Chavismo has a remarkable ability to invent and create new concepts and structures that are simply unworkable or are incredibly simplistic. They legislate and legislate, without asking anyone about it and just moving forward, despite their so called belief in “participative” democracy. But only high ranking Chavistas seem to really “participate” in the truly important things. The Constitution be damned.
By now, Chavismo has created a few monsters that the country has become accustomed to. People accept these things as if they were “normal”, forgetting how perverse the system has become.
For example, the Government imports food without control at the official rate of exchange, destroying local production which “enjoys” 25-30% inflation while the official rate of exchange is held constant. Seems logical? Yeah, sure!
Then there is CADIVI, which magnanimously presides over exchange controls. Huge bureaucracies have been created on both sides. The Government’s to stop you at each instance from importing things, the private sector to weave around the tapestry of requirements in the hope that some official dollars will come your way. If you are out of luck, you can still try SITME, where you deal with the bureaucracy of the private or official banking sector, to see if you can scrape some greenbacks your way.
CADIVI is so perverse, that the President of the Venezuelan Central Bank said this week, without being bashful: “Exchange controls will be removed when the revolution can not be reversed”. Read what he says: I restrict your rights, so that the right to choose will no longer be available in the future. At that point, I will, in my benevolence, return some smaller important rights to you, but you would have lost the freedom to choose.
Nice.
Then there is price, earnings and everything control, now encompassed under the SUNDECOP (sounds like a suppository or a fungus medicine, no?), a new bureaucracy established to control prices, costs and margins. So, in a country with unpredictable inflation and soon, retroactive severance pay, a whole bunch of untrained incompetents, will now try to calculate everything that is so hard for you to do in the business you have worked in all your life. All to establish a regime of price controls, which has been shown not to work anywhere in the world. In fact, Venezuela, one of the few countries with price controls today, has the top or one of the three top inflation rates in the world. But they just don’t get it.
But these guys don’t understand the word “evidence”. If inflation jumped to 100% in Venezuela, they would blame everything but their idiocy. They just don’t know better.
So, in the absence of the All Mighty Hugo, who is taking care of more transcendental things, a new Labor Law has been cooked up barely four weeks before Chavez plans to enact it. This Bill not only returns severance pay to the original system, which was shown not to work, but a novel concept is once again created: Severance does not belong to the worker, but to the family.
These guys want to legislate and promote the family. In a country where practically nothing works, they want to set up a system to promote, legislate and control “family values” as a goal of a “socialist” society.
Of course, the story is told from the side of the irresponsible father. If the wife, or the kids are let out…yadda yadda yadda. But in the machista country of “ciudadanos y ciudadanas” I can already imagine what will happen when the working woman is taken to Labour Court by the unemployed, irresponsible husband. As a matter of fact, imagine also the working kid who lives at home, whose severance will now be at the mercy of his or her parents.
Not pretty.
But what Chavismo does or thinks about, has nothing to do with reality. They represent a world of ignorants who have a lot of initiative and power, but who have no clue as to how economies and societies work. Thus, in a country without practically any functioning institutions, they create new ones to oversee how families values function.
Chavista Family Values. Look at the leaders of the revolution, who spouses them? tell me just one, please…
The Devil's Excrement 