Caracas Chronicles

This piece in El Estimulo – part of the new breed of the communicational-hegemony-runaround websites – is enough to make you despair: in response to deepening goods scarcity the government is reacting with…more bureaucratic controls.

Now each individual shipment to each individual store will need its own “guía” (authorization document), rather than allowing one truck going to several stores to do so with a single guía. A tramite that used to take, on average, three minutes may now take as long as 35.

This is yet more evidence that even now, a estas alturas del partido, the government still doesn’t actually understand the mechanism that generates scarcity. Even now, after years of deepening goods shortages tending to hyperinflation, they’re off chasing a mirage instead of pursuing the common sense reforms that economists from Ricardo Hausmann to Mark Weisbrot agree are needed to begin to stabilize the macroeconomy.

It’s going to get worse before it gets better. It just is.