Welcome to Venezuela

THE AMERICAN RANT / August 11, 2023

Caracas Venezuela

Look at this photograph. Imagine this is where you were born and this is the home you were born into. What do you think your life would be like here? Imagine living in one of these shacks and wanting desperately to build a different life for yourself and your family. What would you do to get yourself out of poverty?

You might say you would go to school, get a degree, find a good job and work your way out. But what if you couldn't stay in school because your family needed you to work so they could eat? What if you were smart and ambitious but had no money for college? What if you managed to educate yourself anyway, only to discover there weren't enough good jobs waiting for you? What if you worked and saved, but inflation destroyed the value of what little money you managed to put away?

You could have all the ambition in the world, but ambition means very little when there are fewer and fewer ways to turn it into opportunity.

If you were born here, you wouldn't stand a chance.

And here's the point: Venezuela wasn't supposed to end up like this. Venezuela sits on extraordinary oil wealth. Yet over the course of years, its government took greater and greater control of its economy. Industries and businesses were nationalized or expropriated. Prices were controlled. Currency was controlled. Private property became less secure. Government increasingly decided what things should cost, who could obtain foreign currency and what private enterprise could and couldn't do.

It was all done in the language these systems always find so seductive: greater equality, greater fairness and a better life for ordinary people.

But government cannot manufacture prosperity simply by declaring what things should cost, taking control of industries or redistributing wealth. When government controls more and more of the economy, the individual controls less and less of his own economic life. Investment disappears, businesses disappear, jobs disappear, goods become scarce and eventually the choices available to ordinary people disappear with them. That is the danger.

America isn't perfect. Capitalism isn't perfect. No economic system run by human beings ever will be. But America's extraordinary achievement is not that everybody ends up in the same place. It is that individuals have tremendous freedom to determine where they will go.

You can work. You can study. You can own something. You can build something. You can start a company. You can fail. You can start again. You can become richer than your parents or poorer than your parents. The government does not guarantee your outcome, and it shouldn't.

You control your destiny. Look at this village again. This is the warning: when you hand government control of your economic destiny, getting that control back may be considerably harder than giving it away.

So when someone promises that government can make life fairer by controlling more of it, don't listen only to the promise. Look at what happens when political power becomes economic power too.

Freedom isn't perfect. It isn't fair. It doesn't guarantee success. But it gives you the chance to create it. Protect your freedom at all costs.