From North Korea to Venezuela to Zimbabwe: When terrible government destroys a country

By James Pethokoukis of AEI.

"It’s especially compelling when reality makes your economic and and political points vividly clear and intellectually inescapable. Nothing like a natural experiment to drive a message home. Unfortunately, the fellow traveler in these cases is sometimes vast human misery. At unification, West German living standards were more than twice those in the communist East (and are still a third higher despite $2 trillion in fiscal transfers over the years). Venezuela shows what happens when full authoritarian populism gets put into action. And who hasn’t seen the stark image of the two Koreas at night, the prosperity of the South glowing brightly.

Then there’s the case of Zimbabwe, which just saw a coup removing dictator Robert Mugabe after nearly four decades in power. From The Economist:

There are two morals to draw from Mr Mugabe’s long, ignominious career. The first is that bad policies, corruptly implemented, can wreck a country with alarming speed and go on wrecking it long after you would have thought there was nothing left. Venezuela has little in common with Zimbabwe culturally, but has also achieved disastrous results by embracing a Latin version of Mugabenomics. By contrast, Botswana, Zimbabwe’s culturally similar but well-governed neighbour, was roughly as rich in 1980 but is now seven times richer."