Venezuela Experiencing Bad Luck

For John, BLUF:  I wonder if we should think about rich people being the tax we pay to allow all who wish to prosper and live a good life?  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Castro, Chavez, and 'bad luck'

Here is the sub-headline:

Castro and his ilk showed us that under socialism, the powerful grow rich — and everyone else grows poor.

From USA Today, by Law Professor Glenn Harlan Reynolds, 27 November 2016.

Yes, 2016, but things have only gotten worse.  This has been a slow moving train wreck and no one could stop it over the last few years.  Today we have several million who have fled Venezuela and we have South American nations resisting the diaspora from Venezuela and nations even building walls (but not big, beautiful walls).  Who would have believed it?

Here is the lede from the article, plus some:

Robert Heinlein once wrote:

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man.  Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people.  Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

This is known as “bad luck.”

I thought about this statement this weekend, reading two news stories.  The first was about the tide of Venezuelans taking to boats to escape Venezuela’s economic collapse.  As The New York Times reported, “Venezuela was once one of Latin America’s richest countries, flush with oil wealth that attracted immigrants from places as varied as Europe and the Middle East."

"But after President Hugo Chávez vowed to break the country’s economic elite and redistribute wealth to the poor, the rich and middle class fled to more welcoming countries in droves, creating what demographers describe as Venezuela’s first diaspora.”

Now, in their absence, things have gotten worse, and it’s poorer Venezuelans — the very ones that Chavez’s revolution was allegedly intended to help — who are starving. Many are even taking to boats, echoing, as the Times notes, “an image so symbolic of the perilous journeys to escape Cuba or Haiti — but not oil-rich Venezuela.”

Economics is about mutually beneficial exchanges.  It is not about fairness, but about prosperity.  If someone making a bundle means you are making a good amount, why is that a problem for you?  The thing is that capitalism and capitalist like economic systems are bringing the world's population out of poverty and that is a good thing.

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff