Apologists for Socialism Approach Insanity

Socialism Has Shattered Venezuela

The Useful Idiots Applauded

 Jeff Jacoby
The Globe

When the Cold War ended 25 years ago, the Soviet Union vanished into the ash heap of history. That left the West’s “useful idiots” — Lenin’s term for the ideologues and toadies who could always be relied on to justify or praise whatever Moscow did — in search of other socialist thugs to fawn over. Many found a new heartthrob in Hugo Chavez, the anti-Yanqui rabble-rouser who was elected president of Venezuela in 1998 and in short order had transformed the country from a successful social democracy into a grim and corrupt autocracy.

An avowed Marxist and protégé of Fidel Castro, Chavez gradually seized control of every lever of state power in Venezuela. The constitution was rewritten to strip the legislature and judiciary of their independence, authorize censorship of the press, and allow Chavez to legislate by decree. Before long, the government acquired a stranglehold over the economy, including the huge and profitable energy sector. (Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world.)

Shades of Weimar and Zimbabwe

The Monetary Meltdown in Venezuela

Washington Post
Francisco Toro

People line up to withdraw money from an ATM in Caracas on Thursday. (Federico Parra/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images)

The Inevitable Fruits of the Hugo Chavez's Regime

Venezuela has run out of cash. Not metaphorically, mind you: The country literally doesn’t have enough cash to go around.  Two weeks ago, facing an acute shortage of paper money, bank regulators capped cash withdrawals at 10,000 Venezuelan bolivars per day — about $5.25.

As I write this, following an almighty rout on the black market, those same 10,000 bolivars are worth less than half that much: $2.17. (By the time you read this, the real number’s likely lower.)  Stop and think about that: How on earth can a country work when the most cash anyone there is allowed to withdraw from their bank account in a day is two bucks and change?

The problem is twofold.

There is, certainly, a serious macroeconomic problem underlying the bolivar’s collapse: an enormous, unmanageable fiscal deficit nobody in their right mind would finance. That has led an irresponsible government to create huge amounts of new money out of thin air to cover its spending needs.   Economists have known for 100 years that “monetizing deficits” this way feeds runaway inflation. It’s a result no one — except for Venezuela’s central bankers and their ideological supporters — seriously questions anymore.

Dealing with this problem isn’t conceptually hard, but it’s politically dicey. The kinds of spending cuts and revenue increases you’d need to head off hyperinflation are challenging for unpopular governments to make.

But it’s the other aspect of the problem that we need to consider here: Even now, with the bolivar trading at 4,600 to the U.S. dollar, Venezuela’s highest-denomination bank note is still the lowly 100-bolivar bill. This summer, it was worth barely a dime. Now, following the latest collapse, the most valuable note in circulation is worth a little more than 2 U.S. cents.

From Russia, Without Love

Much of a Muchness

All totalitarian regimes can best be characterized as being in a state of war against their own people.  To be sure, totalitarian regimes do not always begin that way.  They commence with a great hope, or a grand principle only to find that governing is complex, and the more intrusive rules, regulations, laws, and edicts become, the more complex it turns out to be.  

In this regard we often think of Tolkien's conception of the Ruling Ring--

One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all, and the darkness bind them

We reflect further on how Frodo offered the Ring to Galadriel, saying, "You are wise and fearless and fair, Lady Galadriel.  I will give you the One Ring, if you ask for it.  It is too great a matter for me."  Galadriel admitted that she had long yearned to have such power.

And now at last it comes.  You will give me the Ring freely! In place of the Dark Lord you will set up a Queen.  And I shall not be dark, but beautiful and terrible as the Morning and the Night!  Fair as the Sea and the Sun and the Snow upon the Mountain!  Dreadful as the Storm and the Lightning!  Stronger than the foundations of the earth.  All shall love me and despair!

When Hugo Chavez took control (was set up as a kind of king--the caudillo) over Venezuela.  He was widely loved.  Within half a generation that country is now reduced to despair.  The pattern always plays out.  A false saviour, set to put things right, morphs into a tyrant crushing the lifeblood out of subjects.  The regime ends up being at war against its people.

Angelo Codevilla provides the following description of the Soviet Union--which was not aberrant, but typical of all such.

A Real-Life Monty Python Script

Venezuela Showcases the Glory of Egalitarianism

The ideal of egalitarianism is that everyone is equal.  But, of course, some are more equal than others.  Venezuela is now in the maw of this horror.  Let all those who rail against inequality beware.  You may end up getting what you wished for.

Unfortunately, the "masses" in Venezuela were ardent supporters of strong man, Hugo Chavez's version of egalitarianism.  It would solve all their problems.  Roiling with covetousness and greed they supported Chavismo, the leadership and revolution incarnate in the person of Hugo Chavez. Chanting jubilantly in the streets, they shouted, We will win!  And so they did.  But now, not so much.

In a starving Venezuela, buying too much food can get one arrested

MARIANA ZUÑIGA, NICK MIROFF
The Washington PostVia Stuff

The hunt for food started at 4am, when Alexis Camascaro woke up to get in line outside the supermarket. By the time the Venezuelan man arrived, there were already 100 people ahead of him.  

Camascaro never made it inside. Truckloads of Venezuelan troops arrived in the darkness, arresting him and nearly 30 others seemingly pulled from the queue at random, according to his lawyer. Camascaro, 50, was charged with violating laws against interfering "directly or indirectly" with the production, transportation or sale of food.

He has been in jail for three months, awaiting a hearing.  "I went to see the prosecutors and explained that he was just buying some food for his family. He's not a bachaquero," said Lucía Mata, Camascaro's attorney, using the Venezuelan term for someone who buys scarce, price-capped or government-subsidised goods to resell on the black market.

Camascaro was snared in a new crackdown on Venezuelan shoppers, part of President Nicolás Maduro's attempt to assert greater control over food distribution and consumption.

Update on Venezuela

Riots Draw Nigh

Venezuelans are storming supermarkets and attacking trucks as food supplies dwindle

By Joshua Partlow and Mariana Zuñiga

Washington Post

CARACAS, Venezuela — In the darkness the warehouse looks like any other, a metal-roofed hangar next to a clattering overpass, with homeless people sleeping nearby in the shadows.

But inside, workers quietly unload black plastic crates filled with merchandise so valuable that mobs have looted delivery vehicles, shot up the windshields of trucks and hurled a rock into one driver’s eye. Soldiers and police milling around the loading depots give this neighborhood the feel of a military garrison.

“It’s just cheese,” said Juan Urrea, a 29-year-old driver, as workers unloaded thousands of pounds of white Venezuelan queso from his delivery truck. “I’ve never seen anything like this before.”

The fight for food has begun in Venezuela.

Letter From America (About Venezuela)

Venezuela is on the Brink of a Complete Economic Collapse

Matt O'Brien,
The Washington Post

The only question now is whether Venezuela's government or economy will completely collapse first. The key word there is "completely." Both are well into their death throes. Indeed, Venezuela's ruling party just lost congressional elections that gave the opposition a veto-proof majority, and it's hard to see that getting any better for them any time soon — or ever.

Incumbents, after all, don't tend to do too well when, according to the International Monetary Fund, their economy shrinks 10 percent one year, an additional 6 percent the next, and inflation explodes to 720 percent. It's no wonder, then, that markets expect Venezuela to default on its debt in the very near future. The country is basically bankrupt.

That's not an easy thing to do when you have the largest oil reserves in the world, but Venezuela has managed it. How?

Villainous Hero

How the Mighty Have Fallen

When Hugo Chavez died, the chattering classes and the Commentariat went into official mourning.  A saint had departed from the earth.  A true hero of the people, the poor, the underprivileged had shuffled off this mortal coil.  A political giant had left us.  But his legacy remained--an inspiration to all.

Pieces written by professional mourners appeared throughout the Western press and electronic media.  Chavez proudly announced himself to be a socialist and that socialism was the only way forward.  All of this was a bit too much from the more substantial outlets.  This from his obit in The Guardian:

Letter From America (About Hugo Chavez)

 Life Under Hugo Chavez

Mytheos Holt

March 6, 2013

The Blaze

. . . Chavez’s Agenda

Throughout his career as president of Venezuela, Chavez could be described as single-mindedly pursuing one particular ideal: The ideal of social (particularly economic) equality. Everyone from Chavez’s critics to his supporters has written something to this effect. Bloomberg Businessweek, for instance, wrote this in its obituary:

 Chávez’s most enduring and positive legacy is his shattering of Venezuela’s peaceful coexistence with poverty, inequality, and social exclusion. He was not the first political leader who placed the poor at the center of the national conversation. Nor was he the first to use a spike in oil revenue to help the poor. But none of his predecessors did it so aggressively and with such a passionate sense of urgency as Chávez did. And no one was more successful in planting this priority into the nation’s psyche and even exporting it to neighboring countries and beyond. Moreover, his ability to make the poor feel that one of them was in charge has no precedent.

CNN was even more blatant in its news story on Chavez’s death, describing Chavez’s legacy as leaving the Venezuelan economy “more equal [and] less stable”.