Tag: Welfare State

Chavez is dead

“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. Yet his shadow still looms. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?”
—Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Section 125, tr. Walter Kaufmann

 

Overcoming the goods and bads of Mr. Chavez will not be any easy.  Eliminating redistribution of wealth programs will be almost impossible and the surrender of greater virtues like rationality, honesty, integrity, productivity and justice will be most surely sacrificed by the ruling leader for the sake of his reelection.  Even now that Mr. Chavez died, the Venezuelan Welfare State supports millions of its voters.  Just last year,  Venezuela added more than 800,000 people to the rolls of the state welfare system and  the number of pensioners reaches nearly 2.5 million, an increase of over 600 percent since 1999 in total pensions paid by the state, all of which are indexed to the national minimum wage (via venezuelanalysis.com).  Though he died, his party continues living and his ideas will continue been fostered in the form of more programs in the Venezuelan welfare state.  For this and many more reasons I say: Chavez is dead.

In a global scale the death of former President of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez Frías, will be very limited but noticeable for countries like China and Russia who benefited after Mr. Chavez expelled Western oil companies operating in the country and replaced them with Chinese and Russian state owned companies.  This oil companies were the most important strongholds of this two powerful countries in Latin America.

In a regional perspective the disappearance of this controversial figure will have important effects in Latin America as well.  Specially, around the league of the group ALBA (Spanish Acronyms for the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas) in which he played an important role as its founder and main speaker against the North American interventionist policy.  Without Mr. Chavez the possibility of a halt of the oil donations to the member countries of this alliance could have an important significance as well. Venezuela donated millions of barrels of oil to needy Caribbean states, particularly Cuba, but also countries like Trinidad and Tobago and this countries in exchange commissioned their doctors to help in the most needed areas of Venezuela.  This symbolic gesture has been a constant diplomatic activity of the poor Caribbean states.

Also, Nicaragua benefited from Mr. Chavez anti-American policy.  The government of the former guerrilla leader Daniel Ortega and his party’s politburo have been recipient of more than $2.2 billion in Venezuelan petrodollars since 2007.  To them, the election of a member of the Chavez regime is fundamental to continue holding control of elections in the next term.  Further, the Pulitzer Center reports that “Since Ortega returned to power democratically in 2007, the wellspring of aid from ALBA — a bloc of eight left-leaning Latin American countries underwritten by Chavez — has provided the Sandinista government with an average of $500 million a year in loans, donations and oil credit. In 2011, Ortega’s ALBA allowance jumped to $609 million during his own re-election campaign.”  Showing how Venezuelan interventionism in the region was in occasions more powerful than the interventions of the United States of America that are historically hated and protested by leftists demagogues.

Venezuela has been officially (though in contravention to its Constitution) under the rule of the Vicepresident Nicolás Maduro since the death of Mr. Chavez.  He is now the interim President of Venezuelafollowing the death of Hugo Chávez.  Mr. Maduro will most probably run for the elections with very high chances of winning.  Before dying, Hugo Chavez ran for reelection in 2012 and got the vote of 55% of the voters.  His approval ratings among the poorest of the voters is very high and his main opponent, Henrique Capriles Radonski, will have it very difficult to win.  More important to note is the fact that Mr. Capriles is mentioned as being part of the Centre-Right of the country.  However, if elected his main policies may end up been very similar to the ones that gave popularity to Mr. Chavez.  He may thus be a centre-right from hand-to-mouth and a centre-left activist in practice.

Mr. Chavez ruled the country since February 2 1999 until 5 March 2013.  During his 14 years in power he reformed to his convenience the Venezuelan Constitution several times, created dozens of agencies formed by members of his party, formed hundreds of thousands of state-owned cooperatives, fuelled billions of dollars in his stated goal to lower inequality in the access to basic nutrition, and to achieve food sovereignty for Venezuela.  Further, he placed Venezuela at the centre of the regional foreign policy with states in Africa, Asia and Europe.

Supreme Court upholds Obamacare. Recommended analysis on its short & long-term effects.

Today, Americans who Love Freedom lost a battle against the Welfare State.  In a historical decision, the Supreme Court decided to support Obamacare and to extend the devastating track of health care regulations in The United States of America.

The effects of Obamacare will represent higher costs, less competition, less innovation, more bureacracy, and decreased quality.  and in the long run, the result will be the complete destruction of American health care, as the system’s problems are inevitably blamed on our ‘private’ health care system and a fully socialized ‘single payer’ medicine is offered up as the only cure as explained, Yaron Brook, the Director of the Ayn Rand Center.

To learn how today’s decision will impact your life in the short and long term, I invite you to read the following articles that were collected by the Classical Liberal network Kosmos with the opinions of some the most important Libertarian and Classical Liberals:

While Freedom lost a battle today; the fight for a limited government that protects individual rights, including the right to private property, will continue and we will not stop.

Inequality in India

By 2011 the BRIC economies had some of the highest rates of income inequality adjusted to the Human Development Index among developing nations.  At the same time, the BRIC countries had consistently had the highest GNP growth versus the previous 10 years among developing nations.  How is it that there is not a parallel growth of the Human Development of its citizens?  The answer and one of the biggest challenges for the BRIC countries is the fact that a large amount of the GNP is distributed among small elites that control their market economies.

Economists and investors such as O’Neill, Krugman and others largely emphasize the expected growth of the BRIC economies as indicators of where to invest their money.  Unfortunately, they have not paid the same interest to what many other economists consider important: the human development of the people.  Fortunately, there are still some economists who since the decade of 1970 paid a lot of attention to the issues of freedom and equality.  Economists leaded by Milton Friedman, the Economics Nobel Prize of 1976, argued that economic policies should be focused in the freedom of its citizens as a primary value.  To them, stressing equality per se could lead to economic inefficiency as well as it would put in risk Freedom itself.  However, the same economist argued that it was necessary for developing economies that the government took a central role in poverty alleviation in order to keep the pace with the economic growth of its economies.  Unfortunately, this poverty alleviation is not being done in the BRIC countries and the economic difference between the poorest and the richest continues to grow. Since the 60s, a large group of economists emphasized the negative effects of not paying attention to a free and equal development in emerging markets; economists like Friedman and Hayek wrote a lot in this regard and even recently Elinor Ostrom’s ideas, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009, are still not listened by those who have forgotten the importance of good governance economic policies.

India is the country in which this income inequality versus human development is more pronounced.  Currently, India occupies the position #93 with an IHDI of 0.392 and the country has descended in the rank many positions since the last decade.  Inequality in the earnings among Indians has doubled over the last two decades, making it one of the worst performers among developing economies.  Why? This is again the result of the failed attempts by the Indian government to combat corruption, bad administration and under-payments and also of the unawareness of foreign investors.

The fact that foreign investors have no interest in securing the welfare of the Indian people is a problem.  To them, the investment opportunities of this specific BRIC country are of value until they find a better economy to move their money to.  However, the real stakeholders are not the foreign investors but the Indian Government and its groups of interest who should aim to secure the welfare of all of its citizens now that they have a chance.  While the growth of this economies will continue the effect it will have in such unequal societies will result in some of the worst rates of poverty and hunger ever seen in history. By 2025 India will be the most populous country in the world but also, it will have 268 million people (20.3%) living still with less than US$1.25 a day as reported by economists in the World Bank. The Indian government should go aligned with the current trade liberalization in order to support higher productivity in the private sector and to exploit its comparative advantage of having a labor-intensive industry to foster the production of goods and services.

China Is Asked for Investment in Euro Rescue

Euro
Image by Images_of_Money via Flickr

A new chapter is being written in the History of Money, Bank and Credit as news of how European leaders are asking for China to rescue them from the chaos they created. I wish this guys reconsidered before continue acting some of the most important principles of Deficit Financing, Freedom, Inflation, Money, Property Rights, Savings, Welfare State, Consumption, Credit; Gold Standard, Market Value, Objective Theory of Values, Production, Purchasing Power, Sanction of the Victim, Selfishness and the Trader Principle just to mention a few before going on making more business that en debts their country’s economy while make their citizens poorer.

And as Ayn Rand cleverly mentioned in regard to Deficit Financing,

The government has no source of revenue, except the taxes paid by the producers. To free itself—for a while—from the limits set by reality, the government initiates a credit con game on a scale which the private manipulator could not dream of. It borrows money from you today, which is to be repaid with money it will borrow from you tomorrow, which is to be repaid with money it will borrow from you day after tomorrow, and so on. This is known as “deficit financing.” It is made possible by the fact that the government cuts the connection between goods and money. It issues paper money, which is used as a claim check on actually existing goods—but that money is not backed by any goods, it is not backed by gold, it is backed by nothing. It is a promissory note issued to you in exchange for your goods, to be paid by you (in the form of taxes) out of your future production.

“Egalitarianism and Inflation,”
Philosophy: Who Needs It, 133

Read more of this news:

PARIS — A day after European leaders unveiled their latest plan to save the euro, top officials opened talks with China in an effort to lure tens of billions of dollars in additional cash, giving China perhaps its biggest opportunity yet to exercise financial clout in the Western world.

China is expected to demand significant concessions, including financial guarantees and limits on what Beijing sees as discriminatory trade policies, in exchange for any investment in Europe’s emergency stability fund. The head of the rescue fund, Klaus Regling, got a cautious reply from Chinese officials Friday during a visit to Beijing, where he said he did not expect to reach an investment deal with China anytime soon.

A senior Chinese official, Vice Finance Minister Zhu Guangyao, said China — like the rest of the world — was still waiting for the Europeans to deliver crucial details on how the rescue fund, the European Financial Stability Facility, would operate and be profitable before deciding on whether to participate. via: China Is Asked for Investment in Euro Rescue by Liz Alderman and David Barboza.

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