Santa Claus Economics: An Autopsy

Professor Thomas DiLorenzo reports:

He ran for the highest office in the land on a platform that excoriated the corporate “one-percenters,” promising to reign them in with reams of regulation and government-imposed price controls. To atone for all the alleged unfairness of “capitalist society” he promised explosive growth of welfare statism, complete with “free” education, free health care, free housing, and a virtual “economic bill of rights” filled with free everything. Good old fashioned socialism, in other words. Or, government-as-Santa-Claus.

I speak of course of Hugo Chavez, the late democratic socialist ruler of Venezuela and his handpicked successor, former bus driver Nicolas Maduro. Together, these two men managed to completely destroy their nation’s economy with a mere fifteen years of democratic socialism.

In textbook fashion, Venezuela’s democratic socialists used their nation’s vast oil riches to buy votes from the peasantry with free housing and all sorts of other goodies. They nationalized the oil industry and all medium- and large-scale businesses and made it illegal for the remaining private businesses to set their own prices. To make themselves appear even more popular they imposed universal price controls with such absurdities as two-cents-a-gallon gas.

Just a reminder.