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By Repair Man Jack Posted in Contra Tyrannum — Comments (1) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

Hugo Chavez offered us his opinion on innovation and entrepreneurial drive.

"Anyone who is distributing food ... and is speculating, we must intervene and we must expropriate (the business) and put it in the hands of the state and the communities," Chavez said during the inauguration of a new state-run market in Caracas. – Reuters 24 Jan 2008.

If all of this sounds familiar and reminds us of someone else who seems to be single-handedly wrecking a once-prosperous economy, it’s because it is. Hugo Chavez is copying a page of Econ 101 notes off of Zimbabwean Dictator/Idiot Robert Mugabe.

Hugo Chavez has fallen one notch below Hillary Rodham Clinton wanting to take Exxon Mobil’s profits. Hugo Chavez sent the Venezuelan Army to confiscate 500 tons of food from the Venezuelan food production outfit Alimentos Polar. Chavez accused them of smuggling 350 tons and of hoarding the other 150 tons.

Venezuela, an OPEC nation, and a close friend to the Kennedy Clan, has somehow managed to have food shortages. Even with this decade’s phenomenal market performance for oil, Hugo Chavez still has to order his army to raid an agribusiness firm’s warehouse to feed his people.

Since Chavez took office in 1998, Venzuela has primarily squandered the economic windfall from higher crude prices. The World Economic Forum ranks Venezuela 98th in Global Economic Competitiveness. Other OPEC nations such as Saudi Arabia, (35), Kuwait (30) and Qatar (31) do far better, with far fewer resources aside from crude oil to fall back on. Moldova even one-upped Hugo Chavez’s workers paradise, and The Gambia is hot upon his heels.

Part of Chavez’s problem is that he is too intent on controlling information and centralizing his power. The same NGO ranks Venezuela 83rd in Information Technology infrastructure. Up and coming world economies tend to score far better. South Korea, Estonia and Ireland, which have recently grown by leaps and bounds, rank 19th-21st. By denying his people access to information, he has locked his nation into a paranoid economic death spiral.

When the Global Economic Forum rated Venezuela on the attractiveness of its economy, for foreign investment, it ranked 10th out of 12 Latin American countries. The Executive Board of Alimentos Polar would not be shocked in the least to learn that Venezuela ranked last on both legal dispute resolution and protection of private property. It’s hard to score well on private property protection when a nation is ruled by a dictator who refuses to acknowledge that legal rights to property should actually exist.

The negative sentiment expressed by the world economic forum towards Venezuela’s economy should in no way be construed as a judgment against the work ethic or business sense of the average merchant in Caracas. Place the blame directly where it should go. The egomaniacal misrule of Hugo Chavez has squandered an unheard of opportunity for the Venezuelan Nation to rake in economic prosperity.

Let what has happened to Venezuela be a warning to anyone who thinks they should vote for any presidential candidate who expresses anger over the profits earned by any independent corporate entity. Hugo Chavez’s economic disaster is the ultimate result of any economic policy based on soaking the rich or indulging in class warfare. Shooting the rich also kills the prosperity that the wealthy create in their pursuit of more money and power.