Michael Rowan
Special for El Universal

Venezuela's closed revolution against free markets, globalization and private property produces more poverty, while the open application of those tools produces less poverty. These are incontrovertible facts of history. In the year 1000, everyone on earth had similar per person annual incomes ranging between $405-440 per year - everybody was poor in today's terms - and only a few percent of the people alive today could exist.

From 1000 to 1800, the developed world grew very slowly ahead of the undeveloped world as did global population. But from 1800 forward, the knowledge and technology of global civilization skyrocketed and populations everywhere grew to almost 7 billion. Since 1800, the developed world adapted very rapidly while the undeveloped world adapted less rapidly to applications of knowledge and technology exchanged globally via private property and markets. From 1820 to 1998, the annual per person income in the undeveloped world grew 5.4 times to $3,102 from $573, while the developed world increased income 19 times to $21,470 from $1,130. Everyone has gained a lot, but some more than others -- if and when they adapted to modern times.

An open Venezuela improved per person incomes significantly in the first half of the 20th century, but has failed miserably since nationalization of industry in the 1970s. Per person incomes are less today than they were in 1950, while poverty has soared. The state is rich with oil dollars, but the nation's families are poor. The 1999 "revolution for the poor" has closed the doors of society to knowledge, technology, private property, free markets and globalization. Not surprisingly, the result is more poverty.

Venezuela has also been exporting its failure to nations that share its ignorance about development history and who feel victimized by modern times. Venezuela advertises the miserable failure of Cuba in the last fifty years as a sea of happiness, which it is not, and scares the poor with past horrors such as imperialism and foreign invasion. The revolution is not being true to its intentions. It is either fully ignorant about poverty or it is using the obsolete rhetoric of revolution to gain total power in a closed society that will suffer from poverty as a result, just like Stalin's Soviet Union did.
mrowan@cantv.net

Michael Rowan's column is published every Tuesday