Don’t Believe In Free-Market Medicine? Have You Ever Seen the Inside of a Venezuelan Supermarket?

Venezuelan supermarket:

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It was in early autumn of 1989 that the drunkard Boris Yeltsin, soon-to-be president of the Soviet Union, visited, for the first time in his life, a supermarket in Houston, Texas.

Not long afterward, in his autobiography Against the Grain, Yeltsin wrote about this watershed moment:

“When I saw those shelves crammed with hundreds, thousands of cans, cartons and goods of every possible sort, I felt quite frankly sick with despair for the Soviet people.”

Michael Dobbs, describing that same moment in his book Down With Big Brother: The Fall of the Soviet Empire, said this:

A turning point in Yeltsin’s intellectual development occurred during his first visit to the United States in September 1989, more specifically his first visit to an American supermarket, in Houston, Texas. The sight of aisle after aisle of shelves neatly stacked with every conceivable type of foodstuff and household item, each in a dozen varieties, both amazed and depressed him. For Yeltsin, like many other first-time Russian visitors to America, this was infinitely more impressive than tourist attractions like the Statue of Liberty and the Lincoln Memorial. It was impressive precisely because of its ordinariness. A cornucopia of consumer goods beyond the imagination of most Soviets was within the reach of ordinary citizens without standing in line for hours. And it was all so attractively displayed. For someone brought up in the drab conditions of communism, even a member of the relatively privileged elite, a visit to a Western supermarket involved a full-scale assault on the senses.

“What we saw in that supermarket was no less amazing than America itself,” recalled Lev Sukhanov, who accompanied Yeltsin on his trip to the United States and shared his sense of shock and dismay at the gap in living standards between the two superpowers. “I think it is quite likely that the last prop of Yeltsin’s Bolshevik consciousness finally collapsed after Houston. His decision to leave theparty and join the struggle for supreme power in Russia may have ripened irrevocably at that moment of mental confusion.”

On the plane, traveling from Houston to Miami, Yeltsin seemed lost in his thoughts for a long time. He clutched his head in his hands. Eventually he broke his silence. “They had to fool the people,” he told Sukhanov. “It is now clear why they made it so difficult for the average Soviet citizen to go abroad. They were afraid that people’s eyes would open.”

Many years before, when Nikita Kruschev first visited the United States, he, too, was taken to a garden-variety supermarket. And what he saw there looked to him so beyond belief that he actually thought it was all set up to deceive him. Poverty and want had been so thoroughly inculcated into him that he simply couldn’t accept that Kapitalist America had such a rich variety of food and household goods readily available for everyone, twenty-four hours a day, everyday.

Venezuela, as you know, has been under socialist rule for decades, regime after regime militantly opposed to free-markets, and I’d like the stark contrast to serve as a reminder to those who support government control of healthcare, as against free-market medicine — free-market medicine, mind you, which I’ve always said will provide far greater goods and services, at higher quality and lower costs, than any government committee, no matter how ingenious, could ever in its wildest imagination conceive.

Here are five charts which show the very clear progression and correlation of rising healthcare costs and socialized medicine in America:








Free Will

A reader writes:

Dear Ray Harvey: Can you prove that humans possess the faculty of choice?

— Waffling

Dear Waffling: Yes, I can. And so can you. But first let me point something out: in the same way that you could not ever conceive dreaming if you’re never awake, so you can never conceive choice if you’re never actually able to choose. In other words, the fact that you’re even able to conceive of volition at all goes a very long way in proving it. Choice is an inherent — and definitional — part of the rational faculty, which humans alone possess.

While you’re at your computer right now, think of some small and inconsequential task you could perform — moving your mouse arrow to a certain quadrant of the screen, for instance, or tapping your spacebar once — but do not actually do it. Whatever the small task is that you conceive of, fix it in your mind for a moment. Observe yourself. Observe that in this moment you can choose to perform that small task, or you can choose not to perform it. You have an alternative, and your will alone is what will determine the outcome. Observe that what determines your choice is your decision to do it or not. That decision is your freedom of will. Quoting (again) the philosophical psychologist Rollo May:

When we analyze will with all the tools that modern psychology brings us, we shall find ourselves pushed back to the level of attention or inattention as the seat of will. The effort which goes into the exercise of will is really effort of attention; the strain in willing is the effort to keep the consciousness clear, i.e. the strain of keeping attention focused” (Rollo May, Love and Will, 1969).

Now, Waffling, decide, one way or the other, and then follow through with your decision.

That’s all the proof you need: direct observation. All knowledge starts and ends with observation.