We’re not into nation building, so our profoundest hope is that a new elected regime is put in place soon, and the U.S. military pulls out of Caracas as quickly as possible. What the new government needs to do is to call in “the Chicago Boys” to jumpstart the economy with free markets, as happened so famously in the 1970s and ’80s in Chile. That helped Chile become the jewel of South America.
The road to prosperity is pretty simple: Privatize, dollarize and incentivize (with lower tax rates).
One nation that has pulled off this transition to rapid economic growth is Poland. Under “the warm embrace” of communism, it was an economic basket case. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, free markets have generated growth at such a rapid pace (almost 4% a year) that the Poles are likely to overtake Britain (which has grown only 0.7% a year since 2008) in per capita GDP by the end of the decade.
