If you haven't had the pleasure of a formal course in economics, no worries! I can show you in just six slides:
Now, this isn't really a line of reasoning you can refute. I mean, you could refute it, but you'd have to argue that the demand curve is upward sloping - that the higher the price of something, the more of it people will want to buy.
I'll buy that the minute you show me a store running a 1-for-the-price-of-2 sale.
It boggles the mind that we have a government that can't wrap its mind around these six slides. A government so primitive that it thinks it can legislate away scarcity is a government that has elevated its contempt for common sense to the level of official ideology.
Nor will this problem be alleviated by nationalizing the food sector. There's a reason why shortage management - whether through interminable lines or ration books - is a mainstay of controlled economies: the dynamics of supply and demand operate regardless of the ideological label you affix to the regime that flouts them. Even the Soviet Union - a fully state-controlled economy backed by the threat of deportation to the gulags - failed to bully sellers into supplying enough to meet demand at controlled prices.
It's not surprising - slapping the word "socialist" on a country doesn't magically make its people want to pay more for the things they buy.
For Chávez, though, such talk is just a defense of capitalist deviations like "individualism" and "greed" - moral failings the revolution means to stamp out. And so we get Utopian plans to forge a socialist "new man," which is just a fancy term for a sucker willing to plump for a pay-2-get-1 sale. A mythical being who enjoys his poverty and actively seeks to deepen it.
It breaks my heart to see such economic obscurantism empowered in Venezuela. Like the proverbial slow-motion train wreck, it's too easy to foresee where this is all heading. And it's just plain chilling that our country is run by people who refuse, as a matter of principle, to grasp it.
