Untrammeled Majoritarianism and the Venezuelan Disaster

International Liberty

The economic and humanitarian crisis in Venezuela is the predictable result of statism run amok.

And I will confess a bit of Schadenfreude has suffused my columns on the topic.

• I very much enjoyed mocking leftists who have tried to rationalize Venezuela’s economic collapse.
• I gleefully compared Venezuela’s long-run stagnation with South Korea’s long-run economic boom.
• I mocked the Venezuela’s economy for being so weak that prostitution is one of the few thriving sectors.

But we shouldn’t laugh at the collapse of statism. Real people are suffering. And even if a painful collapse is necessary to create the conditions for a rebirth of freedom in Venezuela, the widespread misery that now exists is still tragic.

So let’s set aside sarcasm and try to draw a very important lesson from the crisis.

Moisés Naim of the Carnegie Endowment and Francisco Toro of the Caracas Chronicles have a column in the Washington…

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