El Opinador Compulsivo

Como comentaba hace unos meses, creo que los argentinos deberíamos seguir con mucha atención experimentos como los de Zimbabwe. La situación de ese país africano se viene deteriorando desde hace años, pero aparentemente aumentó la velocidad del colapso. El país está viviendo una hiperinflación (visto en Instapundit).

Ya que aparentemente no aprendemos de los errores (u horrores) del pasado, tal vez nos sirva prestar atención a los resultados más extremos en el mundo real de las políticas que aplicamos en el país:

The trigger of this crisis — hyperinflation — reached an annual rate of 1,281 percent this month, and has been near or over 1,000 percent since last April. Hyperinflation has bankrupted the government, left 8 in 10 citizens destitute and decimated the country’s factories and farms.

Pay increases have so utterly failed to keep pace with price increases that some Harare workers now complain that bus fare to and from work consumes their entire salaries.

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Seeking to revive farm production, for example, the government sells gasoline to farmers at a bargain rate of 330 Zimbabwe dollars per liter — and farmers promptly resell it on the black market for 10 times that, leaving their fields idle.

Mr. Mugabe, who blames a Western plot against him for Zimbabwe’s problems, has rejected all calls for economic reform. The government refuses to devalue Zimbabwe’s dollar, which fetches only 5 to 10 percent of its official value on the thriving black market. As a result, foreign exchange to buy crucial imported goods like spare parts and fertilizer has effectively dried up.

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The central bank’s latest response to these problems, announced this week, was to declare inflation illegal. From March 1 to June 30, anyone who raises prices or wages will be arrested and punished. Only a “firm social contract” to end corruption and restructure the economy will bring an end to the crisis, said the reserve bank governor, Gideon Gono.