July 11, 2008

I guess it is time for your reporter to change location

Sir I am sorry but Benedict Mander completely misses the angle when in “Red tape congests Venezuela’s roaring car trade”, July 11, he describes the governments “new rules that 30 per cent of cars sold from next April must have dual natural gas and petrol tanks” as something extraordinary. I just need to ask what extraordinary measures he believes the Crown would have to take to reign in car sales if it sold petrol at 4 cents of a dollar per litre and if it subsidized the import of new cars by means of an exchange control system.

When a foreign reporter does not see the absolute grotesque in the state giving away petrol at prices below distribution costs, I guess that reporter has been to long in the country and has become blind to its realities. There is supposedly a study that shows that people after having lived long enough close to a railway station do not even hear the trains, because of natural anatomic process of adjustment.