On 3/16/06, Julio Huato wrote: > Michael Lebowitz once told me that, > with exceptions he had a hard time naming, there are virtually no > economists on the side of the revolution. This seems to me like a big > loss that makes it harder for the revolution to carry out its tasks.
The economic policy that Chavez is involved in is very simple. In a broad-brush portrait, he's using oil scarcity-rents for good, not evil. [For the uninitiated, "scarcity-rent" income is income (resulting from the natural scarcity of an input) that need not go to pay production costs or to profits in order for the output to be produced. It's like some (unknown) fraction of Shaq's income that he doesn't require to continue to play basketball so well. Marx's and Ricardo's theories of rent don't differ all that much from the neoclassical theory, though the latter has been broadened from land and natural resources to apply to the case of Shaq and the like.] One of the nice things about this is that some of the scarcity-rent can be wasted without it being a horrible thing, though obviously the less waste, the better. So not having economists' technical expertise on his side doesn't hamper Chavez too much (especially given the ideological blinkers of economists, present company excepted). The waste of the scarcity-rents was much worse before Chavez, since they went to pamper the already-rich. -- Jim Devine / "There can be no real individual freedom in the presence of economic insecurity." -- Chester Bowles
