Posted on 05/28/2017 4:53:34 AM PDT by RoosterRedux
With all of the unrest, riots and murders in Venezuela these days, it’s easy to overlook one very basic question about the abysmal conditions its citizens are enduring. Venezuela has some of the richest farmland in the western hemisphere and was a net exporter of agricultural products until very recently. How can the people be starving? That’s the question being tackled at the Washington Post this week and the answer comes down to a single source: it’s the socialism, stupid.
At a time of empty supermarkets and spreading hunger, the country’s farms are producing less and less, not more, making the caloric deficit even worse.The case of Escobar’s chicken farm is only one of thousands of such examples, but it’s an excellent one to describe the problems the farmers are facing. He had a ranch with nearly a quarter million hens in a country where people are starving to death. That would mean the opportunity of a lifetime in any free portion of the world. But the socialist regime in Venezuela has taken charge of every aspect of the food production and distribution supply chain. They determine how much Escobar will be paid for his eggs and it turns out to be a net loss for him rather than a profit. Unable to buy sufficient amounts of feed and new chicks to raise, Escobar’s farm is withering and will soon be gone.Drive around the countryside outside the capital, Caracas, and there’s everything a farmer needs: fertile land, water, sunshine and gasoline at 4 cents a gallon, cheapest in the world. Yet somehow families here are just as scrawny-looking as the city-dwelling Venezuelans waiting in bread lines or picking through garbage for scraps.
Having attempted for years to defy conventional economics, the country now faces a painful reckoning with basic arithmetic.
“Last year I had 200,000 hens,” said Saulo Escobar, who runs a poultry and hog farm here in the state of Aragua, an hour outside Caracas. “Now I have 70,000.”
You mean the same reason that Zimbabwe went from being the bread basket of southern Africa to being the basket case?
A kid's got a ton of rules to follow and actually be afraid of (don't get caught with a pocket knife in your backpack even if it is in your locker because "they" can pull unannounced searches legally and look inside while you're in class (A REAL EVENT JUST A MONTH OR SO AGO IN PODUNK HILLBILLY LAND), that all the kid wants to do is get through school and get out.
And because of that subliminal pressure, no real education ever happens.
That is the given. It everyone gets it.
I may be using JR’s words next school board meeting.
Goldman Sachs makes hundreds of millions of dollars profit via the US welfare state.
Bingo. The local farmers lost their incentive.
People Create Wealth
Government Creates Poverty
How do they do that?
One example of educational socialism is the control of public schools by the federal government’s withholding education funds from schools that do not teach Common Core. Common Core was written to hold back higher-achieving students. Common Core is equally confusing for all.
Hey, it really sucks, but at least no one is making any money off it. Except the appropriators.
Socialized schooling, like socialized anything, gets the incentives wrong. Teachers’ incentives should be to get the best out of their students, but socialism loads more administrators onto the system who make decisions about what should happen in the classroom based on little or no knowledge about what is really needed there. Teachers respond by giving the administrators false reports to meet mandated statistical goals, up to and including outright cheating on “achievement” tests.
Adam Smith recommended a system where students and their families directly pay teachers. He who pays the piper calls the tune. Third party payments never work for long because the customers’ needs take second place (at best) and administrators get the lion’s share.
Good question
Maybe because the Chinese and Arabs that are buying it dont give away food?
Just think. If Bernie had been elected we wouldnt have all these student takeovers of college campuses. His govt would truck them to the country and give them hoes.
universal wage and price controls + government monopoly = economic chaos
economic chaos + central planning + tyranny + forced labor + aristocratic privilege for leaders = shortages
shortages + economic chaos = socialist hellhole
Another of how big government operates it’s always the same answer FAIL.
Pecause they are lazy and won't work or the government has conditioned them to not work and has fed them in exchange for their vote. All that lush farmland and its owners are under no obligation to feed those who will not work.
When visiting Venezuela in the 70’s I learned south Venezuela , the agricultural lands, were farmed by Europeans who migrated there over the past century.
When visiting Venezuela in the 70’s I learned south Venezuela , the agricultural lands, were farmed by Europeans who migrated there over the past century.
The farmers pretend to work while the govt. pretends to pay them.
Venezuela is but a preview of what California shall become, if the headlong rush to create a socialist state there is not halted soon.
But I see no way to break the oligarchy that now controls the state short of bringing them up on some kind of Federal RICO charges for malfeasance of office.
Starting with the California Democrat members of Congress and the Senate, the governor, the majority leaders in the California Assembly and Senate, the mayors of San Francisco and Los Angeles, and their allied minions.
“Sanctuary” cities and an entire state are no sanctuaries at all.
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