France24:
CARACAS (AFP) - Under-fire Venezuela President Nicolas Maduro admitted his economic model has "failed" in the wake of food and medicine shortages and public service paralysis, such as Tuesday's power failure that affected 80 percent of Caracas.
"The production models we've tried so far have failed and the responsibility is ours, mine and yours," Maduro told his ruling PSUV party congress, as Venezuela looks to tackle chronic inflation the International Monetary Fund predicted would reach one million percent this year.
"Enough with the whining... we need to produce with or without (outside) aggression, with or without blockades, we need to make Venezuela an economic power," he added late Monday, with the country grappling with a four-year long recession.
Probably, America is a rich country (unlike an oil exporting Venezuela) and it will take
years for us to get that poor.
The sad part is that they won't really transform anything economy-wise. Venezuela has had a long story of an Oil-Based economic model with Social Democracy tendencies and pretty much a regulated economy (Paternalistic State) with little in the way of free market and competition.
ReplyDeleteHow bad was the anti-competition bias? There was a law imposed twice that mandated radio stations to play one Made in Venezuela song for every foreign song the station played. Uno por Uno was called.
It lead to people tuning out of radio stations because there was not enough national product to go by so the same "Made Here" songs got repeated over and over till people just tuned off. Ratings went to crap which obviously led to companies not buying ad time.
Even though it initially led to more people recording more songs (w studio animals were happy) and record companies buying any crap that was on tape, the quality was poor and the music business plunged.
That was their mentality prior to Socialism. To escape, they need to redefine the whole mental structure of the country.