Thanks as always to Pirate’s Cove and The Other McCain for the Rule Five links.  Also, you should read the last of my History of The Six-gun posts over at Glibertarians.com, and in fact you should read all of my articles there by using the link to the right.

Meanwhile:  We’re all too aware of the dumpster fire that socialist Venezuela has become.  The libertarian Von Mises Institute has some ideas on reforms that could once again make Venezuela one of the most prosperous countries in South America:

1. Open the road to monetary freedom, eliminating all legal tender laws and the nation’s central-bank supported system of fractional-reserve banks. Allow Venezuelans to adopt whatever medium of exchange they wish. Even dollarization ought to be on the table.
2. Open the country to International Trade: eliminate all tariffs, taxes, and trade barriers. All of them.
3. Privatize Everything! All state-owned companies and assets, following Econintech’s proposal.
4. Decentralize the Government: Grant total administrative and budgetary autonomy to Venezuela’s twenty-three states . Decentralization is a key to minimizing the damage an abuse central government can do.
5. Lower taxes drastically, and decentralize tax collection and administration to the state level. All new taxes must be approved byreferendum.
6. Allow private Venezuelans to access and accept both humanitarian and security assistance from foreign organizations.
7. Guarantee the right to self-defense: demobilize all the armed groups, purge the prisons, implement widespread private gun ownership, and auction to the public all weapons confiscated by the state.

Good ideas all, but I have just one question:

Forget Venezuela, why can’t we have these reforms here?

Venezuela provides us with a vivid illustration of how socialist economics end, in practice, every time they’re tried.  (And, no, Sweden and the other Scandinavian nations are more statist than the U.S. in many ways, but they aren’t socialist.)

But it’s illustrative to look at that list and see how many items, from one to seven, that we currently do not enjoy in the U.S. – supposedly a free nation; supposedly a nation where we value liberty and individual rights.

Could there be a dumpster fire in our future?