Right on schedule
The people's paradise of Venezuela continues to follow the script with eerie faithfulness. Control "abusive" prices, watch shortages develop, decry the shortages, punish hoarders, and finally: nationalize the industry in the name of ensuring the people's right to access. This week it's the manufacture of toilet paper.
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4 comments:
Wonderful. Communist toilet paper. Lewis Grizzard had a great skit about that back during the USSR.
Chavismo does not have a good track record of maintaining or increasing production of expropriated properties.
Perhaps the only way that expropriation will help is that it will now be easier to obtain foreign exchange to import needed production inputs, given the way the foreign exchange game is rigged in Chavezuela.
Sadly, it's not just Chavismo. Nixon controlled prices, too, and a day rarely passes when someone isn't floating a proposal for some kind of benign price controls here in the U.S. It seems to be an unlearnable lesson.
I didn't have a problem, initially, with Nixon's price controls. They were intended to be temporary and aimed at breaking a cycle of panic--what the SEC later came to call a circuit breaker.
And there's nothing like current empirical data to show the success, or fallacy, of a move.
Unfortunately, politicians are too far removed from the real world to learn from their own data collections. They're attending to entirely different data.
Eric Hines
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