ah yes, the condensed blessings of socialism...
Posted on 08/27/2018 4:31:57 AM PDT by reaganaut1
Ideas run the world. Good ones create freedom and wealth; bad ones, oppression and poverty. You are not what you eat, but what you think.
Politicians in particular fall under the sway of ideas. As John Maynard Keynes put it, “Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. . . . It is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.”
The story of Venezuela makes this point with singular clarity. In 1914 the discovery of oil brought the country vast revenues and produced a relatively free economy. By 1950 Venezuela enjoyed the fourth-highest per capita income in the world, behind only the U.S., Switzerland and New Zealand. As late as 1980, it boasted the world’s fastest-growing economy in the 20th century. In 2001 Venezuela still ranked as Latin America’s wealthiest country.
Venezuela’s troubles, however, had begun long before. Starting around 1958, government interference in the economy, including price and exchange controls, higher taxes, and restrictions on property rights, led to decades of stagnation, with per capita real income declining 0.13% from 1960-97. Still, it remained a normal, functioning country.
Today the country with the world’s largest oil reserves suffers from a severely contracting economy, runaway inflation, despotism, mass emigration, criminality, disease, hunger and starvation, with circumstances deteriorating daily. Venezuela’s economy contracted by 16% in 2016, 14% last year and a predicted 15% in 2018. Inflation was at 112% in 2015 and 2,800% at the end of last year. Economist Steve Hanke finds an annualized rate of around 65,000% for 2018, making Venezuela’s one of the most severe hyperinflations ever.
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
ah yes, the condensed blessings of socialism...
Socialism was used as an excuse or a cover for bad policies as well as personal enrichment by politicians, but the same bad policies and theft could have been implemented under fascism.
These days with the corrupt media worldwide favoring socialism, that’s the way to go if you’re going to be a crook. The media will always give leftists plenty of cover.
As a part of the reality, realize the mass of Venezuelans before the Chavista revolution were very poor, and most of the wealth was in the small middle and tiny upper class.
The revolution has made things worse.
20. Infiltrate the press. Get control of book-review assignments, editorial writing, policy-making positions .
21. Gain control of key positions in radio, TV, and motion pictures.
(From 45 Communist Goals)
tl;dr intellectual mind clutter. One only has to mention ‘Socialism’ and ‘Despotism ‘ as the root cause of everything bad about Venezuela to understand what’s gone wrong.
No Victoria, Venezuela did not turn bad because good men tried ideas they thought were good. It failed as all multi-level marketing schemes do. ignorance and greed.
Step 1. Start confiscatory policies until you run out of industries to confiscate.
Step 2. Start printing more money to keep the government and military going.
Step 3. Watch the death spiral you’ve created as you have to print more and more.
Now EVERYONE (except government employees of course) is destitute and starving - true "income equality" as desired by the Democrat party and it's moron far left socialist leaders.
The Communists always called themselves “Socialists” and make no mistake, the latest government measures are Castroite, Stalinist full bore commie economics.
The starvation will only worsen for those who stay.
At least the people have a chance to walk with their feet to get away from it but maybe that’s Maduro’s calculus.
He wants to invade his neighbors with refugees to disrupt them and trigger a violent response from their police military and or civilians irritated by the new arrivals flooding their streets and taking their jobs away.
Socialism morphs into tyranny when it runs out of other people’s money.
Found your candidate for 2020 yet?
Socialism. It really is Heavenly.
1. Your money is no good.
2. You are expected to praise the administration endlessly.
3. It leads to nothing better.
pretty much
Imagine if we invented a weapon that only crushed Democrats, destroyed their cities, saw them driven before us, and unleashed the lamentations of their women. That genie is already out of the bottle and is called the socialist bomb. The only barricades needed are called city limits. We can't put socialism back in the bottle but we can weaponize it against Democrats.
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