The story of Venezuela, brought from affluence to misery by its own madman in authority, makes this point with singular clarity. In 1914, the discovery of oil on Venezuelan land brought the country vast revenues and produced a relatively free economy. By 1950, Venezuela enjoyed the fourth-highest per capita income in the world, behind only the U.S., Switzerland, and New Zealand. As late as 1980, it boasted the world’s fastest growing economy in the 20thcentury. In 2001, Venezuela still ranked as Latin America’s wealthiest country.
Today, Venezuela has become the most hellish place on Earth, with its population fleeing to neighboring countries, crime skyrocketing, its kleptocrat rulers kept in power through military force, and its remaining population, having eaten the family pets, hunting rats for dinner. Link.
For many years now people such as myself have been writing that Venezuela was going to end up like this. It was absolutely clear from the very first day that Hugo Chavez took power.
And now we have Americans toying with the idea of socialism again. One wonders how many examples of disaster and death they will need to have stacked around their feet before they realize that socialism is a dead end. But perhaps the key to the persistence of this ideology is the word "kleptocrat". Perhaps American socialists all imagine that they will be in the inner circle of leadership who, like Maduro and his friends, enrich themselves by running their country into the ground.
For many years now people such as myself have been writing that Venezuela was going to end up like this. It was absolutely clear from the very first day that Hugo Chavez took power.
And now we have Americans toying with the idea of socialism again. One wonders how many examples of disaster and death they will need to have stacked around their feet before they realize that socialism is a dead end. But perhaps the key to the persistence of this ideology is the word "kleptocrat". Perhaps American socialists all imagine that they will be in the inner circle of leadership who, like Maduro and his friends, enrich themselves by running their country into the ground.
For many years now people such as myself have been writing that Venezuela was going to end up like this. It was absolutely clear from the very first day that Hugo Chavez took power.
And now we have Americans toying with the idea of socialism again. One wonders how many examples of disaster and death they will need to have stacked around their feet before they realize that socialism is a dead end. But perhaps the key to the persistence of this ideology is the word "kleptocrat". Perhaps American socialists all imagine that they will be in the inner circle of leadership who, like Maduro and his friends, enrich themselves by running their country into the ground.
For many years now people such as myself have been writing that Venezuela was going to end up like this. It was absolutely clear from the very first day that Hugo Chavez took power.
And now we have Americans toying with the idea of socialism again. One wonders how many examples of disaster and death they will need to have stacked around their feet before they realize that socialism is a dead end. But perhaps the key to the persistence of this ideology is the word "kleptocrat". Perhaps American socialists all imagine that they will be in the inner circle of leadership who, like Maduro and his friends, enrich themselves by running their country into the ground.
For many years now people such as myself have been writing that Venezuela was going to end up like this. It was absolutely clear from the very first day that Hugo Chavez took power.
And now we have Americans toying with the idea of socialism again. One wonders how many examples of disaster and death they will need to have stacked around their feet before they realize that socialism is a dead end. But perhaps the key to the persistence of this ideology is the word "kleptocrat". Perhaps American socialists all imagine that they will be in the inner circle of leadership who, like Maduro and his friends, enrich themselves by running their country into the ground.
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