Caracas is burning. The socialist policies of Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro have taken a once wealthy nation and reduced it to abject poverty. Desperate people are demonstrating against the government’s inability to provide basic services; particularly, food, clean water and healthcare. How could this happen in a country with more oil reserves than Saudi Arabia? In a word: Socialism.
Señors Chavez and Maduro, with gigantic socialist hubris, took control of all property, suspended property rights and confiscated weapons; the classic socialist flipping of the concept of government protecting the individual’s natural rights of life, liberty and property to government’s despotic control over the individual’s life, liberty and property.
Faced with an existential crisis and the loss of power, the Venezuelan government is doing what socialist regimes have done around the world. Instead of solving problems, socialists are digging in their heels and resisting all efforts to improve the lot of the average citizen. The global elites believe that socialism must be kept in place, by any means necessary, regardless of the damage done to the individual citizen.
Muscle bound bureaucracies push back against the people with increasingly harsh measures. Venezuela’s socialists have murdered hundreds of its starving citizens; citizens whose only crime is asking for bread to feed their families. This is socialism’s last ditch effort to stave off the inevitable; the bureaucracies clamp down on the people and turn on the printing presses. The result of using the printing press to cover socialism’s failings is rampant inflation, which only provides fuel for the burning cities.
Socialists just can’t help themselves; their appetite for other people’s money is insatiable. Unfortunately for the socialists, other people’s money is limited. Further, the more money the socialists devour, the less money available to satiate socialist appetites.
Socialists secure power and position through vote buying by promising the poor a middle class standard of living, complete with “free” stuff. Unfortunately, socialism eliminates all incentives to produce as a byproduct of their squandering the other people’s money. Productivity declines, government expenses exceed government revenues and taxes go up, which further cuts into productivity and incentives for economic growth. And alas, it is inevitable that socialists will run out of other people’s money.
It is not too late for socialists to see the light; they only need to pull their collective heads out of the sand.
