Andres Oppenheimer
Following the announcement that Venezuelan President
I'm not kidding. Last week, Chávez announced that the previous
Many Venezuelans took the announcement with a mixture of humor and resignation. "We will soon see ships crashing against airplanes," joked one reader commenting on the news of the new ministries in the daily El Universal, referring to the chaos brought about by
Since taking office in 1999, Chávez has created dozens of new Cabinet ministries, some of them with titles that are hard to imagine fitting on a business card. One of them, created less than a year ago, reads, "Minister of State for the Revolutionary Transformation of
There are so many Cabinet ministries that nobody really knows their exact number at any given time. At the time of this writing, the Venezuelan government's official website lists 27 ministers, but it hasn't been updated to include at least four that have been officially announced, including the two new transportation ministries.
By comparison, with some exceptions, most countries with the worlds' highest standards of living have fewer than a dozen cabinet ministries.
What's worse, Chávez has changed Cabinet ministers 176 times since he took office in 1999, according to Venezuelan press reports. There have been 12 appointments of Minister of Production and Commerce, an average of one minister a year, and nine ministers of economy over the past 11 years.
With so many Cabinet ministries and their respective bureaucracies, it's not surprising the
According to the report, it takes one day to register a new business -- whether it's a small repair shop or a big corporation -- in
The reason is that in
Supporters of Chávez and his followers in
My opinion: The sad thing about
The huge government bureaucracies in
In modern democracies, when governments have a big problem, their natural instinct is to create a commission. In populist regimes, when governments have a big problem, their natural instinct is to create a new ministry. Both solutions often fail to solve the problems, but the latter is more expensive and leads to more corruption.
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