Hugo Chavez

I've been doing my own private mourning, thank you. I had heard the Hugo took property he wanted when the deed records weren't complete. Ahem, big deal of course. But Hugo insisted that deeds go back through 1821 through an interval where records for some reason were far from complete. Now I don't now about the oil development except to read from the Economist, and he seems to have shown the same interest in oil production at the state run oil company as the communists did on news gathering in their staffing of Isvestia and Pravda. As for stealing from the future, you do know that Argentina was the richest country in the world, per capita income wise, at the turn of the century. Puzzled? I guess, like me, you really don't remember 1900. No, what I am mourning about is that these largely Catholic countries can be such a mess while Israel with a little sand and Palestinian only buses can have such a dynamic economy. To his credit though, and clowns seem to be more in favor these day, Chavez didn't kill his opponents.

The Atlantic if I recall correctly had an interesting graphic a year ago. It showed that the Roman empire hit a nadir bushel of wheat earned per hour of labor in the middle of the third century. One of the error dynamics of the Roman derived states seems to be a struggle between syndicalism in control of property and redistribution on a base of static development of resources or TFP to coin a phrase.