re: #88 HappyWarrior

Exactly. I see wingnuts claiming all the time we want Venezuela and Venezuela is somehow proof that our policy beliefs are a failure. Venezuela’s failure is not socialism, it is authoritarianism just as what made Pinochet evil wasn’t being a capitalist but being a dictator.

Remember the argument I had with Milton Friedman about Chile. I pointed out that was a country with a free market and a dictatorship which flew in the face of his insistence that free markets go hand in hand with democracy. His reply—Chile was a “special case”…