Venezuela indo para a derrocada famelica final - Daniel J. Mitchell (FEE)

Pessoas estão morrendo, cada vez mais, na Venezuela, por falta de remédios e sobretudo por falta de comida, crianças sobretudo.
Estes simples relatos, como abaixo, são absolutamente insuportáveis, de ler, de imaginar, de acompanhar a degringolada fatal de todo um país, dominado pelos seus amos do Caribe.
O que fazem os vizinhos?
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

The Ongoing Implosion of Venezuelan Statism

Venezuela's continuing economic collapse is a horrifying condemnation of how socialism actually works.

Daniel J. Mitchell

Foundation for Economic Education, April 3, 2018

https://fee.org/articles/the-ongoing-implosion-of-venezuelan-statism/?utm_source=FEE+Email+Subscriber+List&utm_campaign=e060890440-MC_FEE_DAILY_2018_04_03&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_84cc8d089b-e060890440-108136181 

As far as I’m concerned, everything you need to know about capitalism vs. statism is captured in this chart comparing per-capita economic output in Chile and Venezuela.

Ask yourself which country offers more opportunity, especially for the poor? The obvious answer is Chile, where poverty has rapidly declined ever since the country shifted to free enterprise. In Venezuela, by contrast, poor children die of malnutrition thanks to pervasive interventionism.

Indeed, having shared several horrifying stories of human suffering and government venality from Venezuela (including 28 separate examples in April 2017 and 28 different separate examples in December 2017), I’ve reached the point where nothing shocks me.

So now I mostly wonder whether leftist apologists feel any shame when they see grim news from that statist hellhole.

For instance, what does Joe Stiglitz think about this report from the Miami Herald?

At 16, Liliana has become the mother figure for a gang of Venezuelan children and young adults called the Chacao, named after the neighborhood they’ve claimed as their territory. The 15 members, ranging in age from 10 to 23, work together to survive vicious fights for “quality” garbage in crumbling, shortage-plagued Venezuela. Their weapons are knives and sticks and machetes. The prize? Garbage that contains food good enough to eat. …A year ago, the gang was “stationed” around a supermarket at a mall called Centro Comercial Ciudad Tamanaco that generates tons of garbage. But a feared rival gang from the neighborhood Las Mercedes also wanted the garbage.

And what does Bernie Sanders think about this story from NPR?

The Pharmaceutical Federation of Venezuela estimates the country is suffering from an 85 percent shortage of medicine amid an economic crisis… "The entire Venezuelan health care system is on the verge of collapse," says Francisco Valencia, head of the public health advocacy group Codevida. Some hospitals lack electricity, and more than 13,000 doctors have left Venezuela in the past four years in search of better opportunities. “They don’t give food to the patients in the hospital…” Government data shows infant mortality rose by 30 percent in 2016… The International Monetary Fund predicts inflation will soar to 13,000 percent this year and the economy will shrink by 15 percent. …The monthly minimum wage for many Venezuelans is now equal to $3, according to the AP. …Maduro blames the country’s growing crisis on…the U.S…leading an effort to wipe out socialism in Venezuela.

I’d be curious to know what Michael Moore thinks about this news from CNN?

Venezuela’s devastating food crisis means wheat flour has become a rare commodity in the country. Some churches have run out of the ingredient needed to make the sacramental bread that is central to celebrating the Holy Eucharist… So, members of the Catholic diocese of Cúcuta, Colombia, braved heavy rain this week to deliver the wafers over a bridge that connects the two countries… Venezuela’s economic crisis, fueled by a decline in oil production, shows no signs of improvement.People are starving because of routine food shortages. They are dying in hospitals because basic medicine and equipment aren’t available.

And what does Jeremy Corbyn think about this Bloomberg report?

Ruiz’s weekly salary of 110,000 bolivares—about 50 cents at the black-market exchange rate—buys him less than a kilo of corn meal or rice. His only protein comes from 170 grams of canned tuna included in a food box the government provides to low-income families. It shows up every 45 days or so. “I haven’t eaten meat for two months,” he said. …Hunger is hastening the ruin of the Venezuelan’s oil industry as workers grow too weak and hungry for heavy labor. With children dying of malnutrition and adults sifting garbage for table scraps, food has become more important than employment, and thousands are walking off the job. …Venezuela, a socialist autocracy that once was South America’s most prosperous nation, is suffering a collapse almost without precedent.

Or how about getting Sean Penn‘s reaction to this story from the New York Times?

For the past three weeks, Wilya Hernández, her husband and their daughter, 2, have been sleeping on the garbage-strewn streets of Cúcuta, a sprawling and chaotic city on Colombia’s side of the border with Venezuela. Though Antonela, the toddler, often misses meals, Ms. Hernández has no desire to return home to Venezuela. …“I sold my hair to feed my girl,” Ms. Hernández said, pulling back her locks to reveal a shaved head underneath, adding that wigmakers now walk the plazas of Cúcuta where many Venezuelans congregate, wearing signs advertising that they give cash for hair. …“If I can’t afford to go the bathroom, I’ll go on the street,” Ms. Hernández added. “That’s when guys walking by say creepy things.”

I wonder if Noam Chomsky has any comments about this Washington Post story?

A friend recently sent me a photograph…, just a blurry cellphone shot of trash… And yet I can’t stop thinking about it, because strewn about in the trash are at least a dozen 20-bolivar bills, small-denomination currency now so worthless even looters didn’t think it was worth their time to stop and pick them up. …according to the “official” exchange rate, …each of those bills is worth $2. In fact, as Venezuela sinks deeper…into…hyperinflation…, bolivar banknotes have come to be worth basically nothing: Each bill is worth about $0.0001 at the current exchange rate… It’s easy to see why the thieves left them behind.

Last but not least, I wonder what Jesse Jackson thinks about this news from the U.K.-based Guardian?

More than half of young Venezuelans want to move abroad permanently, after food shortages, violence and a political crisis escalated to new extremes in 2017, according to a new survey. Once Latin America’s richest country, Venezuela’s economy is now collapsing… One of the most painful effects of the current crisis has been widespread hunger. In 2015, when inflation and food shortages were well below current levels, nearly 45% of Venezuelans said there were times when they were unable to afford food; in the latest study, that figure had risen to 79%—one of the highest rates in the world. …Norma Gutiérrez, a radiologist in eastern Caracas, is one of those…would-be migrants. Acute shortages in the hospital where she works depress her, and she says the idea of emigrating crosses her mind at least once a week.

By the way, in an example of unintended humor, the Socialist Party of Great Britain has a ready-made answer to all those questions. The misery is the fault of capitalism. I’m not kidding.

And folks on the establishment-left occasionally try to imply that it’s all the result of falling oil prices.

Two years ago, I concocted a visual showing the “Five Circles of Statist Hell” and speculated that Venezuela was getting close to the fourth level. Though I still don’t think it’s nearly as bad as North Korea.

P.S. Since I mentioned unintentional humor, you’ll be amused to know a “Happy Planet Index” created by radical environmentalists places Venezuela above the United States.

P.P.S. And here’s some intentional dark humor about hunger in Venezuela.

Reprinted from International Liberty.

Daniel J. Mitchell is a Washington-based economist who specializes in fiscal policy, particularly tax reform, international tax competition, and the economic burden of government spending. He also serves on the editorial board of the Cayman Financial Review. 

Reemergencia do liberealismo no século XXI? - Ralph Raico (FEE, 26/12/2016)

Liberalism's 20th Century Rebirth

Ralph Raico

Foundation for Economic Education, Monday, December 26, 2016

The First World War was the watershed of the twentieth century. Itself the product of antiliberal ideas and policies, such as militarism and protectionism, the Great War fostered statism in every form. In Europe and America, the trend towards state intervention accelerated, as governments conscripted, censored, inflated, ran up mountains of debts, co-opted business and labor, and seized control of the economy. Everywhere “progressive” intellectuals saw their dreams coming true. Thee old laissez-faire liberalism was dead, they gloated, and the future belonged to collectivism. The only question seemed to be: which kind of collectivism?

Bismarck won out, and the welfare state was eventually copied everywhere in Europe.

In Russia, the chaos of the war permitted a small group of Marxist revolutionaries to grab power and establish a field headquarters for world revolution. In the nineteenth century, Karl Marx had concocted a secular religion with a potent appeal. It held out the promise of the final liberation of man through replacing the complex, often baffling world of the market economy by conscious, “scientific” control. Put into practice by Lenin and Trotsky in Russia, the Marxist economic experiment resulted in catastrophe. For the next seventy years, Red rulers lurched from one patchwork expedient to another. But terror kept them firmly in charge, and the most colossal propaganda effort in history convinced intellectuals both in the West and in the emerging Third World that communism was, indeed, “the radiant future of all mankind.”

The peace treaties cobbled together by President Woodrow Wilson and the other Allied leaders left Europe a seething cauldron of resentment and hate. Seduced by nationalist demagogues and terrified of the Communist threat, millions of Europeans turned to the forms of state worship called Fascism and National Socialism, or Nazism. Though riddled with economic error, these doctrines promised prosperity and national power through integral state control of society, while fomenting more and greater wars.

The Rise of the Welfare State

In the democratic countries, milder forms of statism were the rule. Most insidious of all was the form that had been invented in the 1880s, in Germany. There Otto von Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor, devised a series of old-age, disability, accident, and sickness insurance schemes, run by the state. The German liberals of the time argued that such plans were simply a reversion to the paternalism of the absolutist monarchies. Bismarck won out, and his invention — the welfare state — was eventually copied everywhere in Europe, including the totalitarian countries. With the New Deal, the welfare state came to America.

Still, private property and free exchange continued as the basic organizing principles of Western economies. Competition, the profit motive, the steady accumulation of capital (including human capital), free trade, the perfecting of markets, increased specialization — all worked to promote efficiency and technical progress and with them higher living standards for the people. So powerful and resilient did this capitalist engine of productivity prove to be that widespread state intervention, coercive labor-unionism, even government-generated depressions and wars could not check economic growth in the long run.

Mises demonstrated that economic calculation without private property was impossible.

The 1920s and ’30s represent the nadir of the classical-liberal movement in this century. Especially after government meddling with the monetary system led to the crash of 1929 and the Great Depression, dominant opinion held that history had closed the books on competitive capitalism, and with it the liberal philosophy.

If a date were to be put on the rebirth of classical liberalism, it would be 1922, the year of the publication of Socialism, by the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises. One of the most remarkable thinkers of the century, Mises was also a man of unflinching courage. In Socialism, he threw down the gauntlet to the enemies of capitalism. In effect, he said: “You accuse the system of private property of causing all social evils, which only socialism can cure. Fine. But would you now kindly do something you have never deigned to do before: would you explain how a complex economic system will be able to operate in the absence of markets, and hence prices, for capital goods?” Mises demonstrated that economic calculation without private property was impossible, and exposed socialism for the passionate illusion it was.

Mises’s challenge to the prevailing orthodoxy opened the minds of thinkers in Europe and America. F.A. Hayek, Wilhelm Roepke, and Lionel Robbins were among those whom Mises converted to the free market. And, throughout his very long career, Mises elaborated and reformed his economic theory and social philosophy, becoming the acknowledged premier classical-liberal thinker of the twentieth century.

The "Old Right"

In Europe and particularly in the United States, scattered individuals and groups kept something of the old liberalism alive. At the London School of Economics and the University of Chicago, academics could be found, even in the 1930s and ’40s, who defended at least the basic validity of the free-enterprise idea. In America, an embattled brigade of brilliant writers, mainly journalists, survived. Now known as the “Old Right,” they included Albert Jay Nock, Frank Chodorov, H. L. Mencken, Felix Morley, and John T. Flynn. Spurred to action by the totalitarian implications of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, these writers reiterated the traditional American creed of individual freedom and scornful distrust of government. They were equally opposed to Roosevelt’s policy of global meddling as subversive of the American Republic. Supported by a few courageous publishers and businessmen, the “Old Right” nursed the flame of Jeffersonian ideals through the darkest days of the New Deal and the Second World War.

With the end of that war, what can be called a movement came into being. Small at first, it was fed by multiplying streams. Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, published in 1944, alerted many thousands to the reality that, in pursuing socialist policies, the West was risking the loss of its traditional free civilization. In 1946, Leonard Read established The Foundation for Economic Education, in Irvington, New York, publishing the works of Henry Hazlitt and other champions of the free market. Mises and Hayek, now both in the United States, continued their work. Hayek led in founding the Mont Pelerin Society, a group of classical-liberal scholars, activists, and businessmen from all over the world.

Millions of Americans in all walks of life had all along quietly cherished the values of the free market, and private property.

Mises, unsurpassed as a teacher, set up a seminar at New York University, attracting such students as Murray Rothbard and Israel Kirzner. Rothbard went on to wed the insights of Austrian economics to the teachings of natural law to produce a powerful synthesis that appealed to many of the young. At the University of Chicago, Milton Friedman, George Stigler, and Aaron Director led a group of classical-liberal economists whose specialty was exposing the defects of government action. The gifted novelist Ayn Rand incorporated emphatically libertarian themes in her well-crafted best-sellers, and even founded a school of philosophy.

Predictable Hostility

The reaction to the renewal of authentic liberalism on the part of the left — “liberal” — more accurately, social-democrat-establishment was predictable, and ferocious. In 1954, for instance, Hayek edited a volume entitled Capitalism and the Historians, a collection of essays by distinguished scholars arguing against the prevailing socialist interpretation of the Industrial Revolution. A scholarly journal permitted Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Harvard professor and New Deal hack, to savage the book in these terms: “Americans have enough trouble with home-grown McCarthys without importing Viennese professors to add academic luster to the process.”

Other works the establishment tried to kill by silence. As late as 1962, not a single prominent magazine or newspaper chose to review Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom. Still, the writers and activists who led the revival of classical liberalism found a growing resonance among the public. Millions of Americans in all walks of life had all along quietly cherished the values of the free market, and private property. The growing presence of a solid corps of intellectual leaders now gave many of these citizens the heart to stand up for the ideas they had held dear for so long.

In the 1970s and ’80s, with the evident failure of socialist planning and interventionist programs, classical liberalism became a world-wide movement. In Western countries, and then, incredibly, in the nations of the former Warsaw Pact, political leaders even declared themselves disciples of Hayek and Friedman. As the end of the century approached, the old, authentic liberalism was alive and well, stronger than it had been for a hundred years.

And yet, in Western countries, the state keeps on relentlessly expanding, colonizing one area of social life after the other. In America, the Republic is fast becoming a fading memory, as federal bureaucrats and global planners divert more and more power to the center. So the struggle continues, as it must. Two centuries ago, when liberalism was young, Jefferson had already informed us of the price of liberty.

Excerpted from The Rise, Fall, and Renaissance of Classical Liberalism

Ralph Raico

Ralph Raico (1936-2016) was an American libertarian historian of European liberalism. He was formerly a professor of history at Buffalo

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