for the outcomes of those decisions (and thereby encouraging them to assess risk, rather than transferring it all to strangers) will provide the greatest economic mobility. We'll always have the poor among us, but today's poor man is tomorrow's middle class man. Today's poor child is tomorrow's middle class family man.
That will leave still, some 14 or so, poor who really cannot "make do" on their own resources, some of whom only need a hand up to recover from a mistake or from bad luck and some of whom will need support permanently.
I suggest the following hierarchy for such assistance, noting that government does, indeed, have a role here. In order from "first responder" to last:
Family
Friends
private charity/church
local community
local city/county government
state government
Federal government--but only via no-strings-attached block grants to the states.
Eric Hines
You left out step 4.5, "Blame America".
As a possible step (2), I'd prefer "more of the same" over "make things worse." Particularly since "more of the same" is a pattern that has eliminated a huge fraction of the famine that used to be commonplace in the world, and shows every sign of continuing to improve the situation in the future.
Which is something I definitely can't say for Venezuela's step (2).
a largely unregulated--free-capitalist market, which allows/requires everyone, including the poor, to make their own decisions regarding their economic (and other) resources and holding them responsible for the outcomes of those decisions (and thereby encouraging them to assess risk, rather than transferring it all to strangers) will provide the greatest economic mobility.
This. All of this. Our system imperfect though it may be has created more wealth, more genuine prosperity across ALL social strata, than any other system ever devised. As Eric so rightly points out, the "poor" in this nation have about the same standard of living as the middle class in Europe. The average "poor" household in the US has a car and two color televisions. You want to see poor? Go to Jamaica, go to the Dominican Republic, go to Haiti. See people who are truly poor. Yes, we do have some absolutely helpless people in this country who are homeless, and cannot afford to eat. Most are mentally ill, but some are not. But I do know that if you took the truly poor from a Third World country and let them be poor here, they'd kill for the chance.
Yes, that's why you see the moving of the goalposts, so to speak, with talk of 'income inequality' rather than 'poverty'. When the average of 'poverty' isn't something that any body even remotely familiar with history can look at and call 'poverty', yeah, there's some issues here.
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