Ricardo Hausmann is no typical academic. This past week, he suggested in an article that a foreign invasion may be the only way out for Venezuela's collapsing socialist regime. The respected Venezuelan economist who is a professor at Harvard's Kennedy school is known for going out on a limb and making the powers that be uncomfortable. He's done it a lot and it's because he loves his country.

He was one of the first to call fraud on Venezuela's recall referendum of 2004 and blast Jimmy Carter, who claimed all was free and fair. With Venezuela soon starving, he shocked the world ten years later by calling on Venezuela to default on its debts and use the cash to feed its people. He warned a second time that banks that issue new debt for Venezuela as a lifeline to the regime were propping up the regime's capacity to create more starvation.

Now he's calling for the most obvious of solution of all to the monstrous problem of totalitarian socialism, which is failing and cannot reform itself, and whose suffering people are powerless to cast them out: Invade the hellhole.

According to a column by the Miami Herald's Andres Oppenheimer:

In his Jan. 2 syndicated article, “D-Day Venezuela,” Hausmann proposes that Venezuela’s opposition-controlled National Assembly impeach dictator Nicolás Maduro and appoint a new constitutional government, which in turn could request military assistance from other countries.

Sure, invasion is a dirty word in Latin America. But attitudes are changing, Hausmann argues. All of the countries of the region are getting the creeps, not to mention the human waves of refugees - real refugees, by the way, the kind who will go anywhere. What's more, as Miami Herald columnist Andres Oppenheimer argues, Venezuela already has been invaded by a foreign power, Cuba, which runs everything in that country.

Hausmann even argues that his idea is hardly radical or unprecedented - there are many historic precedents. From Oppenheimer:

Venezuela’s independence hero, Simón Bolívar, himself gained the title of Liberator of Venezuela thanks to an 1814 invasion organized and financed by neighboring Nueva Granada (today’s Colombia), Hausmann argues. And France, Belgium and the Netherlands liberated themselves from oppressive regimes thanks to international military actions in World War II, he adds.