Tin Foil Hat Time (Venezuela Edition)

The New York Times has gotten all sorts of bad press this week. This is over an article entitled "Venezuela's Autocrat Is Declared Winner In Tainted Election".

If you don't know the word autocrat ... it's a fancy way of saying dictator.

And it's disingenuous to claim that "... Autocrat Is Declared Winner ..." when the only people who declared that were the autocrat himself, and the government that works under him.

But these are minor points for economists. The real sticking point comes in this quote:

... In recent years, the socialist model has given way to brutal capitalism, economists say, with a small state-connected minority controlling much of the nation’s wealth.

Basically, this is just a bold lie. The problem with that is that if it's repeated enough, some people will start to believe it.

The backstory here is that Venezuela ... then the richest country in Latin America ... took a hard turn towards socialism in the late 90s. The autocrat noted above (Maduro) is the hand-picked successor to the autocrat who started the whole mess (Chavez). So really what we see in Venezuela is a three decade experiment with socialism.

It has not been pretty. And in some ways the Venezuelan government has relaxed its control over the economy in recent years. But this is mostly to help out politically connected friends. 

The article asserts that this is "brutal capitalism". No, it isn't. There's very little capitalist about it (which usually entails private ownership of capital and freely moving prices). But there is a name for a system in which the politically approved are allowed to exercise power, and make profits from the limited size of their well-connected group. The name for this is fascism (in the traditional sense, not the distorted convenience usage popular in the U.S. over the last decade). Better parallels for Venezuela's current situation would be Spain under Franco, Portugal under Salazar, Argentina under Peron, and so on. Paragons of capitalism they are not.

Oh ... and did you not the sleight of hand there ... the article writes "economists say" but doesn't actually quote any economists who do say this. Hmm.

One is left to think that the intended target for this article is people who don't understand what capitalism is, don't understand what fascism was, and are in denial about the track record of socialism.

It's been ages since I wrote anything this harsh ...