Venezuela, China go in opposite directions when it comes to capitalism

Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, whose country has the world’s highest inflation and Latin America’s lowest economic growth, has just convened a “World Conference on the Crisis of Capitalism” for early 2015. He should invite Chinese leader Xi Jinping as the keynote speaker. Leaving aside the fact that the United States, the premier symbol of capitalism, is doing better than any other major world economy these days, and that New York’s stock exchange reached its all-time record last week, China’s Communist leader could help Venezuela’s confused president understand which ideology is really in crisis these days. Only last week, in the latest move of its three-decade-long march to capitalism, China opened its Shanghai Stock Market to foreign investors, allowing more foreigners to invest in mainland China’s companies. Last year’s Chinese Communist Party’s 18th Congress gave Xi broad powers to give market forces a much greater role in the economy, at the expense of government central planners. More...