This Time It’s Different
Source: Venezuela seizes bakeries amid bread shortage | Miami Herald
In 1957, Ayn Rand published what would become her most famous, (if gratuitously overwritten) work of literature depicting a dystopian scenario in which productive people are stripped of their ability to control the product of their industriousness. Instead, the state decides what levels of production are appropriate, by whom and even to the detriment of the producer because the “public good” trumped the needs of the productive individual. As time goes on, innovative and productive endeavours stop, industries fail and the country spirals into poverty.
The cautionary message conveyed by this fictitious scenario in Atlas Shrugged has been lost on many societies since the appearance of the now 70 year old classic novel. The situation in Venezuela with the commandeering of bakers….bakers, could be lifted directly from the pages of the book. Venezuela is blessed with an abundance of economic potential by virtue of ample oil resources. Oil prices soared from under $20 dollars a barrel to over $120 at their peak before declining to the present $50 a barrel level. This bounty of revenue should have created a windfall of wealth for the nation. Yet, thanks largely to the ill advised adventures of their socialist ex-president Hugo Chavez, the nation is barely solvent, with a crushing national debt while poverty and shortages plague the people there. The government is restricting goods and services of all kinds and have now taken to policing bakers on their production. It’s as if they were lottery winners that blew the windfall on booze and trinkets.
By comparison, we may observe that a couple of other nation states have managed to not just survive, but thrive economically with virtually no benefit of available commercial natural resources. In the case of Israel, they have somehow turned a few acres of arid sand, surrounded by permanently hostile neighbors, into an oasis of economic activity. In the case of Japan, a bunch of islands bereft of natural resources, they are nevertheless among the world’s pre-eminent industrial nations. In neither one of these two examples are the poor, the elderly and the sick, pushed into lives of desperation and poverty. Oddly, we only see this type of poverty and desperation in nations that subscribe to centralized control and planning as the form of government. Think Cuba.
In fact, throughout history, there are no examples of successful, centrally controlled, collective societies. None. Think of that. We never hear of people risking their lives to get into nations such as Cuba, or Venezuela. Yet somehow, the notion that a benign and altruistic central authority represents the ideal form of government continues to be pushed to this day. The historical failure of this mindset hasn’t quelled the ambitions of those that push for this dystopian oppression on an even larger scale. Frighteningly, we see this impetus for ‘world government’ coming from today’s ‘globalists’. And therein lies the entire problem with people who have no sense of history and too much faith in unicorn theory. They are like the slow kid in school that still answers 5, when asked the sum of 2 plus 2, despite having been told the correct answer 14 times. In the absence of any successful precedent for their visions of a theoretical central bureaucracy manipulating the affairs of a nation-state, they cling to the idea that this time, it’s different.