The Heritage Insider: Fidel Castro was a brutal dictator, free trade is the real populist policy, the UN wants the poor to remain poor, look beyond health insurance reform to improve health care

December 3, 2016

 

 

Fidel Castro was a brutal dictator who killed many thousands of Cubans and impoverished his island nation. More free trade is the real populist policy that will raise American living standards. Energy abundance is the key to lifting people out of poverty. To improve health care, look beyond health insurance reform.

 

 

Castro’s real record. Ex-dictator Fidel Castro, dead and much lionized this week by the political Left, impoverished Cuba during his nearly 50 years in control of the island. Writes Tim Worstall: “[I]n 1959, when Castro took power, GDP per capita for Cuba was some $2,067 a year. About two-thirds of Latin America in general and about the same as Ecuador (1,975), Jamaica (2,541), Panama (2,322) and two-thirds of Puerto Rico (3,239). […] By 1999, 40 years later, Cuba had advanced hardly at all, to $2,307, while Ecuador had, relatively, jumped to 3,809, Jamaica to 3,670, Panama to 5,618 and Puerto Rico to 13,738. GDP isn’t everything of course but it’s still hugely important. For it’s the basic measure of what it is possible that people, on average, can consume. And we don’t tend to think that Ecuador, Jamaica, Panama and Puerto Rico were particularly well run in the latter decades of the 20th century but at least they didn’t have a government actively conspiring to keep them impoverished like Cuba did.” [Foundation for Economic Education]

 

Thirteen facts about Fidel Castro: Carlos Eire punctures the myths about Castro’s revolution: “He turned Cuba into a colony of the Soviet Union and nearly caused a nuclear holocaust. He sponsored terrorism wherever he could and allied himself with many of the worst dictators on earth. He was responsible for so many thousands of executions and disappearances in Cuba that a precise number is hard to reckon. He brooked no dissent and built concentration camps and prisons at an unprecedented rate, filling them to capacity, incarcerating a higher percentage of his own people than most other modern dictators, including Stalin. He condoned and encouraged torture and extrajudicial killings. He forced nearly 20 percent of his people into exile, and prompted thousands to meet their deaths at sea, unseen and uncounted, while fleeing from him in crude vessels. He claimed all property for himself and his henchmen, strangled food production and impoverished the vast majority of his people. He outlawed private enterprise and labor unions, wiped out Cuba’s large middle class and turned Cubans into slaves of the state. He persecuted gay people and tried to eradicate religion. He censored all means of expression and communication.” [Washington Post]

 

Free trade is the real populist policy. The forthcoming 2017 Index of Economic Freedom finds that countries with low trade barriers have higher per capita incomes, less hunger, and better environmental performance than countries with higher trade barriers. Why is that so? Bryan Riley and Terry Miller explain it this way: “The idea behind freedom to trade is simple: People are better off when they decide for themselves how to spend their money than when politicians or bureaucrats decide for them.” In other words, they note, free trade is the opposite of an elitist policy. [The Heritage Foundation]

 

Energy abundance—not green energy—will raise people out of poverty. The United Nations thinks solar panels, solar lanterns, and other “clean energy” technologies can bring energy wealth to the poorest parts of the world. The Breakthrough Institute argues that the UN’s approach amounts to telling the poor to remain poor in order to prevent global temperatures from rising. As Ronald Bailey writes, a new report from Breakthrough lays out a different vision: “Eco-modernists argue that through technological progress humanity will increasingly withdraw from nature, enabling a vast ecological restoration over the course of this century. The Breakthrough report rejects any approach based around small-scale energy projects aimed chiefly at supplying tiny amounts of electricity to millions of subsistence farmers. ‘There is no nation on earth with universal electricity access that remains primarily agrarian,’ the authors note. ‘Modern household energy consumption has historically been achieved as a side effect of electrification for non-household purposes such as factories, electrified transportation, public lighting, and commercial-scale agriculture.’ Rural electrification has always come last, after urbanization and economic development have taken off. For example, in the U.S. nearly 90 percent of city dwellers had electricity by the 1930s but only 10 percent of rural Americans did. Given this universal growth dynamic, the Breakthrough writers call for prioritizing energy development for productive, large-scale economic enterprises. Copious and reliable energy will accelerate the creation and spread of higher-productivity factories and businesses, which then will generate the opportunities for a better life; that, in turn, will draw poor subsistence farmers into cities.” [Reason]

 

Health insurance reform might not be the key to improving health care. Maybe letting providers experiment with new delivery models will yield bigger gains in efficiency, quality, and access. That’s the idea behind the Mercatus Center’s Healthcare Openness and Access Project, which measures “the flexibility and discretion that patients and providers have in managing health and health care” in each state. Here is one fun finding from the project: “A leftward tilt in the ACA debate does not necessarily correlate with tight centralized control of health care at the state level. Nor does a rightward tilt in the debate always comport with extensive patient-provider discretion. For example, HOAP suggests that Oregon, a reliably blue state, offers broad leeway to patients and providers while Georgia, a very red state, has some of the most restrictive healthcare laws and regulations in the nation.” [Mercatus Center]

 

 

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