April 15 2013

http://daniel-venezuela.blogspot.com/2013/03/april-15-2013.html#more

Whomever wins the April 14 vote in Venezuela will receive a desolate landscape, made it worse by a never ending campaign. The blame needs, of course, to fall on chavismo or whatever political ersatz comes after two decades of romantic robinhoodery blended with mean political expediency. Though the weak-minded pusillanimous opposition leadership of the first decade is also to share the blame. But they are less guilty because in the end they were nice people, educated, polite and thus woefully unprepared to the onslaught of thuggery that Chavez unleashed on Venezuela. By the time they realized who they were dealing with they had lost any capacity of response and the electorate had become dependent on Chavez for its self esteem sustained on the occasional social handout.


The country that Chavez left us is a country that is financially ruined. True, we still have a lot of oil under our feet and good management can bring us back to a semi functional state in as little as half a decade. But the bonanza of the last decade will have been spent with very little to show for it. It has been swallowed by corruption, inefficiency and gifts because what Chavez has done is to distribute cash around, never establishing anything productive and sustainable over time. Nothing.


All of Chavez Misiones were designed for electoral purposes, to improve somewhat the everyday life of the masses without providing them with access to a real pay check, those that are given to people that actually produce something of value, any value, and which allows them true independence. We can argue ad infinitum as to the need to address poverty in Venezuela, but everyday it is clearer that Chavez social programs have not been the solution, a Band-Aid at best, with the nagging after thought of having made things actually worse in solidifying a “47%” mentality.

We also inherit a backward country, a country that has left a decade of impressive technological development go by. True, Chavez bought a satellite. But he did that only, he bought a satellite, with his fat checkbook, while this week we learn that there is not enough feed in Venezuela for our livestock and that in a matter of days we will be left without pork, o poultry or milk. But we have a satellite that can dress the inventory of all the lands that have been expropriated and thus stopped producing anything of importance. When countries made huge strides in their development they did not start by buying satellites. Japan, perhaps the older historical example, started buying industries to produce junk, lots of junk while they made sure they would produce as much food as possible so the little bit of cash available was for investment in industries that the rest of the world found uninteresting or depassé. We know how that ended, and how it ended for Korea and the Tigers and how it may end for China, the pendulum of power having shifted irremediably to Asia who understood that developments starts by keeping it simple.

But in Venezuela Chavez used its large resources to buy elections and power, only too willing to destroy local production when he discovered that it was easier, and more profitable for his cronies, to subsidize imports than promote local production. Venezuela agriculture was not great in 1999 but at least it was growing and on some items not only we were self sufficient but we could even export some occasional surpluses. Today it is simply forbidden to export food as there are no surpluses anywhere. And yet we see in the last decades that some countries get comparable population growth as Venezuela did and still these countries not only managed to feed the new arrivals, but fed them better.