Evil Men and Their Champions

The world seems filled with gifted and intelligent people, particularly on the Left, who believe very stupid things. One such useful idiot, Richard Gott, extolled Hugo Chavez’s management as an exemplar for Greece — as recently as 2012.

Chavez’s policy was simply to use Venezuela’s large oil revenues, in effect its unearned income, to subsidize the standard of living of millions of people, while at the same time antagonizing foreign and even domestic capital. Oddly enough, it did not occur to the learned author of the article that Greece, for example, had no revenues from a resource comparable to oil to distribute, though for a time borrowed money played the role of those oil revenues; nor that an economy utterly dependent on the price of oil was extremely fragile, and that to distribute largesse on the assumption that the price would remain high forever was improvident, to say the least.

Dalrymple at Taki’s Magazine

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