Memo To Venezuela: The Soviets Nationalized Food Distribution And Guess What? It Didn't Work
There is a point to the study of history. For as George Santayana said, those who fail to study it are doomed to repeat it. The point therefore being to find out which things people tried in the past, which of those things didn’t work and then not do them. It’s this part of the process that President Maduro and his merry band in Venezuela seem to have missed. For they’ve just decided to start down, or perhaps continue down the path given their past actions, of one of the greatest mistakes made by the Soviet Union. That is, the nationalization of the food distribution system.
It’s entirely true that markets do not solve every problem: they’re unlikely to make Mom’s apple pie taste any better or worse for example. But one area where they really do work very well is in that distribution of food from the farmer to the consumer. And there’s absolutely no non-market method ever tried, or at least none that’s survived into recorded history, that has been successful. Even Ancient Rome’s grain dole was a byword for corruption and inefficiency. Making this little announcement from Venezuela somewhat worrying for the benighted inhabitants of that country:
Venezuela’s embattled government has taken the drastic step of forcing food producers to sell their produce to the state, in a bid to counter the ever-worsening shortages.
Farmers and manufacturers who produce milk, pasta, oil, rice, sugar and flour have been told to supply between 30 per cent and 100 per cent of their products to the state stores.
It simply is not going to work. My predicted outcome from this is that Venezuela is now one harvest away from serious starvation.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2015/07/24/memo-to-venezuela-the-soviets-nationalised-food-distribution-and-guess-what-it-didnt-work/
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