A few days ago, Argentina's populist female president Cristina Kirchner ordered a price freeze on food products. This price freeze was levied against the largest food retailers in the country, and it is just the latest example of utterly insane economic policies made by populist national leaders who inevitably end up causing massive suffering and economic damage to the nations they claim to lead.

In case you're not familiar with Kirchner, this woman is a mafia-style criminal, a populist political hustler who has, for years, fabricated economic data to claim Argentina has low inflation. (In truth, the inflation rate there is over 25%.) She has been caught using government-created money to pay off political bribes. She has been slapped on the wrist by the IMF for falsifying economic data, and now she is about to thrust her country into nationwide food shortages that may very well be followed by riots.

The people of Argentina deserve better than Kirchner. Argentinians are, by and large, extremely friendly and capable people, yet they have suffered under the most absurd dictatorial rulers for at least a generation, possibly longer. Kirchner is just the latest in a long line of thuggish betrayers of the people who elected her.

"Cristina Kirchner's Argentina illustrates an alarming trend. Her government has expropriated major foreign investors, falsified statistics, destroyed central bank independence , used the nation's currency reserves for political payoffs, and faces default," writes Paul Roderick Gregory at Forbes.com

Welcome to the land of populist governments led by charismatic people who have no clue whatever how economies work. These national leaders are a disgrace to humanity, and nations like Argentina would be far better served if they through Kirchner in prison rather than listening to any more of her delusional economic demands.

For starters, the price freeze means that food importers will halt most imports because they would lose money by selling their food at the prices ordered by the government. So the price freeze results in immediate food shortages.

But people still need food, obviously, so they begin to seek out black market sources of food sold at actual market prices. This causes a mass diversion of purchasing behavior away from the grocery stores to "food smugglers" who inevitably create complex systems of corruption and criminality in order to deliver the products that people want.

Think of this as "food prohibition." Any time a government enacts prohibition of something the people really want, it inevitably creates a criminal black market, complete with payoffs and violence. The Kirchner regime can then point to these black market operations and blame them for all the results of Kirchner's own failed economic policies. Whatever goes wrong in Argentina, she will blame it on "the black market gangs" that have defied her insane government dictates. (If this sounds familiar, it's because in the USA, Obama blames all his failures on "terrorists.")

Continue reading at:  http://www.naturalnews.com/039030_Argentina_Cristina_Kirchner_price...