Tuesday, November 18, 2014

The Difference Between Socialist Venezuela and Free Market America

Thanks to price controls in Venezuela, there are shortages of food and everything else, and people wait in lines for days.



(via Mark Perry)

5 comments:

  1. "When Boris Yeltsin went grocery shopping in Clear Lake - 1989"

    He told his fellow Russians in his entourage that if their people, who often must wait in line for most goods, saw the conditions of U.S. supermarkets, “there would be a revolution.”

    “When I saw those shelves crammed with hundreds, thousands of cans, cartons and goods of every possible sort, for the first time I felt quite frankly sick with despair for the Soviet people,” Yeltsin wrote. “That such a potentially super-rich country as ours has been brought to a state of such poverty! It is terrible to think of it.”

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  2. sometimes the wrong people bear the costs......

    Low interest rates mean Koreans struggle to save [First in a two-part series] Falling returns on time deposit accounts result in lack of assets Nov 17,2014

    Article from Korean news source (in English) highlghts how low interest rates mean Koreans are struggling to save .. "Low interest rates on time deposits mean that Koreans can’t save the way they used to .. Until the 1990s, when the average interest rate hovered at around 10%, a common way to build up assets in Korea was to set aside a portion of wages in the bank every month as a time deposit - after a while, you would be able to buy property with the savings .. not any more .. "Korean consumers will have to live with such low-interest bank savings for a substantial period of time as the country’s central bank is likely to keep its benchmark interest rate in response to the continued quantitative easing of major economies like Japan and the European Union." .. when you take into account the inflation rate in Korea, you have negative real interest rates, characteristic of financial repression.


    http://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/news/article/article.aspx?aid=2997387&cloc=rss|news|joongangdaily

    how long til these people get FED up?

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  3. Don't worry, we'll be there soon enough.

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  4. The point is well-taken but . . . When "free market" America's next crisis hits, free markets will take the blame and calls for more regulation will get louder.

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  5. America is capitalist? Since when?

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