A Miami Herald column suggests that Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez should be awarded the Milton Friedman Prize for advancing liberty and free-markets. The rationale?

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.

He may actually be on to something…