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What do you think of this analysis?

Thanks, Hugo! President of Venezuela deserves free-market award***It's time to nominate Venezuela's populist President Hugo Chávez to the ''Milton Friedman Award'' for his indefatigable work to advance the cause of free-market policies and political harmony in the developing world.

I'm not kidding. No other head of state has done so much in such a short time to wreck his country's economy, and to discourage his neighbors from engaging in the kind of finger-waving populism that has brought about massive capital flight and record poverty levels in Venezuela.

If it weren't for the disastrous performance of Chávez's ''peaceful revolution,'' Brazil's new leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva would have probably launched the anti-free market policies he had championed for the past three decades, several foreign diplomats and politicians told me during a recent trip to Brazil. And Ecuador and Argentina probably would have followed suit.***