The Great Venezuelan Socialist Experiment Dies

The Great Venezuelan Socialist Experiment Dies

RedState - Friday June 24, 2016

SUBTITLE:  Or, Noam Chomsky and Sean Penn Prove They Are Asses

It is estimated that 72% of a family’s monthly income in Venezuela is consumed by food purchases.  Yes…they have free medical care for all citizens, but that is kind of moot when you don’t have doctors or hospitals to provide that care.  There are only three locations in the country to receive chemotherapy and hospitals in Caracas regularly turn away patients because they do not have enough supplies, medicines, or doctors to go around.

If there is one country you don’t want to visit any time soon, it is Venezuela.  It is the darling of people like Sean Penn, Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Chaka Fattah, Joe Kennedy III, and Oliver Stone.  No doubt, they were welcomed into posh hotels and the the presidential palace of Hugo Chavez with aplomb.  After all, this was a man of the people, one who stood up to the entrenched capitalist interests in that country.  Spreading his oil wealth around, he subsidized low income heating fuel for Americans which brought the accolades of dupes like Fattah and Kennedy.  Put another way, Kennedy and Fattah became Chavez’s bitches in America.

It’s funny, but my guess is that this group of misfit Leftists won’t be visiting Venezuela any time in the near future.  To recap, Chavez came into power an avowed socialist in the Castro mold.  He no doubt had the obligatory Che T-Shirt.  Sitting on more oil reserves than Saudi Arabia, he put that oil money to use building schools and clinics.  Along the way, he managed to empty the treasury subsidizing Leftist regimes throughout Latin America, chased away investors, seized assets without compensation, nationalized foreign companies and forced the best and brightest out of the country.   I forgot to mention that the great man of the people and champion of the poor enriched his daughter to the tune of $4.2 billion before he croaked.

But, Leftist governments are in retreat throughout Latin America.  Mauricio Macri, a business-friendly candidate, was elected president of Argentina.  Da Silva’s successor in Brazil (da Silva was a huge supporter of Chavez) was impeached and replaced by another business-friendly person.  A change to the Bolivian constitution was denied.  Two right wing candidates made the runoff in Peru.  Latin Americans are tiring of socialism.

His hand-picked successor and current president Nicolas Maduro is no better.  He carried on the same policies, but made them worse.  Although Venezuela sits on oil reserves of 298 billion barrels, they import oil from the United States.  He prefers the the advice of his Marxist adviser from Spain rather than the Finance Minister.  He blames all the shortcomings on the opposition or the US.  He uses this as en excuse to declare states of emergency.

Socialism has created a Venezuela with a 700% inflation rate.  They have $130 billion in foreign debt.  They have one of the highest murder rates in the world.  Food is in short supply.  Electricity outages are common.  Days off are spent scrounging in garbage heaps for food.  It is a humanitarian crisis.

This is a common refrain with socialism: they make well-off countries poor and poor countries hell holes.  The Left today portrays the main reason for the failure of Venezuela on a single factor- falling oil prices.  Just to balance their budget, Venezuela would need oil to sell at $125 a barrel.  But before Chavez was president, despite their oil industry, Venezuela was characterized by economic mismanagement.  Other petrostates faced similar situations (Nigeria, for example), but they are not basket cases like Venezuela.  Domestically, the Left rails against fracking, a process that has made the US the world’s top energy producer.  In Europe, there is no secret that the anti-fracking environmental Left is supported by Putin’s Russia.

To morons like Chomsky, it is not socialism or the cronies it engenders that ruined Venezuela; it is American ingenuity and technology… you know- capitalists.  Of course, this is the same “intellectual” who has, at various points in history, extolled the virtues of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, Che and Fidel in Cuba, and even Mao in China.  But then again when you are a Holocaust denier, denying the holocaust that is socialism is just another day in the park.

If anything, the disaster that is Venezuela proves that the central planning of an economy is a failed model.  It also illustrates that a government is the worst provider of ordinary goods.  The role of good government is to provide common goods like a functional judiciary and national security.  But it all sounds better using the socialist language of declaring something a “right” as if that act alone magically solves a problem.  And according to socialists, one has a right to free health care, free college education, free public education, “affordable housing,” and a “living wage” among a plethora of other “rights” pulled out of their collective asses.  Of course, one hears nothing of a right to free speech or exercise of religion or a right to own firearms in their lists.

Perhaps Oliver Stone, Sean Penn, Noam Chomsky and the remaining band of inconsequential has-beens or never-were’s can pay a visit to Venezuela today and live among the oppressed masses.  I would actually pay to see Michael Moore scrounging through a garbage heap looking for a potato chip.  Or imagine Naomi Klein protesting the lack of toilet paper in a darkened bathroom.  That is the reality of socialism in Venezuela today.  These deranged pimps for Chavez deserve one thing- three days in their socialist “Utopia.”

 

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