Check out this story about Venezuela's looming economic collapse:
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? Well, a combination of bad luck and worse policies. The first step was when Hugo Chávez's socialist government started spending more money on the poor, with everything from two-cent gasoline to free housing. Now, there's nothing wrong with that — in fact, it's a good idea in general — but only as long as you actually, well, have the money to spend. And by 2005 or so, Venezuela didn't.
Dude ...
Venezuela had problems before Chavez--like any country. But on the plus side, they had lots of oil and an educated people. The 2-cent gasoline and "free" housing that Chavez provided were part of the worse policies put it place! Somebody pays for "free" things and the bill is coming due now.
By pointing to low oil prices as the "bad luck" that made those "good ideas" untenable, the author is actually failing to credit the bad policies that Hugo Chavez set up with his Socialism With a Macho Face approach to effing up a wet dream!
"Bad luck," indeed. Robert Heinlein put it well:
“Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded—here and there, now and then—are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
“This is known as ‘bad luck’.”
We're watching this play out in Venezuela and still can't see what is happening.
But at least the author doesn't hold back from calling the government policies "socialist."
UPDATE: You want to see a real hockey stick?
I'll admit that industrialism is a big part of this increase and so we'd see increases even under socialist industrialization. But other than the failed experiments with socialist economics in Russia (ended by the collapse of the communist empire-state) and China (ended by the communist government to save themselves) this period has been dominated by capitalism in free, Western (and Westernized) states.
