Socialism Works: Venezuela Out of Food, Doctors Make $15 a Month and There's No Beer

Frontpage Mag ^ | 07/30/2015 | Daniel Greenfield

[SeekAndFind]

Venezuela used to have oil literally coming out of the ground. Then the Socialists took over and under Hugo Chavez made it a model for the world... to run away from. Here's what's going on in Venezuela now.

Universal Health Care - Venezuela's widely praised government health care system is doing great. Doctors are being paid $15 a month

In some hospitals, they had less than a third of the medical supplies they require. Almost every patient told me they had to buy at least some of their drugs on the street.

Oncologists said that people who were diagnosed with breast cancer sometimes had to wait more than 18 months for treatment, while surgeons said that other patients often die while waiting for operations.

It's not just a lack of medicines that is making life difficult. Spiralling inflation, which topped 600 percent in July 2015, has meant that doctors' salaries are now worth less than £10 per month.

That's about $15 a month. But even that may be optimistic because Venezuelan currency is monopoly money. Obama had to bail out Cuba because Venezuela couldn't keep carrying Castro.

 It’s taken what, no more than a couple of decades, to turn an oil rich middle income country into something worse than most sub-Saharan economic wastelands (the minimum manufacturing wage in Ethiopia is currently $21 a month or so).

Minimum wage in Venezuela is now about $11 a month. But that's okay because there's no food to buy so the government is just confiscating it from farmers, Bolshevik style.

A food industry group said Monday that Venezuela's government has ordered companies to distribute food staples to a network of state-run supermarkets amid chronic shortages of basic goods.

Federal authorities ordered producers of milk, pasta, oil, rice, sugar and flour to supply between 30 percent and 100 percent of their products to the state stores, he Food Industry Chamber said.

Also there's no beer.

In an attempt to subdue out-of-control inflation, the Venezuelan government now forces companies doing international business to use U.S. dollars instead of the Venezuelan bolivar. There’s just one problem: falling oil prices now mean that U.S. dollars have become few and far between. That’s creating a real crunch for Venezuelan companies like breweries, who must buy U.S. dollars in order to do business with foreign markets or import goods into the country.

The Venezuelan government has failed to give enough U.S. dollars to companies even to import many basic goods, such as chicken, beef and toilet paper, Rueda writes. And in just a few weeks, beer might join that list as well.

Local brewers are already struggling to make ends meet. The industry owes about $200 million to foreign suppliers, Rueda writes, and industry leaders are warning of a crisis that could cost the country over 400,000 jobs.

Even the black market won’t help solve the beer shortage, where the going rate for a dollar is more than 600 Venezuelan bolivares. That’s almost three times the highest rate that companies can buy dollars from the government, Rueda writes.

Maybe they can start paying for those beers in Zimbabwean money.

Under Mugabe, the price of an egg rose to 50 billion Zimbabwean dollars and a beer hit 150 billion dollars because Mugabe had the same idea of economics as Obama and Paul Krugman; just print more money.

But don't crack any jokes about it.

Standup comics here say they have no shortage of material: the president claims to have talked to a bird, one political candidate said Tylenol grows on trees and, amid shortages of a key bathroom staple, the National Guard occupied a toilet paper factory.

But using such absurdities in comedy sketches is getting harder amid a government clampdown on political satirists.

Some humorists have been blacklisted by state-run theaters and hotels, and local governments in several towns won’t even allow them to perform. Comedy programs that poke fun at the government have disappeared from Venezuelan TV. A few humorists have given up and moved abroad.

Laureano Márquez, for example, focuses on the strangeness of daily life in an oil-rich country where people often can’t find milk or diapers. During a recent stand-up routine before a sold-out auditorium in his hometown of Maracay, he said the shortages have gotten so bad that instead of staring at pretty girls on the street he now longingly ogles their shopping bags.

But officials aren't amused. When Mssrs. Márquez and Lovera were scheduled for joint performances in February in the cities of Barquisimeto, Valencia and San Antonio de Los Altos, all three private venues that had booked them were temporarily closed after being accused by the central government of tax evasion. The shows were canceled, the two comedians said.

How very Obama-esque.

No jokes, no beer, no money, no food.  That's the left-wing utopia.

[Democrat_media]

Venezuela now is the USA in 10 years . It’s the democrat party and news media’s plan

socialism can never work. why do those idiots in the media keep propagandizing for it?

[PROCON]

[jagusafr]

No Cerveza Polar? No Cerveza Zulia? Que barbaro!

[stephenjohnbanker]

At least doctors in Cuba get 30.00 per month, and 2 beers.

[stephenjohnbanker]

What?

No tonguework ?

Obama is slipping!

[Veggie Todd]

Let’s see....Venezuela is south of us, so that means there must have been a Confederate flag involved.

[Kartographer]

If I had known I could have taken a couple of truck loads of Vodlka a became Tsar of all the Russia!

[Vaquero]

NO TONGUES!

[wally_bert]

The typical liberal would have no problem doing the same here. Killing any non liberal would be a cause for celebration if they could get away with it.

Unless the liberal knows how to make things work, he or she or they will suffer in the end.

[M Kehoe]

I'd like to ping Bernie Sanders and his useful idiots to this thread, but it won't matter. They will tell you that "we are the ones we have been waiting for."

Socialism has failed everywhere it has been tried. I guess that's not a clue to these people.

5.56mm

[Red_Devil 232]

I really liked Polar Beer when I lived there. I can not think of living there without Polar Beer.

[ctdonath2]

Ironically, there’s probably a robust & growing black-market for alcohol there. Importing the stuff is efficient, selling for $33/liter ($1/oz shots) easy. But moreso it’s easy to _make_ in a crashing economy, turning any source of sugars into high-demand booze with just some yeast, water, and time.

Making whiskey was popular in the South US, despite legality & morality issues, because it was a whole lot easier to transport & sell one bottle of “corn squeezin’s” than hauling a bushel or so of raw grains (about 5.3 gallons of spirit from a bushel of grain), and it fetched a higher price per equivalent to boot.

[IMR 4350]

Sounds like N Korea.

Build buildings with no doors, no windows, no plumbing, and no electricity.

People live in them like they are high rise caves.

[Old Sarge]

I blame the Dunning-Kruger Effect. There is no other reasonable explanation.

Okay, I had to look that up - and you're right, nothing else says it like that...

[ExCTCitizen]

Bernie Sanders may we have your honest opinion on Venezuela’s economic woes? Is it because of the US or because of free enterprise??

[Red_Devil 232]

You are right. I worked and lived there in the early ‘90s. It was a great place then. Good Beer and a lot of good Italian food.

[Buckeye McFrog]

In Caracas there is no beer
So let’s try the same thing here
Our kids no longer have any fear
Of Socialism, it’s coming here

[mumblypeg]

Lenin spoke of a “retreat” to “state capitalism” but “not too much” on the path to his New Economic Policy. He was essentially admitting that socialism inevitably bogs down and progress forward just isn’t possible when all individual self interest is suppressed in favor of the collective. IOW even Lenin knew you don’t kill off the producers too quickly. You have to phase them out gradually. The end result, though, is the same.
He also wrote a very interesting piece entitled “The Importance of Gold, Now and After the Complete Victory of Socialism”. Gobbledygook in which he essentially admits the new ruling class needs to hunker down and cover their own butts because the proletariat may get a bit uppity.

[left that other site]

Yes indeed.

I grew up with a lot of Ukrainian kids and I know about that.

[left that other site]

Yes...My friend is an exceptionally nice guy, cultured, loves art and classical music, and very erudite in both English and Spanish.

Can’t figure out how the majority were deceived into accepting socialism!