Loading ...Argentina Becomes Venezuela With The Passage Of This Law
Tyler Durden’s pictureSubmitted by Tyler Durden on 10/14/2014 16:39 -0400
Submitted by Simon Black via Sovereign Man blog,
In the pantheon of utter political stupidity in our time, the competition is pretty fierce to see who ranks #1.
But I have to imagine that, even with so many rivals, Argentina’s Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner makes a pretty compelling argument to be the champion.
And though the productive class of Argentina is no stranger to being vilified by a populist government whose grasp on power rests on praising the dignity of poverty, Cristina has managed to take things to an entirely new level.
Exhibit A: Argentina’s new ‘supply law’, or Ley de Abastecimiento, due to take effect in December next year.
Under this new law, the government will have the honorable burden of defending consumers from greedy producers.
Companies are now prohibited from setting their prices too high, generating too much profit, or producing too little.
And unlike the country’s astronomically high taxes (which at least have defined numbers and penalties), the new supply law doesn’t even say what is meant by too high, too many, or too little.
It simply reinforces the government’s unchecked power to arbitrarily audit, fine, shut down, and expropriate production of private companies.
Argentina’s government has already been maintaining “voluntary” price controls on over 400 consumer products for the past year, all in the name of combating the inflation that they themselves created.
And as any high school economics student can tell you, price controls create… SHORTAGES. Duh.
more http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-10-14/argentina-becomes-venezuela-passage-law