An Update to Henry Hazlitt’s 'Uruguay: Welfare State Gone Wild'by
George Reisman
This essay consisted largely of a series of verbal “snapshots” of Uruguay, as Hazlitt called them, in the form of quotations drawn from a variety of sources over the years 1956 to 1968. What Hazlitt described by means of the quotations was an economic system plunged into ruin by unrestrained welfare-state spending. Having taken a tour of Montevideo, Uruguay’s capital, last month, I’d like to offer a “snapshot” as of the present year, 2007. What I saw was a city of almost unrelieved drabness and ruin. Graffiti filled walls within a hundred yards of the seat of the country’s Congress. The city’s public parks, presented as an attraction to tourists, were overgrown with weeds; the wrought-iron fences they contained were in a state of collapse. Building after building, in neighborhood after neighborhood, was in a state disrepair. Often, only a burnt-out concrete shell was left. Hardly anything, anywhere, looked new. Much of the city was reminiscent of the South Bronx, an area devastated by more than two generations of rent controls. Only one, small area of the city, near the River Plate, appeared to be at all prosperous.
From what I saw, if there are another 50 years of such “rest,” there may be nothing much left of Montevideo beyond an impoverished village. April 19, 2007 George Reisman [send him mail] is Pepperdine University Professor Emeritus of Economics, and is the author of Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics. Visit his website. Copyright © 2007 George Reisman |
