I sometimes make the theoretical case against socialism. Usually, this means exposing the flaws of the core components of the socialist ideology. Government ownership of the means of production is a recipe for resource misallocation. Central planning has a miserable track record of failure because consumer preferences are ignored. Price controls distort incentives to make […]
About 10 days ago, i showed that Milton Friedman was a much better economist than Joseph Stiglitz by comparing Chile (which followed Friedman’s ideas) and Venezuela (which followed Stiglitz’s ideas). It was a slam-dunk win for Friedman. Chile started poor and has become relatively prosperous. The opposite happened in Venezuela, which started relatively prosperous and […]
I’ve repeatedly praised Chile’s pro-market reforms (see here, here, and here) and I’ve repeatedly condemned Venezuela’s shift to socialism (see here, here, and here). But if you don’t have time to read all those columns, this chart from the Maddison database tells you everything you need to know. Simply stated, Chile’s reforms have delivered huge […]
Jeffrey Clemens points us to some bonkers editorializing in the NYTimes coverage of the likely stolen election in Venezuela. The piece starts out reasonably enough: Venezuela’s authoritarian leader, Nicolás Maduro, was declared the winner of the country’s tumultuous presidential election early Monday, despite enormous momentum from an opposition movement that had been convinced this was […]
Socialism works -Venezuela twice as rich as Hong Kong!
No, wait, that was in 1960. http://t.co/sqwVnMc19t— Screwed by State (@ScrewedbyState) July 26, 2015
Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert”. - J Robert Oppenheimer.
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