#FeelTheBern | Venezuela edition [updated]

 

I hope youthful advocates of socialism have been watching the acopalypse in slow motion that is being inflicted upon Venezuelans by their experiment with socialism. It’s working out exactly as badly for them as anyone could have predicted.

The country’s oil riches – ”more proven oil reserves than any country in the world” – have not saved them from what has been inexorable in every worker’s paradise yet devised.

First, with price signals and profits banned, there are serious shortages: food, medicine, toilet paper, electricity. Indeed, their richness in oil reserves hasn’t even made oil immune to the inevitable: unable to get it out of the ground in sufficient quantity, Venezuela is now importing oil. And with shortages of food, “Hungry Venezuelans Hunt Dogs, Cats, Pigeons as Food Runs Out: Economic Crisis and Food Shortages Lead to Looting and Hunting Stray Animals.”

And with that, inevitably: inflation. Desperate to “fix” things, or at least to appear to, printing money has delivered only an abundance of printed paper bills, and an inflation rate of around 720%. (And paradoxically, Venezuela doesn’t even have enough money now to pay for the paper to print more money to keep up with its hyperinflation.)

And with threats not working, the next thing is outright thuggery (the only thing of which the socialist state is never short: President Maduro is now preparing to seize factories and jail their owners.

And: crime. With the police otherwise occupied, Venezuela now enjoys the highest crime rate in the world – one Venezuelan murdered every 28 minutes.

Forget the stories of socialised medicine too: the economic emergency has become “a public health emergency, claiming the lives of untold numbers of Venezuelans” as doctors and staff flee and -- without medicine, electricity or even gloves or soap – hospitals collapse into something last seen in Dante’s hell.

This has all happened in just under a decade. That’s how rapidly collapse can happen.

What happens next?

What have rulers of every socialist paradise done every time to take their subjects’ mind of disaster?

Yes, you guessed it. From today’s news headlines:

• LA TIMES: Unrest continues to grip Venezuela as president threatens to make opposition-controlled legislature 'disappear'
• BLOOMBERG: Venezuela Prepares for Biggest Military Exercise in History

The Lesson? That full-blown socialism delivers neither peace nor prosperity – just penury and perdure.

Make sure that everyone you know under forty is watching the present disaster play out.

Watching and, hopefully, learning.

[Hat tip Foundation for Economic Education, thoughtcrime, HedgedIn ]

UPDATE:

• “About the same time I was listening to [John Lennon] sing “Imagine,” this item came across my news feed:
        “’By morning, three newborns were already dead. The day had begun with the usual hazards: chronic
        shortages of antibiotics, intravenous solutions, even food. Then a blackout swept over the city, shutting
        down the respirators in the maternity ward. Doctors kept ailing infants alive by pumping air into their
        ungs by hand for hours. By nightfall, four more newborns had died. “The death of a baby is our daily bread,”
        said Dr. Osleidy Camejo, a surgeon in the nation’s capital, Caracas, referring to the toll from Venezuela’s
        collapsing hospitals.’
  “Venezuela has some of the world’s largest supplies of oil, with more proven oil reserves than Saudi Arabia. But about 15 years ago, the late president Hugo Chavez set out to impose a socialist revolution, making a particular point about his great munificence in providing free health care for everyone. In pursuit of this revolution, Chavez crushed every industry outside the oil sector and brought the state-owned oil company under his control. The result has been a long spiral into poverty and oppression. Now we can see the results: socialism literally kills babies.
      “It began by imagining no possessions…”
  Imagine No Possessions, Imagine Venezuela – Robert Tracinski, TRACINSKI LETTER

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