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.

[left that other site]

Thank you for your kind words, FRiend.

[left that other site]

Who can blame them for closing down?

[left that other site]

You are correct about that...Arkanicide and obamacide are happening as we speak.

[Red Badger]

Pass them on.............................

[samtheman]

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

Just as the media here and in Europe will voluntarily clamp down on this story and refuse to air it.

[left that other site]

From Foster to Breitbart and Beyond.....

One or two coincidences, I’m sure, but enough deaths to be “suspicious”...

[driftless2]

"That's what they tell their people. And around half of them buy it."

During the Eisenhower admin vice-president Nixon took a diplomatic trip to Venezuela. He was spit on by angry crowds who mobbed his car.

There's been a very prominent leftist element in S. America for many decades telling the people all their problems are the fault of the wicked Yanquis. They probably believe it today.

[SamAdams76]

It’s the lack of beer that scares me the most about socialism. Over in the Soviet Union, they had to dig potatoes out of the ground to make vodka. Even to this day, there are very few good Russian beers. I do not like vodka.

[TexasRepublic]

I'm too lazy today to research THIS subject, but it seems to me that Venezuela was in the 80's and the 90's a pretty prosperous nation

Do I remember correctly ?

Yes, it was prosperous, by Latin American standards. I was there in Caracas and Merida six months before Hugo (may piss be upon him) took power. People there were friendly and very helpful to visitors, no matter where I went. I was very impressed. I still think about certain people I met there, and wonder how they are coping.

[MinorityRepublican]

Especially after Wilson Ramos, Washington Nationals’ Catcher was briefly kidnapped in that socialists’ paradise

[Popman]

Venezuela now is the USA in 10 years

It's going to take a LOT longer than 10 years for the USA to become Venezuela...

You severely underestimate the American people...

Venezuela has a long history of quasi-socialism or outright socialism, even though are are officially known as as Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela...

One man, Chavez, ruined the country, it took him 20 years with Cuban Fidel help...

The countries biggest problem has been brain drain, (1 million upper and middle class people left) anyone with one has left to escape Chavez and his minions

Atlas shrugged in slo mo..

At some point a new strongman will arise and throw the commies out...

[Lurker]

I learned something today. Thanks.

[nitzy]

I don’t understand what is so hard about this.

They just need to pass laws to increase the amount of food, increase doctor pay and increase beer production.

Problem solved.

[dsc]

“And yet, like a moth to the flame, a large chunk of the US population votes for it because it gives them free stuff paid for by someone else, at least until the collapse.”

You know how the demonrats are always whining that the evil Republicans are “suppressing the vote”?

Maybe they should actually do that.

[dsc]

“Two of his close relatives, who were food producers in Venezuela had just been murdered by a bunch of government thugs who went right up to them on their farm, killed them, and took over.”

Yeah, I saw that on the front page of the Washington Post. (/s)

My condolences to your friend and his surviving relatives.

[dsc]

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

Intellectual dishonesty is not merely the hallmark, the metier, the forte, the oeuvre of the liberal, it is the very sine qua non of liberalism. Compared to this, hypocrisy is a mere spear-carrier in the liberal’s limping army of sophistries, prevarication, and false moral equivalences.

The liberal himself somehow manages to suppress awareness of his own detachment from both reality and honesty, and in fact spends great volumes of energy swanning about in high dudgeon, gushing forth banshee wails of rage at the purported dishonesty and malice of his opponents. Spraying poison in all directions like a rabid cobra on meth, the liberal walks closed-minded through a world in which only he is open-minded, bigoted through a world in which only he is tolerant, ignorant through a world in which only he is educated, consumed by rage, hatred, and malice through a world in which only he is kind and nice.

All leftist thought, from the limousine liberalism of a George Clooney to the murderous horrors of Mao, Stalin, and Pol Pot, is of and from Satan. Leftism is a contaminant in the human cognosphere, not a natural component of it.

Satan is smarter than we are, and he never sleeps. Those over whom he has the most influence are like maniacally evil energizer demons.

Every once in a while one of them escapes, as David Horowitz did, but who knows how or why?

Anyway, Satan knows that leftism is bad for humanity. That’s why he invented it, and that’s why he flim-flams those he can into trying to force it on us all.

[M Kehoe]

Good post.

5.56mm

[Diana in Wisconsin]

“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.”

Is there anywhere on the net that shows what the true ‘cost’ of something should be in American dollars? I mean, we can’t be far off from the above, can we?

OK, maybe only 1 Billion for a beer at this point...but do you see what I mean?

[dfwgator]

“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.”

Zimbabwe is the new Planet Algon....where an ordinary cup of drinking chocolate costs four million pounds,

[Rides_A_Red_Horse]

No BEER! Time for a Revolucion!

---

“When the revolution comes everyone will have peaches and cream!”

“But I don’t like peaches and cream!”

“When the revolution comes you WILL like peaches and cream!”