Category Archives: Free Market

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Wednesday, September 18, 2019: 

Almost unnoticed by the mainstream media are recent decisions by Venezuela’s Marxist dictator, Nicolás Maduro, to relax some of the more debilitating of his economic policies. That relaxation is already leading to economic revival in the country’s cities.

As reported by Kejal Vyas from Caracas and published by the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday, Maduro “has quietly and cautiously begun implementing free-market policies … [his regime has] largely stopped enforcing the price controls that had led to dire food shortages … [which is] giving some life, even if limited, to the economy.”

The economy under Maduro is worse than America’s was at the bottom of the Great Depression, and the IMF is forecasting it will shrink by another 35 percent this year. More than four million of Venezuela’s 30 million residents have left the country, leaving the rest behind to cope with lack of food, medical services and supplies, disease, and starvation.

But, thanks to Maduro’s silent lifting of some of his more onerous restrictions, the economy is beginning to recover, at least in Caracas. Wrote Vyas: “Here in the capital … new stores have popped up, selling everything from boxes of Cheerios to bottles of water.” Reappearing on stores’ shelves are multiple brands of sugar, pasta and flour.

Maduro is also cutting back on the prime driver that has led his socialist regime to install price controls:

This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Wednesday, May 15, 2019: 

In 1779, Ned Ludd, an apprentice hand weaver, smashed two stocking frames because of his fear that the improved machinery would put him out of a job. The resistance to automation began in Nottingham, England, and became widespread in the early 1800s. Over time, its attractiveness waned thanks both to government intervention and the awareness that lowering the cost of textiles through automation benefited everyone wearing clothes.

Ned would be astonished at the automation taking place in the U.S. today. Amazon is quietly installing machines called CartonWraps and SmartPacs in its never-ending quest to serve its customers more quickly at lower cost. In busy warehouses serving Seattle, Frankfurt, Milan, Amsterdam, and Manchester, the company is taking the tiring work employees were doing – each spending up to 10 hours a day taking products and building shipping boxes to fit them for shipping – and giving it to robots.

The robots work four times faster than humans

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Tuesday, April 2, 2019: 

When Venezuela’s Marxist dictator Nicolas Maduro addressed his citizens on Sunday, he told them that their electric power would be rationed: “I have approved a 30-day plan to regulate the output.” He called the plan “a load management regime.”

Unfortunately, owing to the rolling power outages that have plagued Venezuela over the last month, most of those citizens, if they had television, weren’t able to view his speech because their power was out.

That is the end point of socialism: When government interferes, products and services formerly provided by the free market become limited. Prices go up and price controls follow. The price controls further limit supply, and the final step is rationing what’s left.

Maduro admitted to two failures in that short sentence: His government is unable to provide for his people; and those shortages are likely to last for a long time. The unspoken message being delivered is that socialism, no matter what it might be called, always ends in tyranny, misery, and death.

Venezuela’s power industry was nationalized in 2007 under the socialist administration of Maduro’s predecessor and mentor, Marxist Hugo Chavez. The ideology of socialism, termed Chavismo, continued under Maduro following Chavez’s death in 2013. Consequently, those professionals running the energy grid were removed and replaced with political appointees as rewards for their loyalty to the socialist regime. Since then some 25,000 technicians skilled in running the power industry have left the country, leaving the incompetent in charge.

As Maduro’s economy spiraled downward, funds for maintenance dried up. In early March a grassfire burned some trunk lines feeding power from the country’s Guri dam, causing turbines generating power to fail. This plunged the populace into darkness for days. On March 25, another outage led to more misery, and more socialist intervention in the form of rationing the remaining electricity that the power plant is able to produce.

The impacts are predictable, and widely known: