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Fatherland, Socialism and Death!

Venezuela, store, socialism, column

The fall of Venezuela is an atrocity.

The comic elements are clear enough — the further you remove yourself from the poverty, chaos, and collapse. We can wallow in a bit of Schadenfreude, taking glee as some American leftists squirm to explain why the socialist paradise they ballyhooed a mere three years ago now tail-​spins to the grave.

The collapse of this socialist experiment offers an enormous level of tragedy. It’s not pretty.

The country’s leader, President Nicolas Maduro, makes his predictable desperation play. Rather than confront his own errors, and the futility of making socialism work in anything like a rigorous form, he boasts. “Venezuela Leader Says US ‘Dreams’ Of Dividing Loyal Military,” reads yesterday’s Reuters report. While no doubt true, this is one of those cases where whatever we dream to the north, our dreams are better than their current reality.

Of course the Venezuelan military should turn on Maduro, Hugo Chavez’s inheritor, protecting the right of recall, which Maduro is denying. By painting the U. S. as the bad guy, Maduro hopes to unite his people — especially his armed forces — around him. That’s what a desperate demagogic dynast does. Citizens and subjects traditionally abandon skepticism about their leaders when they feel threatened from the outside.

Which is one reason it would be a mistake for the U. S. to intervene.

Reuters poetically reports that the military is still united behind the socialist government, and resists the recall referendum, singing “Fatherland, Socialism, or Death!”

Wrong conjunction. Not “or” but “and” … if you insist on socialism.

The government, military pressure or no, should allow the recall vote, and soon.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Venezuela, store, socialism, column

 

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free trade & free markets ideological culture too much government

Lies and Denials

Politics is often the art of lying about the effects of policy, and Hugo Chavez, Venezuela’s Prevaricator-​in-​Chief, is a master politician. As consumer-​price inflation hits a 27 percent per annum rate, he blames capitalism.

One report summarizes his position: “Mr. Chavez said the market had become a perverse mechanism where the big monopolies, the big trans-​nationals, and the bourgeoisie, dominate and ransack the people.”

So he’s extended price controls from staples to all sorts of goods, with some prices being immediately subjected to a rate freeze. Big firms will have to report costs to the government, so bureaucrats can determine a “fair price.”

Were it not a ratcheting up of oppression and hardship, I’d say this is all getting rather funny. Price controls notoriously fail to achieve what they aim. In the United States, Nixon-​era wage and price controls set stagflation into overdrive. Long lines at the gas pumps, shortages in supermarkets, and rising prices. What a mess.

There’s good theory to explain why price floors and price ceilings cause major problems. But according to the head of the country’s price control board, “The law of supply and demand is a lie.”

Hugo and his cronies deny the relevance of the central bank’s doubling the volume of money in circulation since late 2007. Supply of money increases? No possible effect on skyrocketing prices, supply and demand being a lie, you see.

Meanwhile, people have begun to hoard products. It’s now almost impossible to even find coffee in Venezuelan stores.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.