Venezuela’s Tyranny of Bad Ideas

Socialism was a proven failure, but Hugo Chávez got his countrymen to try it. Ideas run the world. Good ones create freedom and wealth; bad ones, oppression and poverty. You are not what you eat, but what you think. Politicians in particular fall under the sway of ideas. As John Maynard Keynes put it, “Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. . . . It is ideas, not vested interests, interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas”More…