Posted on 08/14/2017 4:11:35 PM PDT by MtnClimber
Our glitterati’s favorite socialist paradise has, like so many similar experiments, become a murderous den of oppression and privation.
Venezuela’s self-destruction has embarrassed more celebrities than has National Enquirer. Our glitterati’s favorite socialist paradise has, like so many similar experiments, become a murderous den of oppression and privation, and none will speak on its behalf. However, Venezuela’s collapse has dashed fantasies far older and more sincere than Sean Penn’s.
Hugo Chávez’s election in Venezuela realized a dream that festered in left-wing hearts for decades: a revolutionary socialist regime, with the sovereignty and resources to fulfill decades’ worth of pledges from left-wing populist leaders in Latin America. During the Cold War, dictators who gained and maintained power through coup d’état and state terror, often abetted by the U.S. government, frequently thwarted such movements. The depth of evil these dictators reached and the misery they created are not to be understated. They undermined the case for capitalism and American power as positive forces in the world, giving defenders of socialism the world over something to point at and say, “But what about…?”
Men like Chávez were cast as the antidote. His triumph was a rebuke not only of Venezuela’s own ancien régime, but also of Pinochet, Rios Montt, and the rest of the Latin American tinpot rogues’ gallery.
(Excerpt) Read more at thefederalist.com ...
You can point and tell leftists that this is what always happens, but there is no way to convince them that they are wrong.
They won’t learn anything from this.
They always think they can do it better.
Call it Democratic Socialism. It was Democratic until last week.
No it doesn’t. Who makes up this sort of headlines? The Left will never stop no matter how many corpses they stack up.
We were in caracas many years ago, before Chavez, and all along the mountainsides the poor people lived in CARDBOARD BOXES, and they are the ones that voted for Socialism to get some of the wealthy’s money, and now they are starving to death.
No, you see, it hasn’t been tried here yet.
Until they make the United States into the paradise that Venezuela is, they will continue to believe in it.
They are convinced that here they could do it correctly.
Just because it fails everywhere it’s tried is no reason not to try it here.
You would think this, but facts and logic don’t matter to the Left. They think they are Smarter and can make it work. Plus, the US has more talent and riches to loot. In the past, the talent from these Socialist paradises could always flee to the US. If the US goes Socialist, where exactly are they going to go?
Right now I am watching a documentary on war time farming in the UK in WWII. Some of the choices the government made to increase food production were down right stupid and if they had asked the farmers probably would have told them literally how the cow ate the cabbage.
Or perhaps how the pig eats the mast would be more accurate.
Central planing except in the most general sense simply does not work for countries.
Hahaha. Once again, socialism shows its true colors.
The people of Venezuela voted for starvation.....twice.
The only nations socialism has worked for in any capacity have:
1. Near-zero international military presence and an undersized military in general.
2. A native population as white as Wonder Bread.
3. Tax rates ranging up to 40%.
4. Massive and reliable income sources such as oil production.
And that’s the short list of it!
True. I worked down there in the '80s and remember one local telling me on arrival how in America the rich lived in the mountainsides and the poor in the valleys, but in Venezuela, it was the reverse.
Part of my work took me to Cabimas on Lake Maracaibo. There we talked with an American who ran a ferry service - shuttling crews out to the oil rigs in the lake. He was pretty pist at the government even then and said that "Venezuela was a Third World country rapidly going Fourth." (They had just gone through another devaluation, which nearly wiped him out.**)
When that country started hitting the headlines, I wondered if he was still in business. Too bad about the country, for I found the people pretty easy-going and pleasant to work with.
The Bolivar since 2010: 
The Russians and China also have hands in this. It's much more sinister and troublesome than the N.Y. Times and Media have reported.
It's primarily the Cubans. They are flipping one country after another to a dictatorship. Columbia is next.
Obama's actions regarding Cuba and inaction regarding FARC only accelerated the process. His name should go down in infamy.
A funny thing about that man Pinochet: while his terroristic rule earned him a much-deserved reputation as a monster, the free-market policies he implemented became the undoing of his tyranny. Chile became wealthy enough for its people to organize a political opposition that ousted him, and it has since become a stable, functioning democracy. Capitalism helped Chile go from a poor dictatorship to a prosperous democracy; socialism has turned Venezuela from a prosperous democracy to a poor dictatorship. Democratic socialism in Venezuela, and throughout Latin America, promised to bring an end to oppression and poverty, but now the falseness of that promise has been laid bare for the world to see.
Venezuela would have collapsed years ago if they didn’t have more oil than anyone except Saudi Arabia. The price was so high their oil income hid the fact they had already ruined their economy. Once the Saudis decided to try to ruin the US oil industry by flooding the market and cutting the price, Venezuela couldn’t bring in enough money to maintain their economy and they didn’t have enough domestic production of anything to meet basic needs. The dirty little secret is that while they championed socialism, they maintained they economy with capitalism and their collapse was caused by not American capitalists, but by Muslim capitalists.
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