Hungary is no longer the unhappiest country. It’s Venezuela….
mainThe Cato Insitute has published an annual update on mortal misery.
Hungary will be happy to learn it has fallen off the misery index.
The five unhappiest countries in 2014 are:
1 Venezuela
2 Iran
3 Serbia
4 Argentina
5 Jamaica
6 Egypt
7 Spain
8 South Africa
9 Brazil
10 Greece
Maybe the doubters may take this miserable statistic as some justification for my wife’s (Gabriela Montero) insistent and principled refusal to tolerate Venezuelan musicians climbing into bed with the very people responsible for that abject misery! A misery which, in real terms, reflects the total destruction of an economy and a moral decay inconceivable to anyone living in the civilized world!
The first-hand horror stories we receive every day – from a country of 30 million people that has seen more murders (65,000) on its streets these past three years than US soldiers killed in the entire Vietnam war – give personal testimony to the grim statistics. A shame on any artist who takes a dime from these monsters or burnishes their image abroad in the name of music! No Mahler or Bruckner symphony can anaesthetize the horror of 65,000 murders in three years! Complicity is complicity, by act or omission.
SOS Venezuela!
The Cato Institute is a far right think tank funded by Charles Koch, the founder and funder of the Tea Party. Gabriela needs to choose her friends a little more carefully…
Are her friends any business of yours? Would you like to live in a country with 100 times more murders than than UK? Or is that just the price you should be happy to accept for living in St Hugo’s socialist paradise?
I would like to live in a country that doesn’t cause turmoil around the world through its economic and foreign policies – but of course that’s nothing the Tea Baggers want to hear. It’s good to see they did poorly in the recent US elections, and that even the Republicans are weary of their idiocy.
The Cato Institute works to defend “America’s heritage of individual liberty, free markets, and constitutionally limited government.” (in their words). Sounds really subversive….
By the way, I was taking a look at some of the folks who have worked with or for Cato over the Years: former Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, Nobel Prize winner Frederich Hayek, Vaclav Klaus, the very subversive PJ O’Rourke, health care expert Thomas Cannon, the very handsome Walter E. Williams, and Fedex Chairman Fred Smith.
I would be thrilled to call any of these people my friend.
No wonder Iran is so near the top (or perhaps the bottom) of this list – being happy seems to be actually against the law there!
See here: http://www.cnn.com/2014/05/21/opinion/ghitis-iran-happy-video/ .