How Populism Helped Wreck Venezuela

[GatoGordo]

The story of how the country went from cheap fridges to no food is about more than socialism and corruption.

URI FRIEDMAN, THE ATLANTIC 4:50 AM ET

"Hugo Chavez, the late leader of Venezuela’s socialist revolution, once provided his people with subsidized refrigerators from China, appearing on television in a mock kitchen to personally cross out the “capitalist” price tag on a fridge and write in a “Chavez discount.” Now his successor’s people have little to refrigerate. Three-fourths of Venezuelans reported involuntarily losing an average of 19 pounds in 2016 because of rampant food shortages and runaway inflation, which is making basic goods unaffordable. A third of Venezuelans reported eating two or fewer meals a day last year—triple the number recorded a year earlier. Child malnutrition has reached crisis levels.

"From a spiraling health emergency to creeping political anarchy, Venezuela is in the throes of “the kind of implosion that hardly ever occurs in a middle-income country like it outside of war,” as Moises Naim and Francisco Toro wrote in The Atlantic. While this implosion was accelerated by the 2013 death of Chavez and the 2014 drop in the price of oil, which accounts for nearly all Venezuela’s export revenue, it can be traced in part to the Venezuelan government’s failed socialist policies—price and currency controls, farm and factory nationalizations, government control of food distribution, and the like. It is also the product of government corruption, cronyism, and plain incompetence; by one measure, corruption is more widespread in Venezuela than in any other country in the Americas.""

-snip-

Read more here: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/06/venezuela-populism-fail/525321/

[sharedvalues]

1. It's left wing authoritarianism. Problem is the authoritarianism, not the wing.

Chavez executed the autocratic playbook from the left.
Putin executed it from the right.

In both cases, the autocrat moves to control the media, demonize enemies, pay off the military, and enrich themselves. Just like Trump is doing today- and he's doing it from the right.

[Marksman_91]

2. Shh!! Don't tell that to fervent communists, especially the ones that bay lurk in this forum

They simply reject the reality that a left-wing government cannot be bad at all and that a right-leaning one can only be pure evil.

[GatoGordo]

3. Their silence

speaks volumes to their vacuous arguments.

Socialism works in many, many countries. But Chavez'/Maduro brand of "Bolivarian" socialism is bizarre, at best. Even the stauch leftist Evo Morales, from Bolivia, who hasn't nearly the economic resources of Venezuela knows how to run an economy.

Maduro has paid off the military (4000+ generals?) and they are not about to let their gravy train run out. (And it won't, thanks to Goldman Sachs!)