Do Economies Need Blueprints?

“We even owned a nightclub in Mexico City. It was probably the only nightclub in the world losing money.” Jesus Silva Herzog, on all the money-losing state-owned companies he had to privatize as Mexico’s finance minister in the 1980’s.

I’ve just been reading an excellent 1998 book about the results of government meddling in the economies of various nations. In The Commanding Heights, authors Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw profile the results of government economic policies in over a dozen different countries, and what they found casts a very negative pall on President Obama’s stated intention to sit in the nation’s capital and draw up a “blueprint for the economy.”
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