He ran for the highest office in the land on a platform
that excoriated the corporate “one-percenters,” promising to reign them in
with reams of regulation and government-imposed price controls. To
atone for all the alleged unfairness of “capitalist society” he promised
explosive growth of welfare statism, complete with “free” education, free
health care, free housing, and a virtual “economic bill of rights” filled
with free everything. Good old fashioned socialism, in other
words. Or, government-as-Santa-Claus.
I speak of course of Hugo Chavez, the late democratic
socialist ruler of Venezuela and his handpicked successor, former bus driver
Nicolas Maduro. Together, these two men managed to completely destroy
their nation’s economy with a mere fifteen years of democratic socialism.
In textbook fashion, Venezuela’s democratic socialists
used their nation’s vast oil riches to buy votes from the peasantry with free
housing and all sorts of other goodies. They nationalized the oil
industry and all medium- and large-scale businesses and made it illegal for
the remaining private businesses to set their own prices. To make
themselves appear even more popular they imposed universal price controls
with such absurdities as two-cents-a-gallon gas.
Predictably, the demand for all these nearly-free goods
skyrocketed while supplies quickly disappeared since it was no longer
possible to make a profit at such low, government-mandated prices. No
one in his right mind would invest in the Venezuelan economy. In the
absence of market prices and of the profit-and-loss market feedback mechanism
in all those nationalized industries, economic chaos, and impoverishment
immediately ensued. Dozens of major industries were placed in the hands
of political cronies instead of people who actually knew how to operate them,
leading to their rapid destruction, a hallmark policy of Latin American
politicians.
For years now, there have been shortages of
everything in Venezuela, as hundreds of thousands of people have fled
the country desperately looking for food. People who used to have good
middle-class jobs have been literally rummaging through garbage in the
streets searching for anything that is edible. Pets are starving to
death, as are animals in the zoos. People are “hunting” cats and dogs
and pigeons for food. The shortages of everything are most catastrophic
in the hospitals, where babies and the elderly have died by the thousands
because of the complete lack of simple medicines like antibiotics.
Surgeons go without soap, antibiotics, electric power,
gloves, and x-rays, according to a May 18 article in the Daily
Mail. The article describes how patients languish in hospitals
with days-old blood on their bodies; some lie curled up on dirty floors,
“blood streaming, limbs blackening”; sick children lie in dirty cardboard
boxes in hallways without food, water or medicine; rampant opossums killed
seventeen newborns in one Venezuelan hospital; there is no medicine for
chemotherapy; seven babies died in one day at a hospital because of the
absence of oxygen tanks; malaria has made a big comeback; and much, much
worse. In the face of these realities of socialized medicine, Nicolas
Maduro recently proclaimed that: “I doubt that anywhere in the world,
except in Cuba, there exists a better health care system than this one” in
Venezuela.
Power outages are routine in Venezuela, as are food
riots. Meanwhile, the politically-connected live very lavishly, having
rigged the system for themselves and literally stolen billions of dollars
from the public treasury. The wealthiest person in Venezuela is the
thirty-five-year-old daughter of the late Hugo Chavez, who is reportedly
worth $4.5 billion. She got that wealthy the Clinton way: Without
producing and selling a single product or service.
Chavez’s finance minister left the country and is
reportedly worth some $11 billion according to the Wall Street Journal. He
also became a very wealthy man the Clinton way. Hundreds of politically
connected democratic socialists live lives of luxury while nearly everyone
else is equal in their misery, the same as in all socialist countries
everywhere, democratic or not. It is as though they are all graduates
of “Clinton University.”
Price inflation in Venezuela stands at 720% this year
according to the IMF, which projects 2,200% hyperinflation for 2017.
he Venezuelan government has done what all socialist governments eventually
do, and has tried to create “prosperity” with legalized counterfeiting, a.k.a.,
“quantitative easing” through central bank “monetary policy.” Thanks to
all of this quantitative easing an order of french fries at McDonald’s costs
the equivalent of $130. The new head of Venezuela’s central bank
recently announced that the mass printing of currency has nothing to do
with inflation, which he blames entirely on “corporate greed” and, of course,
a CIA conspiracy.
In addition to creating hyperinflation, Venezuela’s
democratic socialist government has dealt with the economic disaster it
has created by issuing a “decree” that all adults must work for 60 days
on a farm in order to avert a starvation crisis. Forced labor, Soviet
gulag style. Castro and Stalin would be so proud of their Venezuelan
protégés. There are reports that some people are so desperate
that they have sold their children into adoption.
It is little wonder, then, why Bernie Sanders, America’s
pied piper of Santa Claus economics, was dead silent for the first time in
years when he was asked by a Univision journalist last summer if he had an
opinion on Venezuela’s economic and societal implosion. “No comment,”
he said, explaining that he was too busy running for president in order to
bring Latin-American-style democratic socialism to North America.
