- Joined
- Jul 19, 2012
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- 14,185
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- Location
- Houston
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- Political Leaning
- Libertarian
They are very different cultures, but the similarities are striking:
An authoritarian government increasingly works to thwart the popular will through thuggery and violence.
The government spends money on subsidies for everything but can't pay its bills so it prints money. Inflation is rampant. They seize national corporations and then run them into the ground, destroying the economy.
If not for the black market people would starve. Price controls means goods are diverted into the black market or are sold in other countries. Subsidies that are supposed to make the price controls work are often stolen.
The official exchange rate is ten Bolivars for one American dollar. On the black market it's 1500 Bolivars per dollar. A package of soap costs 35 Bolivars officially but on the black market goes for 600. Merchants can't import goods with the income they get from the official price, so in many stores the shelves are empty. Government leaders are clueless about the relationship between price controls and the scarcity of goods. They blame it on speculators, traitors, and America.
Spot the difference | The Economist
Two people who are of the opinion that what they have is their property meet somewhere to come to a mutually beneficial agreement to trade their property. That's capitalism. It can be done anywhere, a store, a street, a back alley, and it can't be stopped. It wrecks all of any government's efforts to control the markets, so socialism or communism, taken to their theoretical maximum, will always fail.
An authoritarian government increasingly works to thwart the popular will through thuggery and violence.
The government spends money on subsidies for everything but can't pay its bills so it prints money. Inflation is rampant. They seize national corporations and then run them into the ground, destroying the economy.
If not for the black market people would starve. Price controls means goods are diverted into the black market or are sold in other countries. Subsidies that are supposed to make the price controls work are often stolen.
The official exchange rate is ten Bolivars for one American dollar. On the black market it's 1500 Bolivars per dollar. A package of soap costs 35 Bolivars officially but on the black market goes for 600. Merchants can't import goods with the income they get from the official price, so in many stores the shelves are empty. Government leaders are clueless about the relationship between price controls and the scarcity of goods. They blame it on speculators, traitors, and America.
Spot the difference | The Economist
Two people who are of the opinion that what they have is their property meet somewhere to come to a mutually beneficial agreement to trade their property. That's capitalism. It can be done anywhere, a store, a street, a back alley, and it can't be stopped. It wrecks all of any government's efforts to control the markets, so socialism or communism, taken to their theoretical maximum, will always fail.