Socialism
August 2, 2017 — John Hinderaker
The time comes when a country has spiraled so far downhill that it is no longer safe for journalists to cover its demise. That time has arrived in Venezuela. Hannah Dreier, who has been the Associated Press’s reporter in Venezuela since 2014, writes that she is going home: “Departing AP reporter looks back at Venezuela’s slide.” While her article doesn’t say this, it sounds like she won’t be replaced. I
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July 6, 2017 — John Hinderaker
Representatives of the G20 countries are meeting in Hamburg, so the traveling circus of anti-capitalist rioters naturally showed up. As best one can tell, it is more or less the same people who turn out for all of these anti-capitalism demonstrations around the world. They don’t appear to have jobs, and quite a few of them are reported to be trust fund babies. These photos from Hamburg are typical; they
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July 2, 2017 — Scott Johnson
Marxism appeared to have suffered a knockout with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. It looked at the time like the postscript to Ronald Reagan’s long struggle against Communism, the struggle Peter Schweizer called Reagan’s War. Now in what seems like the blink of an eye, Bernie Sanders has somehow become the most popular politician in the United States. By contrast with Reagan, here is a guy who
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May 26, 2017 — John Hinderaker
The Lancet is a renowned medical journal headquartered in England. The current issue includes an article on Venezuela, titled “Data reveal state of Venezuelan health system”. The data in question come from the Venezuelan government, after two years in which it released no reports. No doubt the picture the government paints is, if anything, optimistic. Still, the facts are grim: Maternal and infant mortality have skyrocketed in Venezuela in the
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May 11, 2017 — Steven Hayward
I’ve been waiting for this. Or at least something like it. Take it away, Remy!
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May 6, 2017 — John Hinderaker
The limits of human endurance are now being tested in Venezuela. The Wall Street Journal reports: “Venezuela is starving.” [Venezuela] was once Latin America’s richest, producing food for export. Venezuela now can’t grow enough to feed its own people in an economy hobbled by the nationalization of private farms, and price and currency controls. Socialism, in other words. Venezuela has the world’s highest inflation—estimated by the International Monetary Fund to
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April 22, 2017 — John Hinderaker
That isn’t quite how the New York Times puts it, of course. In fact, the words “socialist” and “socialism” never appear in its otherwise unsparing account. But Venezuela under Chavez and Maduro illustrates the inevitable arc of socialism, from parasitism to gangster rule. The uniformed men who shot Mr. Moreno were not government security forces, witnesses say. Rather, they were members of armed bands who have become key enforcers for
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April 21, 2017 — Paul Mirengoff
John wrote below about the sorry state of the British Labour Party. It has fallen so low that it’s reduced to advertising on Twitter for candidates. In France, the Socialist Party is the analog of the British Labour Party. It has fallen even lower. In the presidential election be held this weekend, the Socialist candidate, Benoit Hamon, is expected to finish fifth. That would make him, in effect, a fringe
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February 21, 2017 — Steven Hayward
Obesity is said to be the pre-eminent public health problem in America right now, which is probably one more reason liberals prefer socialism, and always want to enact legislation regulating our diets. (I predict the school version will be called the “No Child Left With a Big Behind Act.”) To wit, this news: Venezuela: 75% of population lost 19 pounds amid crisis Venezuela’s Living Conditions Survey found that nearly 75
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December 21, 2016 — John Hinderaker
Adam Smith said that there is a lot of ruin in a country, but he didn’t know the half of it. The slow, agonizing descent of once-wealthy Venezuela into a Hobbesian state of nature has been painful to watch, even from afar. Every day brings a new set of disasters, and it is hard to understand why President Maduro hasn’t been strung up from a lamppost like fellow socialist Benito
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December 13, 2016 — Steven Hayward
Steve Hanke of Johns Hopkins University is one of my favorite economists, and he has done some of the best original analysis of inflation around the world, calculating real inflation rates instead of just going by official government-reported rates or World Bank figures, which have defects. He is the originator of the Hanke-Krus World Hyperinflation Table, which found, among other eye-popping findings, that the world’s worst hyperinflation was not Germany
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December 10, 2016 — John Hinderaker
The latest from Venezuela, where socialism has just about completed its destruction of a once-prosperous country: the government has stolen four million toys to distribute them to poor children: Venezuela’s socialist government has seized nearly 4 million toys from a private company and says it intends to hand them out as Christmas gifts to poor children this holiday season. The country’s fair pricing authority seized the toys from three warehouses
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October 25, 2016 — John Hinderaker
Socialists around the world never hold up Venezuela (or North Korea, or the Soviet Union, or Albania, or Cuba) as an example of a successful socialist economy. That honor nearly always goes to Sweden; never mind that Sweden isn’t actually socialist. But it is a welfare state, and that’s the best the Left can do. But the idea that Sweden proves welfare state policies are a path to prosperity is
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October 6, 2016 — John Hinderaker
We have written often about Venezuela’s long decline into poverty and chaos, here, here and elsewhere. Among the country’s many humiliations is the fact that its socialist economy can neither produce nor buy toilet paper. It is, I think, a fitting image of the last days of socialism. Michael Ramirez has, I think, been reading Power Line, and he has created this marvelous image of the fruits of socialism. Click
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September 28, 2016 — John Hinderaker
We have chronicled the agonizing decline of Venezuela into socialist decay over the last couple of years. As poverty has deepened, Western news agencies have taken notice of Venezuela’s symptoms, if not, usually, the cause of that country’s disease. CNN Money reports on middle-class Venezuelans who come to the United States to stock up on basics they can’t buy at home: Carmen Mendoza came to New York to visit her
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September 9, 2016 — John Hinderaker
Socialism is the real voodoo economics, and in Venezuela, the metaphorical has become actual. Out of medicines, Venezuelans turn to black magic. Jaime Otrupo chanted a solemn prayer then wrenched a chicken’s head from its body, allowing the blood to pump into a ceremonial clay pot as an offering to the gods. At his feet were the sacrificed corpses of a dove and a chick, both of which were beheaded
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August 20, 2016 — John Hinderaker
In socialist Venezuela, it has come to this: A gang in search of food broke into a zoo at night and butchered a horse for food, it has been reported. The shocking incident in Caracas has been held up as an example of the desperation of the Venezuelan people who are enduring a severe economic crisis. With looting and food shortages commonplace, it’s been reported that several people forced their
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