Getting people into the market is half the problem in countries such as Venezuela
<a href=www.vheadline.com>Venezuela's Electronic news Posted: Thursday, May 29, 2003 By: David Sheegog
Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 21:41:24 -0500 From: David Sheegog davidsheegog@hotmail.com To: Editor@VHeadline.com Subject: Re: Chavez Frias deserves credit for initiatives
Dear Editor: Chavez has instigated enough reforms in land and home ownership to make a positive economic impact on the country. The program should continue. Those new "owners" are exactly what capitalism needs to create wealth. It was done at no real expense to anyone, and, once the dispossessed are enfranchised their economic behavior changes. Much as the difference between home-renters and home-owners in caring for and holding on to what they have ... there is no substitute for the pride of ownership in a capitalist system. The country will look better too.
I admit the farm cooperatives are a long shot to work. But the spirit of them is to enfranchise and empower people who are outside the economy at present. Getting people into the market is half the problem in countries such as Venezuela.
The black market ... a squatter's market, if you will ... contributes less than half its wealth generating power to a nation's productivity. Legitimate markets come into being from inclusive economic activity. Local food markets that the government sponsors are healthy inputs to productivity as well, for only slightly different reasons. Creating jobs to sanitize and improve living conditions in the barrios is an easy decision that also has disproportionately more positive economic impact than it's cost.
- The union reforms which he (Chavez) is attempting now, have the potential to increase the share of the nation's productivity of the lower middle class and the working poor.
The unions have not always served the workers who belong to them. That, unfortunately, is true of some unions in every country in the world. More transparency in union activity has been helpful for every union that has achieved it. The great middle class of the US was built largely on the strength of union activity from the 1920s to the 1970s, plus the gigantic wealth redistribution policies of the federal government between 1935 and 1960.
And of course, these and others reforms are important for Chavez to strengthen his political base as well. If he is to be successful in wresting control of Venezuela's political system away from the rich oligarchs who have controlled and owned it for so long ... and impoverished such a huge proportion of the population ... he must serve the political base from which he derives his voting strength.
David Sheegog davidsheegog@hotmail.com