Cuba is, however gradually, reforming its economy which is great. However, they do seem to be concentrating on the wrong bits still:
“Less well known and less common are the cooperatives but they are part of a political balancing act for the government, which needs to move hundreds of thousands of workers off the state payroll but also wants to slow the rise of capitalism. In many ways it prefers cooperatives, where each worker has a stake in the business, to private businesses where owners make profits based on the work of their employees.”
That concentration on who owns what is the wrong thing to be concentrating upon. Sure, capitalism is useful, it’s also a great bugbear of those over on the left. But it’s also not the important point in an economy. What is important is markets: competitive markets at that, with entry and exit. This is vastly more important than whether those entrants (and those being forced to exit) are cooperatives, owned by the government or top hatted pot bellied capitalists like myself.
The reason for this is that there is no possible method of planning a modern national economy. We could use Alchian’s (and Hayek’s) point that only a market economy produces enough experimentation for us to be able to work out what to do, or that Socialist Calculation problem that means we’ve still got another century of Moore’s Law to go before we could possibly calculate what to do. There is simply no alternative to using the prices and incentives that a market provides for us and so therefore that’s where Cuba should be concentrating their efforts. Simply scrap the rules about who may do what, those licencing regimes. Worrying about who owns it is trivial by contrast.
As an aside, to those who will insist that Cuba provides wonderful free health care and so the system mustn’t change. Amazingly, I think you'll note that this country, the UK, also manages to provide free health care to all citizens. And we manage to do this without being a communist dictatorship, without being in Stone Age poverty and without shooting anyone who wants to leave. So quite why those three things are considered necessary to provide tax paid for healthcare I’m really not quite sure.
This article was originally published at the Adam Smith Institute.
