Congratulations To Venezuela: Monthly Minimum Wage Now Below Seattle's Hourly Minimum

It was Adam Smith who said that there’s an awful lot of ruin in a nation. This is usually taken to mean that you’re going to have to really work very hard at it to completely mess a country up. But it does appear that President Maduro and his merry band are achieving that in Venezuela. We now hear that the black market rate (and that means the real price, a price being what someone is willing to pay, not what the government says it ought to be) for the bolivar is now at an exchange rate of one hundredth the official rate, somewhere up in the high 680s to the dollar. This does mean that the country’s official minimum wage is somewhere just under $11. Umm, no, that’s not per hour, not even per day, that’s per month. More…