Dust Off Your Econ 101 Notes
The first lesson in almost every introductory microeconomics course is 'Consumer Choice,' how an individual will decide how much of his resources he'll devote to what good based on his preferences. Central planning corrupts that, restricting individual freedom and creating scarcity of goods and distortion of prices. It likewise breeds a climate for corruption, favoritism, fraud and waste. Perhaps the meddling grandees with Ph.D.s should review their Econ 101 notes.
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Fox News
3 hours ago
- Fox News
Venezuelan opposition leader says Nicolas Maduro represents a 'real threat' to Americans' national security
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Fox News
4 hours ago
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‘Living laboratory': Trump admin urged to look to South America for lessons on fighting migrant gangs
A former high-ranking Venezuelan military officer is urging the Trump administration, particularly Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, to look to South America for best strategies in fighting against the migrant gangs and cartels that flooded the U.S. under the Biden administration. José Gustavo Arocha, a former lieutenant colonel in the Venezuelan army and now national security expert at the Center for a Secure Free Society, told Fox News Digital that South American countries' varied responses to organized crime groups hold the key to what the U.S. should do and not do. He said the region especially teaches valuable lessons on how to respond to Tren de Aragua, also known by its acronym "TdA," a brutal transnational criminal group with alleged ties to Venezuelan socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro. The gang's name means "Train from Aragua," indicating its origin as a prison gang in Venezuela's Aragua region. Following Noem's visit to Chile and Peru in late July, Arocha said the U.S. should "think of the region as a living laboratory." In line with this laboratory analogy, Arocha said that while countries like Chile and Ecuador "grabbed the scalpel early; Colombia left the petri dish wide open." Overall, he said the lesson for Washington is "act fast, act in unison, or spend years mopping up a disaster." He said that Chile acted decisively to unite all aspects of government together to fight the migrant gangs spilling over its borders, fusing police, tax and customs intelligence with one another. This enabled the Chilean government to quickly identify hundreds of members of a Tren de Aragua offshoot gang known as the "Los Gallegos clique" and march them into prison. "Chile turned intel into jail time," explained Arocha. "Every migrant-shelter interview, every crypto-remittance slip, every fingerprint goes into one national fusion hub; detectives then launch 'mega-operativos' that knock out stash houses, mules, and shell companies in the same forty-eight-hour punch." "That stops the gang before it can splinter and re-spawn," he said. Likewise, he explained that if Noem similarly connects U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the FBI and Homeland Security Investigations into a shared, real-time biometric feed, typical gang tactics like using a fake ID won't outrun the database and "our prosecutors can bring bundle indictments the way Chile bundled Los Gallegos." It is Ecuador, however, that Arocha said "set the gold standard hands down." He explained that the Ecuadorian government "went one step further" by labeling Tren de Aragua a terrorist group, something the U.S. has also done under the Trump administration. Ecuador also unleashed joint police-military sweeps of prisons and border posts for gang activity so that today he said the country "still reports no major TdA enclave on its soil." "By stamping TdA as a terrorist outfit before bodies piled up, Ecuador unlocked instant asset freezes and extradition-on-sight rules," he said. "We already have the Foreign Terrorist Organization label; now we need the Treasury-FinCEN [Financial Crimes Enforcement Network] sledgehammer, so every crypto hop tied to TdA or its Venezuelan sponsors, the Maduro Regime, trips an automatic choke." By contrast, Arocha said the U.S. should look to Colombia for what not to do. He said the country reopened its borders and "hoped goodwill would tame the chaos." He said that open borders without synchronized vetting turned the migrant route through the country into a "rolling ATM." "TdA simply moved its toll booths from jungle trails to the shiny new bridges and kept fleecing migrants in broad daylight," he explained. "The misstep was policy without policing: agencies split their intel streams, extraditions stalled on politics, and the gang slipped through the seams." "For Washington, that means no border liberalization unless vetting, rapid removal, and financial choke points are already locked in. Otherwise, the 'train' will ride our own policy gaps straight into every ZIP code," he said. "Tren de Aragua isn't a rogue band of street punks; it's the muscle car hitched to Maduro's smuggling convoy," he went on. "Think of it as Caracas outsourcing hybrid warfare: the cartel ships cocaine north, the gang escorts the loads and terrorizes migrants, and the regime pockets hard currency while claiming clean hands." "If we freeze their dollars, seize their crypto, and indict their officers alongside TdA couriers, the whole war machine stutters. Anything less is just chasing boxcars while the locomotive keeps rolling."

Associated Press
4 hours ago
- Associated Press
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