Funny enough, Venezuela generated super wealthy connected to the regime even as they destroyed the country:
Step by step, Venezuela has been shutting down.
This country has long been accustomed to painful shortages, even of basic foods. But Venezuela keeps drifting further into uncharted territory.
Funny enough, the New York Times can't fathom that socialism is what is shutting down Venezuela:
The growing economic crisis — fueled by low prices for oil, the country’s main export; a drought that has crippled Venezuela’s ability to generate hydroelectric power; and a long decline in manufacturing and agricultural production — has turned into an intensely political one for President Nicolás Maduro. This month, he declared a state of emergency, his second this year, and ordered military exercises, citing foreign threats.
What bad luck!
Well, not really bad luck. Foreign threats.
That dastardly President Obama, who has always had it in for poor Venezuela, has probably been plotting against this Pearl of Socialism since day one of his presidency, eh? Our president has always wanted to discredit socialism. And now he has done it.
Okay, not really. Or does our Left want to stand on that particular hill of American plots under Obama and defend that position to the death?
No? Can't blame this on American policy?
The problems cited are real, but socialism has eroded all of those issues--looting the oil industry and hydroelectric sectors that ended needed maintenance and investments while regulating the productive sectors to death--making them fragile enough to collapse at the first real problem that a healthy government system would have coped with.
This is what socialism does. No matter how many times Sean Penn claimed he was seeing a glorious future being built in Venezuela.
In the end it impoverishes you and then shoots and imprisons you for daring to mention your poverty.
The shooting and imprisoning will no doubt start in earnest pretty soon.
UPDATE: Socialism wrecks societies, making new elites who run the socialist system:
Well, this is old news: George Orwell explained the phenomenon in his Animal Farm many decades ago. But people keep falling for it: Like Ponzi schemes, socialism is an evergreen form of fraud, egged on by suckers eager to believe the lies hucksters tell them.
That's the most frustrating part. Socialists couldn't pour water out of a boot if the instructions were written on the heel, yet people keep falling for the siren song of building stuff together, hoping that this time it will work just swell.
