Me parece que llegó el momento de pasarnos definitivamente a WordPress.

Parece mentira, pero hoy en día consideramos de lo más normal del mundo el hecho de tomar un avión y viajar miles de kilómetros (visto en Johan Norberg).

Ya que aparentemente no aprendemos de los errores (u horrores) del pasado, tal vez nos sirva prestar atención a los resultados más extremos en el mundo real de las políticas que aplicamos en el país:

The trigger of this crisis — hyperinflation — reached an annual rate of 1,281 percent this month, and has been near or over 1,000 percent since last April. Hyperinflation has bankrupted the government, left 8 in 10 citizens destitute and decimated the country’s factories and farms.

Pay increases have so utterly failed to keep pace with price increases that some Harare workers now complain that bus fare to and from work consumes their entire salaries.

—-

Seeking to revive farm production, for example, the government sells gasoline to farmers at a bargain rate of 330 Zimbabwe dollars per liter — and farmers promptly resell it on the black market for 10 times that, leaving their fields idle.

Mr. Mugabe, who blames a Western plot against him for Zimbabwe’s problems, has rejected all calls for economic reform. The government refuses to devalue Zimbabwe’s dollar, which fetches only 5 to 10 percent of its official value on the thriving black market. As a result, foreign exchange to buy crucial imported goods like spare parts and fertilizer has effectively dried up.

—-

The central bank’s latest response to these problems, announced this week, was to declare inflation illegal. From March 1 to June 30, anyone who raises prices or wages will be arrested and punished. Only a “firm social contract” to end corruption and restructure the economy will bring an end to the crisis, said the reserve bank governor, Gideon Gono.

Is social stigma a threat to liberty, or is it liberty in action?

It’s the debate that won’t die: the endless face-off between conservatives and libertarians over the tension between liberty and morality. In his foreword to the 1998 anthology Freedom and Virtue: The Conservative/Libertarian Debate-much of it composed of essays from the 1950s and ’60s-editor George W. Carey described it as the main fault line dividing the two philosophies.

In Carey’s words, conservatives “believe that shared values, morals, and standards, along with accepted traditions, are necessary for the order and stability of society” and that some restrictions on individual freedom, including censorship, may be needed to preserve this social cohesion. Most libertarians, he continued, share the conservatives’ alarm about the “erosion of both public and private virtues” but regard individual liberty as the highest value and free choice as the prerequisite for true virtue.

So far, so good. But beyond rejecting moral enforcement by government, what is the libertarian view of moral and cultural standards upheld by a voluntary social consensus? Some conservatives accuse libertarians of treating all shared values or conventions with contempt.

Más del tema de Carlos en BlogBis.

Insisto, vivimos en una sociedad donde los gestos y los símbolos son mucho más importantes que los hechos. Y así nos va.

La inédita intervención política de los índices de precios puede tener como consecuencia inmediata no sólo que los datos dejen de ser confiables sino, además, que quienes son encuestados para producir estadísticas mientan, como una maniobra de defensa propia.

El Gobierno no sólo ya no garantiza el secreto estadístico, como exige la ley, sino que las oficinas de los técnicos son intervenidas y se impide el acceso a sus responsables, mientras personas ajenas revisan la información producida, que luego es sometida, como en la última medición del IPC, a una suerte de comité político, que decide qué es lo que hay que difundir.

Si bien es cierto que la cantidad de alumnos aumentó considerablemente, yo creo que el problema está directamente relacionado al hecho de que los aranceles universitarios fueron congelados a mediados de los 90 y en la actualidad alcanzan cifras irrisorias.

Estos suelen ser los resultados de las distorsiones que genera el estado. Creo que no hace falta explicar en detalle que la manera más eficiente de fomentar el consumo de un producto es mantener el precio artificialmente bajo.