Private enterprise saw this book in my hands within 25 hours of my ordering it.

I was somewhat amused to read recently that Venezuela’s President Maduro blamed the pervasive shortages that country is facing on the fact that the distribution network for goods is largely controlled by the private sector. Over the past 6 years, since I met my wife who is Venezuelan, I have tried to pay attention to what is happening there, especially as she still lives there, so I know this is a laughable. It ignores the fact that about 70% of what Venezuelans consume is imported, 95% of the currency needed for these imports comes from oil exports and the government nationalized the bulk of, if not all, the oil industry. So the blame for lack of goods in stores most likely lies on those who, through control of foreign currency and exchange rates, controls the imports, not the distributors. (I should mention that President Maduro, and Chavez before him, routinely blames everyone but the government for the ills facing the country. Maduro even accused President Obama of funding right-wing groups to destabilize the government.)

Compare this to my recent experience with Amazon.com, a private distributor. At the end of his latest BlogTalkRadio program, Yaron Brook recommended the book Hidden in Plain Sight: What Really Caused the World’s Worst Financial Crisis and Why it Could Happen Again by Peter Wallison. Dr. Brook compared it with John Allison’s book, The Financial Crisis and the Free Market Cure: Why Pure Capitalism is the World Economy’s Only Hope, on the same topic, which I enjoyed very much. With that recommendation, I decided to get the book in hardcover (no Kindle version unfortunately) and placed my order at about 1:00pm to be delivered with my free Amazon Prime 2 day shipping. To my surprise, the book arrived today via UPS, another private company, at about 2:00pm. So from placing my order to receiving my copy of the book it took only 25 hours.