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
