Czech writer Vaclav Havel, who died on Sunday, was a lifelong champion of freedom. The former dissident, and later, president of his country, was especially active in denouncing Cuba’s totalitarian system and in stressing the importance of solidarity with that country’s many brave dissidents.  In the video below, he discusses Cuba.

On a related note, Cuban cyber-dissident Yoani Sanchez had this to say by Twitter upon the death of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il: “Nature accomplishes what citizens have not been able to.”

Vaclav Havel on Cuba is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

In the new video below from Reason TV, leading critics of the global drug war provide some thoughts about why they oppose prohibition. The conservative and former Colombian Senator Enrique Gomez Hurtado blames the drug war for the high levels of violence and cruelty his country has experienced. India’s former drug czar and expert on Afghanistan, Romesh Battacharji,  says of current drug policy:  “You just can never win it…Ever since the war on drugs, everything has hit the fan.”

The video is based on last month’s Cato conference, “Ending the Global War on Drugs.” You may see videos of the talks here, including a video of former U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz and former Mexican President Vicente Fox.

New Video: Ending the Global War on Drugs is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Hashim Shawa, the head of the Bank of Palestine, says that in 2012 Palestine will adopt the private pension system that Chile pioneered 30 years ago and has exported throughout the world. As you can see from the map below, it will become the second Arab territory after Egypt to do so. Of course, the devil is in the details, and for the reform to be as successful as it has been in Chile, Palestine should introduce a whole set of complimentary economic reforms. But if done right, at least in this regard Palestinians will be ahead of almost all of their neighbors, including Israel.

Palestine To Adopt Chilean Private Pension Model is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Our longtime colleague Bill Niskanen passed away yesterday. I will miss him dearly for his good nature, scholarship, wisdom and insight. In light of the debate on inequality, here’s an example of such insight in which he critiques philosopher John Rawls’s views. It is from footnote 21 (page 23) of his book, Autocratic, Democratic, and Optimal Government.

Rawls recognizes that individual well-being is dependent on more than income and wealth, but he does not acknowledge the implications of the fact that the other dimensions of well-being are not fungible. Consider the following example.

One young man is healthy and handsome, spends his days on the beach, has his pick of young women companions, and makes $10,000 a year by busing tables in the evening. Another young man is confined to a wheelchair, has congenital body odor, has never had an intimate relationship, and, with no other life, makes $100,000 a year as an expert computer programmer. In this case, who is worse off? Who should redistribute what to whom and how?

Bill Niskanen on Inequality is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Last week, former Mexican President Vicente Fox spoke at a Cato forum on the need to legalize the consumption, production and sale of all drugs. (You may also see C-Span’s coverage of the event.) President Fox took time to do a BBC interview below on the same topic.

By calling for an end to the drug war, he joins prominent figures from around the world—including former Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, former Mexican foreign minister Jorge Castañeda, former U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz, and many others—who are calling for policies that treat drug abuse as a social problem, rather than a criminal one. Join us for a major Cato conference, “Ending the Global War on Drugs,” on November 15, where the above opinion leaders will address the harm of prohibition and realistic policy alternatives.

Vicente Fox on Legalizing Drugs is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Former Libyan dictator Moammar Qaddafi is dead. The Transitional National Council can now get on with the challenges ahead, including setting up elections for a future government deemed legitimate by Libyans.

At the heart of Libya’s many problems is the so-called natural resource curse. Libya’s economy is based heavily on oil and gas. Yet the abundance of natural resources like oil or minerals has often slowed growth, over-expanded the state’s role in society and strengthened authoritarianism in places as diverse Russia and Iraq. In developing countries with weak institutions, such resources tend to be channeled, if not monopolized, through government, which then becomes corrupted, less responsive to the desires of citizens, and less interested in advancing policies and institutions that create wealth.

But not all resource-rich countries suffer from the curse. Chile overcame the resource curse while Venezuela has not. A study by the Fraser Institute used measures of economic freedom, including rule of law measures, to find what set successful countries apart from the rest. The difference was the level of economic freedom or institutional quality. On a scale of 0-10, where 10 represents better institutional quality, the paper found a resource curse threshold of about 6.9—the level above which countries broke the so-called curse. More economic freedom turns the curse into a blessing.

The graph below shows selected countries and regions with regard to the resource curse threshold.

For lack of reliable data, the Middle East and North Africa indicator does not include Libya and a number of countries in the region whose scores would surely bring the region’s average down notably. What is clear is that the region is below the point at which countries can take advantage of their riches to also make their people rich. Libya’s new leaders should pay heed to the central role of economic freedom in political and economic progress. After all, as our friends in the region remind us, the Arab spring began when Tunisian street vendor Muhammad Bouazizi set himself on fire after he was prevented from selling his goods, i.e., after being denied his economic freedom.

Advice to a Free Libya on Turning the Resource Curse Into a Blessing is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Slovakia is set to vote today on the European bailout plan and may well become a holdout. As my colleague David Boaz noted yesterday, this is due to Slovakia’s libertarian speaker of the house, Richard Sulik, who spoke at a Cato Institute conference in Bratislava last year, and who opposes bailouts of Greece and other EU countries based on sound ethical, political, and economic reasoning. Greece is already bankrupt and a bailout will only add to the country’s debt; an EU “rescue” will continue to create moral hazard, thus encouraging bad policies by reckless governments; relatively poorer and better behaved Slovakia should not be forced to support the irresponsible governments of richer European countries; the EU’s response to the Greek debt crisis has led to blatant violations of EU and European Central Bank rules, thus undermining democratic principles and the EU itself; the scare stories of not approving the bailout should not be believed; the best solution is for Greece is to declare bankruptcy once and for all.

In this document by his Freedom and Solidarity Party, Richard Sulik lays out his party’s opposition to the bailout fund. It is consistent with the views of other leading scholars including that of John Cochrane of the University of Chicago (and a Cato adjunct scholar) as expressed in his recent Wall Street Journal op-ed on how to save the Euro.

Sulik has tapped into popular sentiment among Europeans about the “democracy deficit,” or huge gap between the designs of Europe’s ruling elites and the desires of the region’s citizens. The widespread (and accurate) perception of Eurocrats imposing their agenda on Europe to the benefit of their cronies (e.g., big business, labor unions, and politicians in power) and at the expense of the majority is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. The Slovak government, which supports the bailout, may well fall on account of this vote, but the prime minister has already indicated that the vote on the bailout fund will be held repeatedly until it is approved. (No doubt there will be little possibility of a repeat vote repealing the bill.)

On a related note, a new Finnish think tank, Libera, provides more evidence that Europeans are rethinking big government. It published a study today which reassesses the record of the Swedish welfare state and praises the numerous market reforms that country has introduced out of necessity since the 1990s.

Why Slovakia May Not Support Europe’s Bailout Plan is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

After having risen for decades, global economic freedom has fallen for a second year in a row. That’s according to Economic Freedom of the World: 2011 Annual Report co-published today with the Fraser Institute. The average global economic freedom score rose from 5.53 (out of 10) in 1980 to 6.74 in 2007 and has fallen to 6.64 in 2009, the last year for which data is available.

As the graph below shows, the United States has had one of the largest declines in the past decade. It now ranks in 10^th place compared to 3^rd in 2000, largely due to higher government spending and lower ratings on “rule of law” measures. The report documents the strong, positive relationship between economic freedom and a range of indicators of standard of living including wealth, economic growth, longer life spans, better health care, lower poverty, civil and political liberties, and so on. Economic freedom is central to human progress. As the response of activist governments to financial and ongoing debt crises fails to address underlying issues responsible for low growth and high unemployment, this report is an important empirical reminder about the wide-ranging consequences of politics or markets in determining the use of resources.

The Decline in Global Economic Freedom is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Two good op-eds take a critical look at the so-called Beijing Consensus that purports to be an alternative to liberalism because of China’s economic success under authoritarian rule with its mix of interventionist and market-oriented policies. The key to China’s impressive progress in the past few decades has of course been its move from extreme poverty and a highly repressed economy toward economic freedom. In today’s Wall Street Journal, Liu Junning, a champion of liberal democracy in China, reminds readers of that fact and of “The Ancient Roots of Chinese Liberalism” (as noted in an earlier post by David Boaz). Writing in an Indian daily, Cato senior fellow Deepak Lal explains that state capitalism has not been the source of Chinese growth and warns against “China’s Hubris,” which is leading to a more assertive state and a decrease in personal liberty.

Questioning the Beijing Consensus is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

In the new video below, renowned civil libertarian and Cato senior fellow Nat Hentoff talks about his meeting with Che Guevara when Hentoff wrote for the Village Voice. (See it also here with Spanish subtitles.) El Che is romanticized by college kids and those on the left as a champion of the oppressed, but he was in fact a main architect of Cuban totalitarianism, a cold-blooded murderer whose defining characteristic was sheer intolerance of those with differing views. The best essay on Che, “The Killing Machine,” was written by Alvaro Vargas Llosa for the New Republic some years ago. 

It is hard to imagine a symbol in popular culture in which the represented ideal is more far apart from the historical reality than in the case with Che. Surely that gap helps explain Che’s appeal among people all over the world with little knowledge of Latin America. Four years ago on a visit to Hong Kong’s Legislative Council I saw pro-democracy activist and Council member Leung Kwok-hung, a.k.a. “Long Hair,” wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt on the floor of the chamber. (Hong Kong is not yet a democracy and its Legislative Council is quite limited in its powers; in practice, the city is ruled by the communists in Beijing, which has ironically upheld the city’s free-market model and rule of law tradition inherited from the British.) Does Long Hair not know that Che despised democracy?

In his classic book, The Latin Americans, the late Venezuelan intellectual Carlos Rangel explained how outsiders, especially Europeans, have since their earliest contact with Latin America idealized the place, projecting their fantasies and frustrations, and promoting ideas there that they themselves would not find acceptable on their own turf. Thus the early inhabitants of the region were “noble savages” despoiled and degraded by the Europeans; the noble savages later evolved into the good revolutionaries, those authentic Latin Americans who fight for everything that is good and reject the imposition of all forms of oppression. Simplistic and wrong, but effective. So it is even in Latin America, where, as Rangel explains, that storyline has served political leaders well as they justify the imposition of any number of restrictions on freedom, from tariffs to censorship. Che’s image still abounds in the region. (For an excellent and eminently relevant video in Spanish of Rangel speaking in Caracas in 1980 about the central problems with Venezuela, see here.) 

Incidentally, another Cato scholar had close ties to Che. The rebel was a cousin to well-known Argentine libertarian and adjunct scholar Alberto Benegas Lynch (Che’s complete last name was Guevara Lynch). In this article in Spanish, Alberto discusses his cousin Che.

When Che Guevara Met Nat Hentoff is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The last 10 years have probably been the best decade in Peruvian history in terms of economic growth and social progress. As I’ve described before, Peru has become an increasingly successful market democracy. Growth averaged a yearly 5.5 percent since 2001 and the poverty rate fell from 54 to 30 percent in the same period. And yet, Peruvians elected leftist Ollanta Humala as president on Sunday in a contentious, polarizing and very tight race.

Humala narrowly beat Keiko Fujimori, daughter of former President Alberto Fujimori, now serving a 25-year prison term for corruption and human rights abuses conducted during 10 years in power (1990-2000) that also saw the defeat of the Shining Path guerrillas and the liberalization of the Peruvian economy. Fujimori had trouble condemning violations committed under her father’s rule. Humala is a nationalist, former army officer and coup leader who for years advocated populist, anti-market policies of the kind practiced by Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez or Bolivia’s Evo Morales.

Though the election pitted two aspirants with questionable democratic credentials against each other, it would be a mistake to interpret it as a rejection of Peru’s market-liberal path. The two candidates got to the second round of elections because the various other presidential contenders broadly supportive of democratic capitalism carved up almost half the popular vote among themselves in the first round of elections. Humala’s initial vote was still high (32 percent), but it is doubtful he could have been elected president had only one market democrat run.

Compared to other Latin American countries, Peruvians’ support for a liberal society should not be surprising. The country set itself apart by introducing perhaps the most far-reaching market reforms of the early 1990s, sticking to those reforms, deepening some of them after the return of democracy last decade, and avoiding major public policy mistakes that led to economic crises in other countries. The result has been a transformation of large parts of the economy and society. Non-traditional exports and industries have flourished; wages have increased; economic growth has spread throughout the coast and much of the interior traditionally little affected by economic progress; successful Peruvian multinational corporations have emerged from humble roots; and poverty reduction has meant both the rise of a middle class and a narrowing gap between the rich and the poor.

According to Peruvian journalist and anthropologist Jaime de Althaus, “What we are seeing, in essence, is the birth of the free and autonomous citizen and his incorporation to the national dialogue of the market.” Bourgeois values are spreading. 

That is why so many Peruvians found the second round of voting unfortunate and agonizing. In the face of that dilemma, Peruvian Nobel laureate in literature and renowned classical liberal Mario Vargas Llosa exhorted his compatriots to vote for Humala in Sunday’s election on the idea that it was the lesser of two evils. My friend and colleague Alvaro Vargas Llosa (Mario’s well-known son) then vigorously campaigned for Humala, arguing constantly, articulately and forcefully that Humala no longer believed in his previous, extremist views. Thus he convinced at least a small portion of the electorate that Humala represented the modern Latin American left committed to civil liberties, economic stability and democracy along the lines of former President Lula of Brazil. It is probably fair to say that Alvaro made all the difference in the final weeks of this election, delivering the vote to Humala.

For many of us, though, the argument that Humala was now Lula and not Chavez was too hard to swallow. Why should we believe in the new democratic credentials of a politician who led a failed coup attempt in 2000, praised another failed coup attempt by his brother in 2005, and allied himself with Hugo Chavez in the previous elections (with credible indications that he received funds from the Venezuelan regime at that time)? After all, Humala’s campaign platform released in December 2010 called for nationalizing strategic industries, renegotiating free trade agreements, re-writitng the constitution, reviewing the legitimacy of radio and TV broadcast licenses, guaranteeing that the media “are at the service of democracy,” and it blamed “neoliberalism” for Peruvian poverty and advocated a general expansion of the state in society. Humala then changed his campaign platform considerably several times and professed to be ever more moderate. (I rarely believe U.S. politicians when they make much more credible claims of policy moderation.)

If instead you believed that the chances that Humala was just following a pattern of deception that we’ve seen elsewhere in Latin America where elected populists went on to destroy democracy and violate rights, then it was fully rational to oppose Humala. I hope Alvaro is right about his assessment. For the time being, uncertainty about Peru’s future will prevail. Those of us skeptical of Humala should now do everything we can to hold the new government to account and to steer it away from Chavismo, as I think is the intention of Humala’s liberal supporters.

Peru’s Election is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Now that Dominique Strauss-Kahn has resigned as head of the International Monetary Fund, the debate has turned to who will lead the lending agency as it goes through its usual non-transparent and politicized selection process. (Of course, virtually all decisions at the IMF are politicized since it is primarily a political institution, a club in which rich countries’ governments with diverse interests and political priorities typically lend money to governments with track records of mismanaging their economies.)

The IMF is a fundamentally flawed institution, a problem independent of whether the new Fund chief is French or South African. Here’s a brief reading list for anybody more interested in the scandal of IMF lending than of the scandals of IMF personalities.

• In this Cato Handbook essay I provide an overview of the IMF’s poor record at promoting growth or reform, and of the moral hazard of providing big bailouts to countries, beginning with Mexico in 1995.
• In “The IMF’s Imprudent Role as Lender of Last Resort,” Charles Calomiris describes how IMF rescue packages undermine global financial stability.
• In this Cato study, I review the evolution of the IMF, show that its lending tends to last for decades rather than be short term, and that it tends to slow rather than accelerate reforms. I argue for market solutions to debt crises.
• In “International Financial Crises: Myths and Realities,” Anna Schwartz explains that financial contagion during the Asian financial crisis—a key justification for IMF intervention—was not occurring. Only countries with flawed economic policies suffered crises.
• Here, Swami Aiyar argues that the IMF has no business lending to Greece.
• In “Asian Problems and the IMF,” Allan Meltzer criticizes the Fund’s subsidization of risk.
• Here Anna Schwartz takes on the Fund’s “dubious proposal” to turn itself into a sort of bankruptcy court for nations.
• In this study Swami Aiyar takes on another bad idea: creating an IMF currency to rival the dollar.

The IMF—A Reading List is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

A new World Bank working paper by Jean-Pierre Chauffour (author of the Cato book, The Power of Freedom: Uniting Human Rights and Development) finds that freedom is the root cause of development. In contrast to economic, political and civil freedoms, Chauffour finds that “beyond core functions of government. . . the expansion of the state to provide for various entitlements, including so-called economic, social and cultural rights, may not make people richer in the long run and may even make them poorer.”

Freedom vs. Entitlements is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The big international story that broke on Sunday understandably was the death of Osama Bin Laden. But another big story was that May 1 also marked the thirtieth anniversary of the introduction of Chile’s successful private pension system. Implemented by José Piñera (now a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Cato) to replace unsustainable public pensions, private retirement accounts have averaged real annual rates of return of more than 9 percent, contributed to economic growth and the rise in savings, and helped turn working Chileans into capitalists. They’ve been a key to Chile’s economic progress and political maturity. The reform has been copied in part or in full by some 30 countries around the world. And contrary to what American critics on the left claimed at the time, private pensions weathered the global financial storm admirably. It’s only a matter of time before the United States and other rich nations begin addressing the crisis in public pensions in the same way. But the sooner the better. See this piece from Investor’s Business Daily on Chile’s system at 30.

Thirty Years of Private Social Security in Chile is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Today Cato released the Economic Freedom of the States of India 2011 report (co-published with Indicus Analytics and the Friedrich Naumann Foundation) in Washington and New Delhi. India has been growing at high rates since it implemented market reforms in the early 1990s thus notably improving its level of economic freedom.

Yet India is an enormous country with some regions making more progress than others. The new report shows that there is a great diversity among Indian states in terms of economic freedom. Parallel to the findings of the Economic Freedom of the World report, the new study on India finds that states with more economic freedom tend to have better economic performance. As the graph shows, states that have increased their level of economic freedom in the past five years have also tended to grow faster.

Andhra Pradesh, India’s fifth largest state with a population of 84 million people, is the state that most increased its level of economic freedom since 2005, achieving an average annual growth rate of more than 9 percent. My colleague Swami Aiyar, co-author of the report, documents how that government reduced the level of its spending as a share of the economy and has made it easier to do business.

India has a long way to go before establishing a free economy (it ranks 87 out of 141 countries in the economic freedom index), and the current government has been rightly criticized for not pushing forward further necessary reforms of the kind that have led to high growth. We hope this new report will show that Indian leaders at the state level can still do much to improve economic freedom despite the national government’s lacking reform agenda.

Economic Freedom in India is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

In yesterday’s Brazilian daily, O Globo, Pedro Abramovay, the drug czar of the new Brazilian administration, said that Portugal’s experience with drug decriminalization should be considered as an alternative to Brazil’s current anti-narcotics policy. This comes on top of Rio Governor Sergio Cabral’s call for drug legalization and of former President Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s criticism, along with other prominent Latin Americans, of drug prohibition. By officially weighing in on the side of harm reduction, Latin America’s giant can have a significant effect on the debate over this hemisphere’s drug war.

Brazil’s Drug Czar: Let’s Look at Portugal’s Experience with Decriminalization is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Nicholas Kristof provides “a useful reminder of the limitations of charity and foreign aid” in his New York Times op-ed about Haiti today. “Nearly a year after the earthquake in Haiti,” he notes, “more than one million people are still living in tents and reconstruction has barely begun.”

He emphasizes the importance of “trade, not aid” and of the role of business: “It’s hard to think of a charitable project that will be as beneficial as the Coca-Cola Company’s decision to build up the mango juice industry in Haiti, supporting 25,000 farmers.”

He also cites a seemingly successful microfinance aid project that lends money to poor women in Haiti to begin and expand business ventures by, for example, investing in livestock or growing fruit for sale. It is impossible to evaluate the record of that organization based on the anecdotes Kristof provides, but, while microcredit may for a time alleviate the conditions under which poor recipients live (and be successful at pulling some recipients out of poverty), there is little evidence from its overall record that microcredit effectively reduces poverty. It is certainly not a way to reduce poverty on a widespread or sustainable basis. David Roodman of the Center for Global Development notes, for example, that “microfinance institutions in Haiti only reach perhaps 250,000 people, about 2.5% of the population.” (For a critique of some of the claims of microcredit proponents see Thomas Dichter’s Cato study.)

In line with Kristof’s main argument and with decades of evidence of successful countries around the world, the most effective way to reduce poverty in economically repressed Haiti is by opening its markets and increasing economic freedom. Unfortunately, Haiti’s reconstruction and long-term development plan, according to which the United States and international donors have pledged more than $15 billion, reads like a relic of central planning with virtually no mention of policies that promote economic freedom. Two sentences in the document mention the importance of clarifying land titles. One page mentions the role of the private sector, but it is in regards to its cooperation with the government’s “development centers” that will operate throughout the country to stimulate predetermined industries using government funds and guarantees and for “better redistribution of [the] population.”

We’ve been down this road before. If the Haitian government wishes to avoid disappointment and free itself from dependence on international aid, it needs to rethink its approach to development.

Hope and Dismay about Haiti’s Future is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Mexico ends 2010 with 15,000 illicit drug-related murders for the year—a record for the Calderon administration that began its term four years ago by declaring an all-out war on drug trafficking. Drug war violence skyrocketed since Calderon took office, claiming more than 30,000 lives. Though it is an unwinnable war whose consequences also include the rise of corruption and the weakening of the institutions of civil society, it is being used by drug warriors and skeptics alike to push for pet projects ranging from increased development aid to more military cooperation.

A recent example comes from the Washington Post this week. It editorialized in favor of an Obama administration plan to stem the flow of arms to Mexico, and it ran a story the same day citing the claim that 90 percent of guns in Mexico’s drug war come from the United States (though the Post also noted that the Mexican and U.S. governments refuse to release the results of their weapons traces). My colleague David Rittgers notes here that the proposed gun regulation is unlawful and here he has explained that a more realistic figure for guns of U.S. provenance is about 17 percent. In a Cato bulletin earlier this year, former Mexican foreign minister Jorge Castañeda calculated a similar figure and explained why attempts at controlling the trade in U.S. arms are a waste of time:

In fact, we only know with certainty that about 18 percent of guns come from the United States, according to Mexican and U.S. sources. The rest is surely coming from Central America, countries of the former Soviet Union, and beyond. And as countries as diverse as Brazil, Paraguay, Somalia, and Sudan attest — all countries with a higher arms per capita than Mexico — you don’t need a border with the United States to gain easy access to guns. Nevertheless, the possibilities of really limiting the sales of weapons in the United States is not imminent, to put it mildly. Moreover, asking the United States to stop arms trafficking from north to south is like asking Mexico to control its border from south to north, whether it is for drugs, people, or anything else. It’s not going to happen.

Another Dubious Record in Mexico’s Drug War is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Fifty years ago Tuesday, the United States began to impose sanctions on Cuba in what would turn into a comprehensive U.S. trade, finance and travel embargo.

Though the embargo is not the cause of Cuba’s dismal and deteriorating economic and social conditions, neither has it worked to change Cuban policies or even lead to regime change.

It is time to lift the embargo. Doing so will not save communism from its inherent flaws; that system collapsed spectacularly elsewhere around the world in places where the West maintained or established trade. Keeping the sanctions will only further allow the dictatorship and its sympathizers to explain away the regime’s own failings. It would be better for Cubans and the world to see the unraveling of Cuban communism without U.S. intervention. When a free Cuba is eventually born, it will more easily flourish if enemies of the open society cannot rely on a false narrative about how the colossus of the North finally killed off the island’s socialist experiment.

A good way to start would be by lifting the travel portion of the embargo. That measure would expose ordinary Cubans to hundreds of thousands of American citizens, thus inevitably expanding Cuba’s informal economy and establishing innumerable relationships that would make Cuban citizens more independent of the state. The regime may try to reap the benefits of increased revenues, but it will have unleashed a social dynamic that will be difficult to control.

The Cuba Embargo at 50 is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The Chilean mine accident and subsequent dramatic rescue of 33 miners in Chile has prompted criticism of capitalism from the usual quarters. Happily, there is an increasing recognition of the real story, as noted by Dan Henninger in the Wall Street Journal: capitalism saved the miners. Chile, long Latin America’s freest economy and now the fifth freest economy in the world according to the Economic Freedom of the World report, was able to rely on the latest technology and expertise provided by capitalist companies from around the world to execute a rescue that would not have been possible before the current era of globalization. The Washington Post also editorialized to that effect, saying, “Thanks to Chile’s openness to the world and embrace of entrepreneurship, it was able to effectively deploy cutting-edge technologies.” Here, commentator Star Parker writes about the miners and Chile’s remarkable transformation that began in the 1970s.

A Market Rescue in Chile is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog