Dec 9, 2002 | Dollars & Crosses
You heard it here first.
This year in Venezuela, the currency has collapsed, the economy has contracted, while inflation and unemployment has soared. Our global economics and financial markets contributor Andrew West predicted all of this over two years ago in Capitalism Magazine. The good news is that in Venezuela, the most productive people have gone on strike, refusing to exist as Hugo Chavez' revolutionary slaves. According to the BBC,Oil production in Venezuela - the world's fifth largest oil exporter - is nearing a standstill, as the national strike against President Hugo Chavez enters its second week. Many petrol stations are running out of fuel, and exports are being severely hit, hiking up prices on the international oil market.
Opposition leaders vowed on Sunday to continue their strike against Mr Chavez indefinitely. Many schools and businesses in Caracas and other major cities remain closed, and domestic airline pilots and aluminium workers are the latest to join the stoppage...
... During his weekly Alo Presidente television programme, Mr Chavez launched into a lengthy diatribe in which he dubbed the opposition "coup-mongers". "They won't rob Venezuela of its happiness," he shouted, grabbing a plastic model of the baby Jesus from a crib on his desk and kissing it.
Comments Andrew West, "[Chavez's diatribe and grabbing of a the baby Jesus is] as good a comic scene as any in Atlas Shrugged. Even Mr. Thompson wouldn't stoop that low."
Dec 7, 2002 | Dollars & Crosses
Here's a good one: The Washington Post ran a letter criticizing Catherine Reynolds' recent $100 million donation to the Kennedy Center by Mark Weadon."The Dec. 7 front-page story…said that Ms. Reynolds made her fortune "in the student loan business." Am I alone in finding this disturbing? At a time when college students and their parents and universities are struggling to make ends meet, how is it possible for one person to amass this kind of wealth from the sale of education loans?
Something is deeply flawed when so much money can be siphoned out of a system in which both students and colleges operate on razor-thin margins. Perhaps students, universities and the nation would have been better served if even a portion of Ms. Reynolds's vast income had gone toward lowering student loan interest rates."
Heck, why not eliminate all interest, because after all, wouldn't the nation be better served if no one had to pay to borrow money? Never mind that Ms. Reynolds' wealth came from loaning people money to get an education that supposedly would allow them to be self-sufficient. Never mind that Ms. Reynolds pays a large percentage of her wealth in taxes. And never mind that Ms. Reynolds is now using her wealth to support the arts. Apparently, the only people who should make money in life are whiners like Mr. Weadon. People like Ms. Reynolds should just work for free putting people like him through school. After all, rich people should sacrifice more.
Dec 6, 2002 | Dollars & Crosses
"The truly and deliberately evil men are a very small minority; it is the appeaser who unleashes them on mankind; it is the appeaser's intellectual abdication that invites them to take over. When a culture's dominant trend is geared toward irrationality, the thugs win over the appeasers. When intellectual leaders fail to foster the best in the mixed, unformed, vacillating character of people at large, the thugs are sure to bring out the worst. When the ablest men turn into cowards, the average men turn into brutes."-- Ayn Rand, in "Altruism and Appeasement," published in The Objectivist newsletter, January 1966.
Dec 5, 2002 | Dollars & Crosses
The denial of federal loan guarantees to UAL deals a serious blow to the corporatist notion that the taxpayers should be on the hook for the management blunders of privately owned companies. Bravo! And as Bruce Bartlett writes, the airline's troubles also offer a reality check on the fuzzy-headed notion that employee ownership represents a ideal form for capital/labor cooperation in a capitalist economic structure:The benefits to each individual worker are too small to fundamentally change their attitudes. On the contrary, they often use their ownership to block productivity-enhancing changes. The result is that management is even more hamstrung than it was before, leading to losses and bankruptcies.
To signficant extent, UAL's problems are rooted in the denial of economic reality engendered by majority employee ownership.
Nov 28, 2002 | Dollars & Crosses
The Romanow commission was a shameful waste of time and money. Mr. Romanow wants us to believe that socialist medicine is good while private, for-profit medicine is bad. But the exact opposite is true.We have reams of evidence that capitalism generates better products and services at lower costs. Consider the computer industry where we keep getting vastly better computers at lower prices; or consider the telephone industry where long-distance rates plummeted after privatization. Free market competition works because it rewards people for being innovative, productive and responsible.
Likewise, we have we have reams of evidence that socialism leads to rising costs, longer lineups and poorer quality. Consider all the poor and miserable socialist countries of the last century. Even Sweden embraced some privatized medicine. Socialism always fails because it punishes those who are creative, productive and responsible in order to reward those who, for whatever reason, are not. And there's another reason. When the government extorts money from people to pay for health care, the providers become accountable to the government -- not the patient. Unlike under capitalism, there is no real incentive for providers to innovate to improve quality and efficiency.
Nobody can predict what new discovery will be made in medicine to drastically reduce costs and save lives. Only capitalism provides the incentive to innovate. Contrary to what many believe, socialism doesn't help the poor; it merely bulldozes everyone down. The moral and practical solution to our health-care woes is private, for-profit health care.
Nov 27, 2002 | Dollars & Crosses
IRVINE, CA-- "Scratch through an environmentalist's veneer and you will find a mystic not a scientist," says Dr. Onkar Ghate, resident fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute. "Environmentalists and religionists are, deep down, of the same faith. That's why it's to be expected that a coalition of church groups and environmentalists would launch a 'What Would Jesus Drive?' campaign to deprive Americans of their SUVs."
"Religion declares that it is your moral duty to serve God--that you must abandon your rational mind and believe-that material profit and worldly success are sinful because they pull you away from God. Environmentalism declares that it is your moral duty to serve wilderness--that despite the vast evidence to the contrary, you must simply believe that industrialization and technology are harmful--that selfish profit and worldly success are sins because they represent the exploitation of nature. Both necessarily look upon SUVs--contemporary symbols of technological progress and earthly pleasure--with disgust.
"If this coalition of religionists and environmentalists want a world where you are forced to serve something other than your own life, where rational thought is outlawed in the name of blind faith, where men grovel in caves while most of the land remains in a wild state, untouched by the life-giving hand of technology and capitalism, then they are a little late. They could have found a concrete example of their ideal--in Taliban-run Afghanistan."