Harry's Place

In Venezuela, he said, a citizen who goes to a medical center for a visit can get free service that never shows up as economic activity because money doesn’t change hands

Venezuelan doctors work for free? No fees, no salary, no monetary remuneration of any kind at all? Such perfection is only possible in a prosperous country like Venezuela where every citizen is an oil millionaire.

And does the president work for free too?

The CIA was an unlikely pioneer of socialist friendly accounting methods. According to one of PJ ORourke’s books (iirc) the CIA world factbook confidently stated that the USSR had a higher GDP per head than the UK immediately before it, the Soviet Union, collapsed.

According to “socialist calculations” GDP is positively correlated with illness? That can’t be very good.

Of course chasing out business owners and professionals forming a Conga line to exit for NY and Miami are just mere coincidences.

Chavez finds new ways to make his apologists look absurd every day

How come leftists never deliver, there is always a lot of posturing and the moment they get in its self aggrandizement, rapid deterioration of civil society, conspiracy theories and persecution complex, and this exact same pattern repeats itself every time and yet leftists and their apologists continue make the same excuse about ‘real’ leftists and persist in lecturing the world on how it should be run and seemingly intelligent people pay attention to their ravings.

This is an ideology that has never delivered every single time its been tried in the last 100 years. They leave a huge mess behind which takes decades to clean up and in the interim they rear their ugly head again to exploit the suffering and poverty. The only thing leftists care about is themselves and their opinion, everything else is a vehicle to self importance.

Muchas palabras, pero no de pollo.

Ok, I’m not defending a clearly wriggling politician, cynically trying to distract from his country’s economic problems. But there is a point about the limitations of GDP as a measure of economic activity.

Child care is one example. If one partner works, and the other stays at home to look after a young child, there’s no measured value. If the same couple set up an arrangement where the working one paid the other a formal salary (just below the tax allowance threshold to avoid losing money) to do this, it would add to GDP. But nothing has been achieved, there is no greater growth – no increase in wealth or income.

Indeed, a cynical government could introduce to a ‘free at point of delivery’ healthcare system a series of charges, increasing GDP, then tax the providers more to recoup that money, increasing GDP, which it could then redistribute in grants to the users, increasing GDP still further. Magical growth that makes no one any better off!

GDP is useful, obviously, but it really does have limitations.

Just read Animal Farm. It tells you all you need to know about how these regimes progress. ” Four legs good, two legs better!”

Actually he’s wrong. There are inputs and there are outputs. One has to conclude that money not spent on medical care is otherwise spent, saved or invested somewhere else. Unless El Presidente imagines a money-free economy that functions solely on slogans and Unicorn piss. Which is more or less the Marxist socialist model assuming of course that one never imports any goods or services and only exports, in this case, oil, for hard currency. Alternatively, in the Soviet model, you simply expropriate the inputs you need and ‘export’ armies to keep the peasants in check.

Happiness? I am happy that our Dear Maximum Leader saw fit to not enslave and/or kill us today.

ISTR actually, when some of the old Eastern Bloc countries converted from Gross Material Product as their method of calculation, their GDP’s suddenly sky rocketted, because they hadn’t counted a lot of government activity.

Don’t forget, kids, breaking windows increases GDP!

Joe Camel
23 November 2009, 2:17 am

And does the president work for free too?

I’ll take a wild guess that Hugo works on an “expenses paid” basis as opposed to collecting a salary.

Personally, I’m waiting with baited breath for anti-globalization champ Naomi Klein to explain away the Venezualan recession.

Perhaps Chavez can exhort Venezuelans to “be Happy in their work” like the Japanese Commandant told the British POWs in “Bridge on the River Kiwi”.

At this rate, under the Benevolent Guidance of the New Maximum Leader, Venezuela will soon be like the Soviet Union in the 1970s where the People pretended to work and the Communists pretended to pay them.

The Journal spoke to respected economist Graham, regular of Harry’s Place, who commented, “Whose to say Venezuela is experiencing de un invierno de descontento? The economic conditions experienced by the individual are contingent upon how he, or she, chooses to reify the abstract narrative.” Dave S was unavailable for interview.

Passing Thru,

You didn’t really get what I said on that subject at all did you? :-)