#because even ‚leftists‘ there grow up on a diet of ‚this is the land of the free‘ and a sense of entitlement as well

[yuri-for-businesswomen]

so embarrassing how many self proclaimed leftists/communists/anarchists are prioritising individual feelings and identity over structural class analysis based on material reality and dont realise that is in fact liberal ideology lmao

[principleofplenitude]

The intricate synergies of coffee and capitalism form the subtext of the historian Augustine Sedgewick’s thoroughly engrossing first book, Coffeeland: One Man’s Dark Empire and the Making of Our Favorite Drug. At the center of Sedgewick’s narrative is James Hill, an Englishman born in the slums of industrial Manchester in 1871 who, at 18, sailed for Central America to make his fortune. There, he built a coffee dynasty by refashioning the Salvadoran countryside in the image of a Manchester factory. Hill became the head of one of the “Fourteen Families” who controlled the economy and politics of El Salvador for much of the 20th century; at the time of his death, in 1951, his 18 plantations employed some 5,000 people and produced more than 2,000 tons of export-ready coffee beans from more than 2,500 acres of rich soil on the slopes of the Santa Ana volcano. For many years, much of what Hill (or rather his workers) produced ended up in the familiar red tins of Hills Brothers coffee.“What does it mean to be connected to faraway people and places through everyday things?” Sedgewick asks in his early pages.  Coffeeland offers a fascinating meditation on that question, by rendering once-obscure lines of connection starkly visible.Filling those cans of Hills Brothers coffee involved a few different forms of brutality. Because growing coffee requires a tremendous amount of labor—for planting, pruning, picking, and processing—a planter’s success depends on finding enough people in the countryside willing to work. The essential question facing any would-be capitalist, as Sedgewick reminds us, has always and ever been “What makes people work?” Chattel slavery had provided a good answer for Brazil’s coffee farmers, but by the time Hill arrived in El Salvador, in 1889, slave labor was no longer an option. A smart and unsentimental businessman, Hill understood that he needed wage labor, lots of it, and as a son of the Manchester slums, he knew that the best answer to the question of what will make a person work was in fact simple: hunger.There was only one problem. Rural Salvadorans, most of whom were Indians called “mozos,” weren’t hungry. Many of them farmed small plots of communally owned land on the volcano, some of the most fertile in the country. This would have to change if El Salvador was to have an export crop. So at the behest of the coffee planters and in the name of “development,” the government launched a program of land privatization, forcing the Indians to either move to more marginal lands or find work on the new coffee plantations. Actually the choice wasn’t initially quite so stark. Even the lands newly planted with coffee still offered plenty of free food for the picking. “Veins of nourishment”—in the form of cashews, guavas, papayas, jocotes, figs, dragon fruits, avocados, mangoes, plantains, tomatoes, and beans—“ran through the coffee monoculture, and wherever there was food, however scant, there was freedom, however fleeting, from work,” Sedgewick writes. The planters’ solution to this “problem”—the problem of nature’s bounty—was to eliminate from the landscape any plant that was not coffee, creating an ever more totalitarian monoculture in which nothing else was permitted to grow. When a chance avocado tree did manage to survive in some overlooked corner, the campesino caught tasting its fruit would be accused of theft and beaten if he was lucky, or shot if he was not. Thus was the concept of private property impressed upon the Indians. In Sedgewick’s words, “What was needed to harness the will of the Salvadoran people to the production of coffee, beyond land privatization, was the plantation’s production of hunger itself.” James Hill did the math and found that workers showed up most promptly and worked most diligently if he paid them partly in cash—15 cents a day for women and double that for men—and partly in food: breakfast and lunch, which consisted of two tortillas topped with as many beans as could be balanced on them. (The local diet became as monotonous as the landscape.) Hill thus transformed thousands of subsistence farmers and foragers into wage laborers, extracting quantities of surplus value that would be the envy of any Manchester factory owner.The whole notion of surplus value of course is Karl Marx’s and, as Sedgewick points out, emerged from Marx and Friedrich Engels’s analysis of industrial capitalism in James Hill’s birthplace. Communism was another Manchester export that found its way to Santa Ana, this one arriving during the Great Depression, when coffee prices collapsed and unemployed coffee workers could no longer eat from the land. It turns out that leftists were also able “to transform hunger into power.” The climax of Sedgewick’s narrative comes in the early 1930s, when thousands of mozos, organized by homegrown Communists who had spent time abroad, rose up against the coffee barons, seizing plantations and occupying town halls.Revolution was afoot, at least until 1932, when the Salvadoran government, again at the behest of the coffee planters, launched a vicious counterinsurgency. Rounding up anyone who looked like an Indian, soldiers herded them into town squares and then opened fire with machine guns. The government’s campaign against the coffee workers came to be known as La Matanza—“The Massacre”—and its memory burns bright in the Salvadoran countryside. When El Salvador erupted for a second time half a century later, the coffee barons were under siege again; James Hill’s grandson, Jaime Hill, was kidnapped by rebels and held for a multimillion-dollar ransom, which the family had no trouble paying.

“Capitalism’s favorite drug” from The Atlantic

[newestbalance]

‘I Give and You Give’: Venezuela’s Leader Dangles Food for Votes

CIUDAD GUYANA, Venezuela — Julio Romero emerged from the flag-waving crowd as President Nicolás Maduro stood smiling on a stage, dancing to an election jingle.

Mr. Romero, 42, was in no mood to celebrate. He clutched the colostomy bag he has used since he was shot last September, when armed men stole his taxi and any chance he had of making a living. Though he had managed to attend the rally, Mr. Romero did not consider himself a supporter of the president.

He had come in search of food.

“I came here because I thought they would give me something to eat,” said Mr. Romero, referring to the handouts often seen at government rallies.

Venezuela was once a country whose governing party used elections to speak about transforming society in revolutionary terms. It built homes and clinics and schools for the poor. Its ideas spread throughout the region, influencing leftist leaders throughout Latin America for more than a decade.

But years of mismanagement have scaled back those dreams, if not dismantled them altogether, in an economic collapse that is one of the worst in the Western Hemisphere in modern times.

This election, it seems, is in many ways about food.

Venezuela’s inflation is already the worst in the world and is expected to hit a stunning 13,000 percent this year. Stores are empty and people sift through garbage for scraps. Many people call the country’s malnutrition the “Maduro diet,” laying blame for the gaunt figures that are common sights now on Mr. Maduro.

A large majority of Venezuelans are dependent on the government for subsidized groceries distributed by local councils loyal to the president. Food has even entered the election, potentially controlling the way Venezuelans will vote.

Many people receive their subsidies using a special identity card that is playing a big role in this election. For Sunday’s vote, Venezuelans have been told to present these cards at stations run by Mr. Maduro’s governing party at polling places — so that party organizers can see who has voted and who has not.

“Everyone who has this card must vote,” Mr. Maduro has said at his campaign rallies, directly linking government handouts to voting. “I give and you give.”

Many see his words as wielding food as a tool to buy votes in the campaign — or to intimidate hungry people who might consider voting against him.

“Maduro has put it clearly: It’s an exchange of loyalty,” said Margarita López Maya, a political scientist.

The election is a pivotal moment for Venezuela. The country’s democracy has come under assault since Mr. Maduro won a special election in 2013 after the death of President Hugo Chávez.

The big shift here began in late 2015, when Mr. Maduro’s governing United Socialist Party lost control of the National Assembly. But before the new legislature could be seated, pro-Maduro lawmakers stacked the Supreme Court with loyalists, stifling the opposition’s agenda.

Then in 2017, Mr. Maduro sidelined the legislature altogether, pushing through the creation of a new body, the Constituent Assembly, that had the power to rewrite the Constitution and effectively run the country. Mr. Maduro consolidated his power as the new group took over.

Now comes another major test for the country: a presidential vote that many international observers say has been engineered for Mr. Maduro to win a new term.

Many major international election observers have refused to monitor the vote on the grounds that it will not be fair. Most of the main opposition parties have been disqualified from running and their most popular potential candidates have been jailed or barred from holding office.

Those eligible to run have mostly called for a boycott. The date of the election is even a point of contention: The vote was called six months early, in what Mr. Maduro’s rivals say was an effort to give them little time to prepare for it.

The United States and many countries in the region have said they will not recognize the winner of the election.

“They do whatever they want and put themselves above the law and above the interests of the people,” said Héctor Navarro, who served for years as a minister in the government of Mr. Chávez and is now part of a growing list of former top Chávez officials who have become dissidents while still keeping their distance from the traditional opposition.

“In the history of Venezuela, every government has had its weaknesses and problems: murderous governments, thieving governments, incompetent governments, lazy governments, those have always been around,” Mr. Navarro said. “But all at the same time? That has never happened before, a government with all of those traits.”

It is the government’s inability to feed its people that has stunned Venezuelans the most, even some of Mr. Maduro’s fiercest supporters.

Isabela Romero, a 50-year-old schoolteacher, stood in the crowd of the president’s supporters in Ciudad Guyana, once a growing industrial city whose wealth was fueled by iron, steel and aluminum. Many factories are idle, and lines outside of grocery stores have been endlessly long for years.

Two decades ago, Ms. Romero voted for Mr. Chávez and saw the benefits of his reforms: She received a master’s degree that his government paid for and a parcel of land that had been expropriated, she said.

Now her hopes have changed under Mr. Maduro. “He just needs to find a way to make an economic revolution, so we can eat once again,” she said.

At his rally that day, the president sounded nearly contrite, saying he had made mistakes in the past and had “matured” — a play on words using his last name. He promised big changes to get people to work once again, an “economic revolution” that would give people jobs and opportunities again. Mr. Maduro insists that the country’s problems are the result of an “economic war” waged against it by the United States.

At a separate news conference, Mr. Maduro insisted that he was still a democrat. “Do they really think that people here are so stupid and submissive that they would put up with a dictator?” he said.

For some, the lack of food is just part of the desperation that has made many here receptive to the call for a boycott of the vote.

“People are very dispirited and they aren’t prepared to go out and vote,” said Miriam Bravo, a 40-year-old mother of seven with a 3-month-old baby in the sprawling Petare slum of Caracas, the capital. She said that her husband died in January from cancer, the victim of a health system in a free fall, with medicines scarce or nonexistent and adequate treatment often unavailable.

Ms. Bravo, a seamstress, said that before the crisis she and her husband used to take their children to the beach or to a park near the center of Caracas on weekends. Sometimes, they would treat themselves to a meal at McDonald’s. Now she struggles to put food on the table even twice a day.

“I think that by voting I will just be supporting the government,” Ms. Bravo said. “I don’t think that the election should be carried out in these conditions.”

While many opposition figures have called for a boycott of Sunday’s election, the two main candidates who have defied that appeal to challenge Mr. Maduro are Henri Falcón, a former follower of Mr. Chávez who later joined the opposition, and Javier Bertucci, a wealthy evangelical minister.

The question of abstention has weighed on the opposition, tearing apart what had been a unified front against Mr. Maduro in previous elections. His rivals faced a difficult choice: Participate in an election that many believed was rigged against them, or boycott the vote and assure a victory for Mr. Maduro.

On Thursday, those tensions were laid bare in Caracas outside the headquarters of Venezuela’s intelligence agency, which contains a jail holding about 55 political prisoners, including opposition activists and a prominent opposition politician. The night before, many of those prisoners had begun a protest in which they occupied a section of the jail, sending out text messages and videos. The images showed a prisoner they said had been badly beaten on the orders of guards.

Outside the complex, family members of the prisoners and opposition activists gathered. Mr. Bertucci, the evangelical minister running against Mr. Maduro, showed up in what he said was an effort to draw attention to the prisoners’ plight. But many of those present saw it as a campaign event for an illegitimate election.

“Get out!” they screamed, as he tried to speak to reporters. Someone threw water at him. “Bertucci is Maduro! I ask for democracy!” another shouted.

Mr. Bertucci remained calm. “Calling for abstention is not the way to free them,” he said of the prisoners. “We have to do more than protest. I believe the only weapon is the vote.”

Desireé Rodríguez, a volunteer cook at a Caracas soup kitchen, said that she intended to ignore calls for the boycott and would vote for Mr. Falcón.

Ms. Rodríguez, 33, who has a 10-year-old son, said that before the soup kitchen opened in January, her family was short on food and often ate just twice a day. She recalled counting out the small potatoes she could afford to make sure there were enough for more than one meal, or carefully dividing up a ration of pasta to stretch it across two or more days.

“This is like an epidemic,” she said. “Ask any poor person and they will tell you the same thing.”

In a Caracas slum called La Vega, Iris Hidalgo, 50, struggled with the question of whether to vote on Sunday.

She said that she had always voted for Mr. Chávez and then, in 2013, for Mr. Maduro.

“I regret it now,” she said. “He destroyed the country.”

Nicholas Casey reported from Ciudad Guyana, and William Neuman from Caracas, Venezuela.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A7 of the New York edition with the headline: President of Venezuela Dangles Food for Votes. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

The post ‘I Give and You Give’: Venezuela’s Leader Dangles Food for Votes appeared first on World The News.

from World The News https://ift.tt/2GwBgJ8 via Everyday News

[stopkingobama]

Dark Humor from the Socialist Hellhole of Venezuela

Photo source: Pixabay, tpsdave, CC0 Public Domain, https://pixabay.com/en/maracaibo-venezuela-building-old-110257/

Back in 2015, I mocked Venezuelan socialism because it led to shortages of just about every product. Including toilet paper.

But maybe that doesn’t matter. After all, if people don’t have anything to eat, they probably don’t have much need to visit the bathroom.

The Washington Post reports that farmers are producing less and less food because of government intervention, even though the nation is filled with hungry people.

Venezuela, whose economy operates on its own special plane of dysfunction. At a time of empty supermarkets and spreading hunger, the country’s farms are producing less and less, not more, making the caloric deficit even worse. Drive around the countryside outside the capital, Caracas, and there’s everything a farmer needs: fertile land, water, sunshine and gasoline at 4 cents a gallon, cheapest in the world. Yet somehow families here are just as scrawny-looking as the city-dwelling Venezuelans waiting in bread lines or picking through garbage for scraps. …“Last year I had 200,000 hens,” said Saulo Escobar, who runs a poultry and hog farm here in the state of Aragua, an hour outside Caracas. “Now I have 70,000.” Several of his cavernous henhouses sit empty because, Escobar said, he can’t afford to buy more chicks or feed. Government price controls have made his business unprofitable…the country is facing a dietary calamity. With medicines scarce and malnutrition cases soaring, more than 11,000 babies died last year, sending the infant mortality rate up 30 percent, according to Venezuela’s Health Ministry. …Child hunger in parts of Venezuela is a “humanitarian crisis,” according to a new report by the Catholic relief organization Caritas, which found 11.4 percent of children under age 5 suffering from moderate to severe malnutrition… In a recent survey of 6,500 Venezuelan families by the country’s leading universities, three-quarters of adults said they lost weight in 2016 — an average of 19 pounds. This collective emaciation is referred to dryly here as “the Maduro diet,” but it’s a level of hunger almost unheard-of… Venezuela’s disaster is man-made, economists point out — the result of farm nationalizations, currency distortions and a government takeover of food distribution. …The price controls have become a powerful disincentive in rural Venezuela. “There are no profits, so we produce at a loss,” said one dairy farmer.

Here’s where we get to the economics lesson. When producers aren’t allowed to profit, they don’t produce.

And when we’re looking at the production of food, that means hungry people.

Even the left-wing Guardian in the U.K. has noticed.

Hunger is gnawing at Venezuela, where a government that claims to rule for the poorest has left most of its 31 million people short of food, many desperately so. …Adriana Velásquez gets ready for work, heading out into an uncertain darkness as she has done since hunger forced her into the only job she could find at 14. She was introduced to her brothel madam by a friend more than two years ago after her mother, a single parent, was fired and the two ran out of food. “It was really hard, but we were going to bed without eating,” said the teenager, whose name has been changed to protect her. …Venezuela’s crisis has deepened, the number of women working at the brothel has doubled, and their ages have dropped. “I was the youngest when I started. Now there are girls who are 12 or 13. Almost all of us are there because of the crisis, because of hunger.” She earns 400,000 bolivares a month, around four times the minimum wage, but at a time of hyperinflation that is now worth about $30, barely enough to feed herself, her mother and a new baby brother.

This is truly sad.

Our leftist friends like to concoct far-fetched theories of how prostitution is enabled by everything from low taxes to global warming.

In the real world, however, socialism drives teenage girls (or even younger) to work in brothels.

That’s such a depressing thought that let’s shift the topic back to hunger and toilet paper.

Especially since Venezuela’s dictator is bragging that the nation’s toilet paper shortage has been solved!

This is definitely a dark version of satire.

But Venezuela is such a mess that it’s hard to know where to draw the line between mockery and reality.

For instance, here’s another “benefit” of limited food. If you don’t eat, it’s not as necessary to brush your teeth.

And is the socialist paradise of Venezuela, that makes a virtue out of necessity since – surprise – there’s a shortage of toothpaste.

The Washington Post has the grim details.

Ana Margarita Rangel…spends everything she earns to fend off hunger. Her shoes are tattered and torn, but she cannot afford new ones. A tube of toothpaste costs half a week’s wages. “I’ve always loved brushing my teeth before going to sleep I mean, that’s the rule, right?” said Rangel, …“Now I have to choose,” she said. “So I do it only in the mornings.” …The government sets price caps on some basic food items, such as pasta, rice and flour. …those items can usually be obtained only by standing in lines for hours or by signing up to receive a subsidized monthly grocery box from the government… Since 2014, the proportion of Venezuelan families in poverty has soared from 48 percent to 82 percent… Fifty-two percent of families live in extreme poverty, according to the survey, and about 31 percent survive on two meals per day at most.

Isn’t socialism wonderful! You have the luxury of choosing between two meals a day, or one meal a day plus toothpaste!

By the way, the central planners have a plan.

Though it won’t make Bugs Bunny happy.

Rabbit is now on the menu! Here are some excerpts from a CNN report.

Let them eat rabbits. That was basically the message from President Nicolas Maduro to Venezuelans starving and struggling through severe food shortages… The Venezuelan leaders…recommend that people raise rabbits at home as a source of food. …The agriculture minister argued that rabbits easily reproduce and are a source of protein. He also recommended citizens consider raising and growing other animals and vegetables at home. It’s just the latest attempt to try and solve the food shortage problem. The government forces citizens to pick up groceries on certain days of the week depending on social security numbers.

Gee, isn’t this wonderful. The government cripples markets so they can’t function and then advocates people live like medieval peasants.

Maybe there should be price controls on clothing, along with having the government in charge of distribution. That will wreck that market as well, so people can make their own clothes out of rabbit pelts.

I wonder whether a certain American lawmaker is rethinking his praise of Venezuelan economic policy?

Based on what he said as recently as last year, the answer is no.

Republished from Intentional Liberty

Daniel J. Mitchell

Daniel J. Mitchell is a Washington-based economist who specializes in fiscal policy, particularly tax reform, international tax competition, and the economic burden of government spending. He also serves on the editorial board of the Cayman Financial Review.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

[americanlibertypac]

Dark Humor from the Socialist Hellhole of Venezuela

Photo source: Pixabay, tpsdave, CC0 Public Domain, https://pixabay.com/en/maracaibo-venezuela-building-old-110257/

Back in 2015, I mocked Venezuelan socialism because it led to shortages of just about every product. Including toilet paper.

But maybe that doesn’t matter. After all, if people don’t have anything to eat, they probably don’t have much need to visit the bathroom.

The Washington Post reports that farmers are producing less and less food because of government intervention, even though the nation is filled with hungry people.

Venezuela, whose economy operates on its own special plane of dysfunction. At a time of empty supermarkets and spreading hunger, the country’s farms are producing less and less, not more, making the caloric deficit even worse. Drive around the countryside outside the capital, Caracas, and there’s everything a farmer needs: fertile land, water, sunshine and gasoline at 4 cents a gallon, cheapest in the world. Yet somehow families here are just as scrawny-looking as the city-dwelling Venezuelans waiting in bread lines or picking through garbage for scraps. …“Last year I had 200,000 hens,” said Saulo Escobar, who runs a poultry and hog farm here in the state of Aragua, an hour outside Caracas. “Now I have 70,000.” Several of his cavernous henhouses sit empty because, Escobar said, he can’t afford to buy more chicks or feed. Government price controls have made his business unprofitable…the country is facing a dietary calamity. With medicines scarce and malnutrition cases soaring, more than 11,000 babies died last year, sending the infant mortality rate up 30 percent, according to Venezuela’s Health Ministry. …Child hunger in parts of Venezuela is a “humanitarian crisis,” according to a new report by the Catholic relief organization Caritas, which found 11.4 percent of children under age 5 suffering from moderate to severe malnutrition… In a recent survey of 6,500 Venezuelan families by the country’s leading universities, three-quarters of adults said they lost weight in 2016 — an average of 19 pounds. This collective emaciation is referred to dryly here as “the Maduro diet,” but it’s a level of hunger almost unheard-of… Venezuela’s disaster is man-made, economists point out — the result of farm nationalizations, currency distortions and a government takeover of food distribution. …The price controls have become a powerful disincentive in rural Venezuela. “There are no profits, so we produce at a loss,” said one dairy farmer.

Here’s where we get to the economics lesson. When producers aren’t allowed to profit, they don’t produce.

And when we’re looking at the production of food, that means hungry people.

Even the left-wing Guardian in the U.K. has noticed.

Hunger is gnawing at Venezuela, where a government that claims to rule for the poorest has left most of its 31 million people short of food, many desperately so. …Adriana Velásquez gets ready for work, heading out into an uncertain darkness as she has done since hunger forced her into the only job she could find at 14. She was introduced to her brothel madam by a friend more than two years ago after her mother, a single parent, was fired and the two ran out of food. “It was really hard, but we were going to bed without eating,” said the teenager, whose name has been changed to protect her. …Venezuela’s crisis has deepened, the number of women working at the brothel has doubled, and their ages have dropped. “I was the youngest when I started. Now there are girls who are 12 or 13. Almost all of us are there because of the crisis, because of hunger.” She earns 400,000 bolivares a month, around four times the minimum wage, but at a time of hyperinflation that is now worth about $30, barely enough to feed herself, her mother and a new baby brother.

This is truly sad.

Our leftist friends like to concoct far-fetched theories of how prostitution is enabled by everything from low taxes to global warming.

In the real world, however, socialism drives teenage girls (or even younger) to work in brothels.

That’s such a depressing thought that let’s shift the topic back to hunger and toilet paper.

Especially since Venezuela’s dictator is bragging that the nation’s toilet paper shortage has been solved!

This is definitely a dark version of satire.

But Venezuela is such a mess that it’s hard to know where to draw the line between mockery and reality.

For instance, here’s another “benefit” of limited food. If you don’t eat, it’s not as necessary to brush your teeth.

And is the socialist paradise of Venezuela, that makes a virtue out of necessity since – surprise – there’s a shortage of toothpaste.

The Washington Post has the grim details.

Ana Margarita Rangel…spends everything she earns to fend off hunger. Her shoes are tattered and torn, but she cannot afford new ones. A tube of toothpaste costs half a week’s wages. “I’ve always loved brushing my teeth before going to sleep I mean, that’s the rule, right?” said Rangel, …“Now I have to choose,” she said. “So I do it only in the mornings.” …The government sets price caps on some basic food items, such as pasta, rice and flour. …those items can usually be obtained only by standing in lines for hours or by signing up to receive a subsidized monthly grocery box from the government… Since 2014, the proportion of Venezuelan families in poverty has soared from 48 percent to 82 percent… Fifty-two percent of families live in extreme poverty, according to the survey, and about 31 percent survive on two meals per day at most.

Isn’t socialism wonderful! You have the luxury of choosing between two meals a day, or one meal a day plus toothpaste!

By the way, the central planners have a plan.

Though it won’t make Bugs Bunny happy.

Rabbit is now on the menu! Here are some excerpts from a CNN report.

Let them eat rabbits. That was basically the message from President Nicolas Maduro to Venezuelans starving and struggling through severe food shortages… The Venezuelan leaders…recommend that people raise rabbits at home as a source of food. …The agriculture minister argued that rabbits easily reproduce and are a source of protein. He also recommended citizens consider raising and growing other animals and vegetables at home. It’s just the latest attempt to try and solve the food shortage problem. The government forces citizens to pick up groceries on certain days of the week depending on social security numbers.

Gee, isn’t this wonderful. The government cripples markets so they can’t function and then advocates people live like medieval peasants.

Maybe there should be price controls on clothing, along with having the government in charge of distribution. That will wreck that market as well, so people can make their own clothes out of rabbit pelts.

I wonder whether a certain American lawmaker is rethinking his praise of Venezuelan economic policy?

Based on what he said as recently as last year, the answer is no.

Republished from Intentional Liberty

Daniel J. Mitchell

Daniel J. Mitchell is a Washington-based economist who specializes in fiscal policy, particularly tax reform, international tax competition, and the economic burden of government spending. He also serves on the editorial board of the Cayman Financial Review.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.