VENEZUELA IS PROOF SOCIALISM ALWAYS CAUSES MISERY BY BENJAMIN WEINGARTEN
See more at: https://www.conservativereview.com/commentary/2016/06/venezuela-is-proof-socialism-always-causes-misery#sthash.QPR78WLI.dpuf
The great man-caused disaster of the last century is not global warming. It is socialism.
Consider the utter tragedy playing itself out in Venezuela, a formerly relatively prosperous, resource-rich, Western nation that now faces the economic, political and cultural abyss after embracing the Bernie Sanders-on-steroids policies the Left always promises will bring about justice, fairness and equality.
As one heart-wrenching account details:
In the last two years Venezuela has experienced the kind of implosion that hardly ever occurs in a middle-income country like it outside of war. Mortality rates are skyrocketing; one public service after another is collapsing; triple-digit inflation has left more than 70 percent of the population in poverty; an unmanageable crime wave keeps people locked indoors at night; shoppers have to stand in line for hours to buy food; babies die in large numbers for lack of simple, inexpensive medicines and equipment in hospitals, as do the elderly and those suffering from chronic illnesses.
Venezuela indeed has experienced a war, but not one involving armies. The nation has waged a war on liberty itself.
Consider the events that have transpired in a nutshell:
- Citizens ceded ultimate power to the Chavez and Maduro regimes. Like all “successful” strongmen of socialist dictatorships past, Chavez and Maduro respectively conferred just enough benefits on critical constituencies to allow them to keep their heads while the nation failed. Absolute power in the hands of one ruler meant that individuals lost their sovereignty, and capital of all forms including human deteriorated. Under this infantilizing revolution, the state became the father-master, while the people became its children-slaves.
- Central planning of the economic system in the form of nationalized industries, confiscatory taxation and wage and price controls ruined any semblance of a marketplace, with much economic activity going underground. In response to the devastation wrought by replacing voluntary actions coordinated by the price mechanism under capitalism with a socialist system based upon coercion, the government has been running its printing presses overtime. No country can print its way to prosperity, but now that central planning of the economy has failed, central planning of money in general and its pump-priming in particular is the next logical step.
- The decay of the marketplace has led to not only poverty and misery, but desperation which has fast turned into rampant violence.We are now at the point of de-civilization altogether, where strength and raw power trump all else. As The New York Times writes:
With delivery trucks under constant attack, the nation’s food is now transported under armed guard. Soldiers stand watch over bakeries. The police fire rubber bullets at desperate mobs storming grocery stores, pharmacies and butcher shops. A 4-year-old girl was shot to death as street gangs fought over food.
…Hundreds of people here in the city of Cumaná, home to one of the region’s independence heroes, marched on a supermarket in recent days, screaming for food. They forced open a large metal gate and poured inside. They snatched water, flour, cornmeal, salt, sugar, potatoes, anything they could find, leaving behind only broken freezers and overturned shelves.
…In the last two weeks alone, more than 50 food riots, protests and mass looting have erupted around the country. Scores of businesses have been stripped bare or destroyed. At least five people have been killed.
In a nation in which the gears of the markets have ground to a halt, stymied by socialism, and people are literally starving, force triumphs over trade.
Successful looters aside, it is only the politically connected who eat. As the Times notes:
Mr. Maduro has tightened his grip over the food supply. Using emergency decrees he signed this year, the president put most food distribution in the hands of a group of citizen brigades loyal to leftists, a measure critics say is reminiscent of food rationing in Cuba.
“They’re saying, in other words, you get food if you’re my friend, if you’re my sympathizer,” said Roberto Briceño-León, the director of the Venezuelan Violence Observatory, a human rights group.
Most telling of all from the Times’ sad exposé is this quote from one starving Venezuelan: “We are now living on Maduro’s diet: no food, no nothing.”
Policies supposedly geared towards justice, fairness and equality have produced nothing but shared pain. Indeed, the progressive ideal at the heart of Venezuela’s regime is Sophistic. For progressivism yields regressive outcomes, and its underlying collectivist principles are themselves regressive.
The transfer of power from the individual to a king under the banner of progressivism is regressive.
In essence, as progressivism moves towards its final stages, it takes us backwards from a state of civilization to the state of nature, in which life is nasty, brutish and short.
The replacement of the daily commercial decisions of millions of individuals to an “enlightened central planner” is regressive.
The yielding of freedom to coercion is regressive.
In essence, as progressivism moves towards its final stages, it takes us backwards from a state of civilization to the state of nature, in which life is nasty, brutish and short. Venezuela is a Rousseaun nightmare.
In short, what Venezuela’s socialist experiment shows us is that a country with much going for it can be squandered quite quickly if the wrong ideas take hold. Freedom is fragile. It is not the rule throughout history, but the great exception. Liberalism in general and capitalism in particular need to be defended. Absent such a fight, we should not be surprised if we succumb to the regressive progressive abyss someday too.
– See more at: https://www.conservativereview.com/commentary/2016/06/venezuela-is-proof-socialism-always-causes-misery#sthash.QPR78WLI.dpuf
– See more at: https://www.conservativereview.com/commentary/2016/06/venezuela-is-proof-socialism-always-causes-misery#sthash.QPR78WLI.dpuf
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