Who can believe that Chavez will build 913 homes per day?

VenEconomy: "You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time."

Here in Venezuela these words are all too true. Today the President is trying to fool enough people for long enough to keep him in office. This would seem to be the purpose behind of Hugo Chavez' "admirable campaign" to convince a large enough number of Venezuelans who are desperate for the home that he, after holding all the power in his hands for the past 12 years, will soon be giving them modern, clean, properly equipped homes.

This past Sunday, Chavez promised to build two million homes over the next six years, a lie that is pathetically self evident.

Chavez' promise is even more outrageous when we stop to think that during this long, 12-year period that he has sat in Miraflores, the average number of houses built per year has been only 24,300, or some 300,000 in all. This is the worst performance in the area of housing in all Venezuela's democratic history, made even worse by the fact that he is the President who has been in office for the longest period over the past 70 years.

Who, then, can believe that Chavez will be building 913 homes per day? Or that this government will be able to build 578 12-storey buildings, with four apartments per floor, every month?

To begin with, Venezuela lacks the wherewithal to achieve this housing feat. Home construction costs approximately Bs.F.5,000 per square meter, including utilities and land development. In other words this would require, at the very least, an investment of Bs.F.500 billion, the equivalent of 2.5 times the central government's annual budget.

Then there is the fact that, with his communist policies, he has also destroyed the production sector that supplied the raw materials, the inputs, and has worked to destroy the human capital and the companies working in the construction sector.

Equally serious is the fact that the few houses that the government does manage to build will be assigned, but without real property rights. This, however, will not stop Chavez and his people from handing out housing "IOUs" left and right in an effort to win over votes for the presidential election.

As Lincoln might have said, maybe he will be able to fool some of the people for long enough to be re-elected in 2012.