Yesterday's post from Mr. Strachan about the myth of the effects of the US embargo on trade with Cuba and this post at Fee.org about "The Market's Gift" got me to thinking about the more dramatic shift in economic policy here at home.

In recent decades successive governments have devoted their time to deficits, borrowing and spending rather than encouraging economic growth.

The coercive arm of government continues to get longer, discouraging investment in business, the engine of any economy. Applying for and receiving a business license alone is allegedly an education on rent seeking and with more and more regulations and taxes on the horizon is there any reason to expect less of this?

Generally speaking our political class despise business and downplay the value it creates in employment, construction, education and more.

Unfortunately the history of these failed public policies are the same whether in Cuba, Russia or the United States. Why The Bahamas government thinks they will have a different outcome is beyond reason.

As professor Deirdre McClosky pointed out here…

"A big change in the common opinion about markets and innovation, I claim, caused the Industrial Revolution, and then the modern world. The change occurred during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in northwestern Europe. More or less suddenly the Dutch and British and then the Americans and the French began talking about the middle class, high or low — the "bourgeoisie" — as though it were dignified and free. The result was modern economic growth."

She even mentions The Bahamas and rent seeking:

"When bourgeois virtues do not thrive, and especially when they are not admired by other classes and by their governments and by the bourgeoisie itself, the results are sad. As the economists Virgil Storr and Peter Boettke note about the Bahamas, "Virtually all models of success to be found in the Bahamas' economic past have to be characterized as piratical," with the result that entrepreneurs there "pursue 'rents' rather than [productive] profits."

Of course, in an economic environment where the political class dominates with negative rhetoric about and harmful policies toward the business class, there is little hope there will be any significant near term economic growth.

Who knows how far our country will sink before this necessary change in language by he political class about business changes?

After decades of damning economic freedom and capitalism, should the US actually drop the embargo on Cuba they will have nothing to blame their failed economic policies on so their overlords will sit on the horns of a dilemma worse than The Bahamas faces today.

Will we become more and more like Cuba and continue to implement additional detrimental policies or will The Bahamas government take an about face and pursue economic liberty and encourage bourgeois dignity for the betterment of all Bahamians?