A Preview for America? Trillionaires in Zimbabwe

Where do you find the most trillionaires of any place in the world? In Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe. Mugabe has been the darling of the socialist world since he took power in an election validated by Jimmy Carter. In terms of quantity of money, Mugabe has made Zimbabweans very wealthy indeed.

The country that has produced the most trillionaires in history isn’t America, but Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. The Wall Street Journal describes what it is like to dine out on the town. “Buying anything is a ‘bizarre experience,’ said Lucy Chimtengwende from Bulawayo, who spent $12 U.S. on lunch recently, with the bill in local currency being an astonishing 1.1 trillion Zimbabwe dollars.” Inflation has been given a whole new meaning in Zimbabwe, whose currency has depreciated ten billionfold in twelve years, a rate that threatens to exceed the bounds of the database field sizes that the bank’s software developers thoughtlessly assumed would be enough. Consider the travails of a man who simply wanted to buy groceries. __Belmont Club

Mugabe knows how to promise the world to his supporters. And he has delivered a world to them. The third world, in its most degraded form.

Mugabe is much like Hugo Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in that he knows how to appeal to the lowest instincts of the mob. That ability, and a bit of presto-changeo at the ballot box, can keep a person in power for a long time.

Tell the people what they want to hear, then when elected make them so dependent upon your government that they're afraid to speak out or propose a change.