Was Venezuela one of those s___hole countries Trump was talking about? Whether it was or wasn't, the country certainly has become a s___hole. One of the things that has bewildered me lately is why so many Americans claim to be in favor of socialism when there's an example of the disastrous results of a socialist policy just a few countries South of us. How do they rationalize the result with socialism?
Mary Anastasia O’Grady is the Wall Street Journal's resident expert on South America. And her latest in that paper appeared in the 6/11/2018 edition, to wit: Venezuela’s Long Road to Ruin (or here for a work-around):
If anything was more predictable than the mess created by Hugo Chávez’s Marxist Bolivarian Revolution, it is the pathetic effort by socialists to deny responsibility. The Socialist Party of Great Britain tweeted recently that Venezuela’s problem is that socialism has yet to be tried. It blamed the crisis on “a profit-driven capitalist economy under leftist state-control.” Even more preposterous is the claim by some academics that economic liberalism in the 1980s spawned the socialism that has destroyed the country.
Learning from history is impossible if the narrative is wrong. So let’s clear the record: By the time Chávez was elected, Venezuela already had 40 years of socialism under its belt and precious little, if any, experience with free markets.
She goes on to provide the history for the past several decades. Spoiler alert -- they had help from some bad rulers, but the culprit is still socialism.
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12:50 PM 6/11/2018
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