Michael Rowan / Irrational Economics

After thirteen years of failure, President Chávez continues to pursue self-destructive economic policies for Venezuela. These include confiscations of private property, disregard for international law on investment and trade, and an increasing dependence on oil for the entire population.

The country's productive sector has collapsed. And the only international investors and trading partners remaining have suspect agendas like Iran's. Oil is the major business in the country and its productive capacity is also in a free fall. Second is the cocaine business, which has yielded homicide rates unseen since before governments created law and order centuries ago. The response to this failure has been to print money, borrow and spend into oblivion. The children of Venezuela are being saddled with a debt greater than their life's total earning capacity.

The tragedy is that all of this misery was unnecessary and avoidable. The assumption that capitalism was evil and had to be extinguished, as in Cuba, is simply false. Here are the facts: The spread of government, law and free enterprise - all of which Chávez is out to monopolize or extinguish - are integrally associated since 1800 with three sets of facts. First, average global life expectancy has increased three times from 25 to 75 years. Second, global wealth has increased twenty times, from $400 to $8,000 per capita. And third, population has increased nine times, from 800 million to 7 billion people on earth.

Since Chávez has been president, Venezuela has missed the rising tide that is lifting all boats worldwide. Since 2000, half the exchanges of goods and services in world history have taken place. The effects of that trade on the well-being of China, India, Russia, Brazil, and all the open societies of Latin America are fabulous. Aruba and Curacao with no oil enjoy per capita wealth many times that of Venezuela. But Chávez has ignored all these facts in favor of an irrational policy derived from an emotional outburst against private property, which is burying Venezuela on the ash-heap of history.

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