Stone mentions in the CNBC interview below that he didn’t take Chavez’s word, he talked to 7 other presidents in the region. Perhaps he should have spent less time talking to presidents and more time talking to the people standing in long lines desperately trying to acquire food.
A fantastic article from the Telegraph details the catastrophe Chavez has caused in the name of getting food to the poor.
Here are a few excerpts:
I find myself wondering how great life must have been for generations past. They never had to deal with the vagaries of the 21st century competitive marketplace or the stresses of day-to-day life. I just had to change a flight and hotel schedule for a trip I’m taking in November because the flight I was originally taking was changed. I just spent a few minutes on talking to a customer service rep who is probably in India, and now I’m having to re-book my trip on a competing airline.
Posts from Robin Hanson and William Easterly got me thinking about rankings, zero-sum status games, and critiques of markets. Too often, criticism proceeds as if there is an obvious, easy to obtain, and unambiguously superior alternative out there just waiting for us to see it. Consider one of the standard critiques of commercial society: it makes us acquisitive, mean, and self-absorbed.
Here’s a good case of the pernicious, insidious effects of IP on business. As noted in What’s Up On the Roof? Goats! (video below), Al Johnson back in 1973 added a Scandinavian-style sod roof and goats grazing on it, to Al Johnson’s Swedish Restaurant in Wisconsin.
Mao Zedong, founder of the People’s Republic of China, qualifies as the greatest mass murderer in world history, an expert who had unprecedented access to official Communist Party archives said yesterday. (…) At least 45 million people were worked, starved or beaten to death in China over these four years (…) Mr Dikötter is the only author to have delved into the Chinese archives since they were reopened four years ago.
Canadian emergency rooms are infamous for their long wait times.1 A recent study has shown that in most of them the average wait time exceeds 6 hours and sometimes reaches up to 23 hours. While some call for action in reducing these extreme
Private ownership of the means of production is the fundamental institution of the market economy. It is the institution the presence of which characterizes the market economy as such. Where it is absent, there is no question of a market economy.
It seems that the public relations industry is always trying to distance itself from the image that its main business is in providing “spin” or “spinning the news for its clients. This is true to a certain extent throughout both the public and private sector PR types. Afterall, who doesn’t want to put a good face on corporate earnings or home sales prices, or any other news of import that may reflect on one’s business.
A note from Jesus Huerta de Soto:
In the cradle of modern democracy, in the parliament of the United Kingdom, a bill was officially presented in London yesterday with a dual objective: first, to fully and effectively defend citizens’ right of ownership over money they have deposited in checking accounts at banks; and second, to once and for all put an end to the recurrent cycles of artificial boom, financial and banking crisis, and economic recession which have been afflicting the world’s (poorly-named) market economies for at least two hundred years.
Following up on my post UK Proposal for Banking Reform: Fractional-Reserve Banking versus Deposits and Loans, Toby Baxendale’s Cobden Centre post Support for Douglas Carswell’s forthcoming Bill to reform the banks provides links to various articles and posts in support of the Bill.
