Julian sends this piece from Miami Herald columnist Andres Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer nominates Stalinist Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez for Cato’s bi-annual half million dollar Milton Friedman Prize.

The punchline:

It’s time to nominate Venezuela’s populist President Hugo Chávez to the ”Milton Friedman Award” for his indefatigable work to advance the cause of free-market policies and political harmony in the developing world.

I’m not kidding. No other head of state has done so much in such a short time to wreck his country’s economy, and to discourage his neighbors from engaging in the kind of finger-waving populism that has brought about massive capital flight and record poverty levels in Venezuela.

If it weren’t for the disastrous performance of Chávez’s ”peaceful revolution,” Brazil’s new leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva would have probably launched the anti-free market policies he had championed for the past three decades, several foreign diplomats and politicians told me during a recent trip to Brazil. And Ecuador and Argentina probably would have followed suit.

The whole region, disenchanted with the results of the U.S.-backed free-market reforms of the 1990s, would have made a political U-turn to embrace the free-spending, blame-the-oligarchy policies that destroyed many of Latin America’s economies in the 1970s. It hasn’t happened, largely because of Chávez’s failures…

…In recent times, nobody has done more for the cause of the free market than Chávez. If it weren’t for the way he has ruined his country, Brazil — which accounts for more than half of South America’s economy — would have taken a populist path, and swayed much of the rest of the region with it. Thanks, Hugo!

It’s true. Chavez is a plant. A closet free-marketeer.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 13th, 2003 at 4:12 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.