Venezuela

Chile vs. Venezuela

Featured image Pop quiz: Which country would you rather live in—Chile or Venezuela? That’s pretty obvious—Chile. That was not an automatic answer until recent years. As recently as 2004 Venezuela had a higher per capita GDP than Chile, but then Chile doesn’t have Venezuela’s oil riches. Today Chile has a higher per capita GDP than Venezuela measured in nominal terms, but with a 30,000 percent inflation rate in Venezuela right now (and »

In Venezuela, the End Is Near

Featured image We have chronicled the accelerating destruction of Venezuela, once one of the world’s more prosperous countries, by socialism. The most recent news from that country is chilling: * According to Gallup, Venezuela is now the least safe place in the world, having tumbled below Afghanistan in the rankings. Only 17% of Venezuelans say they feel safe walking alone at night. * Polio has re-emerged in Venezuela, 30 years after it »

Venezuela “Votes.” Is There a Lesson Here For Democrats?

Featured image An election is going on in Venezuela. In a country where there are no more pets and children join gangs to fight over dumpster refuse, while their parents battle for dead rats to eat for dinner, you would expect the incumbent party to lose a free election. But Nicolas Maduro will no doubt be re-elected, in part because the polls are being boycotted by most of his opponents. So Venezuela’s »

The Perils of “Neoliberalism”

Featured image Hang around a campus long enough and you’ll soon get wind of the great bête noir of the left these days: “Neoliberalism.” When I first started hearing the term, I thought back to the early 1980s, when old line liberals like Charlie Peters of the Washington Monthly were trying to work out a “neoliberal manifesto” to go up against the highly successful neoconservatism. In fact Peters and Philip Keisling produced a »

Not Even Baseball Can Survive Socialism [with comment by Paul]

Featured image We have documented, from time to time, Venezuela’s descent into the final stages of socialism. You know you are nearing the end when people eat their pets. But that’s not all: Patrick Reusse, a veteran sportswriter at Minneapolis’s Star Tribune, notes that even baseball is abandoning Venezuela: Bill Smith was in charge of setting up a training academy for the Twins that opened in Bejuma, Venezuela, in 1995. There was »

Children Are Starving Under Socialism

Featured image Today’s New York Times has a long article, replete with photographs, on starving children in Venezuela. The situation is grim: Hunger has stalked Venezuela for years. Now, it is killing the nation’s children at an alarming rate, doctors in the country’s public hospitals say. Venezuela has been shuddering since its economy began to collapse in 2014. Riots and protests over the lack of affordable food, excruciating long lines for basic »

Starvation: It’s a Small Price to Pay for Socialism!

Featured image This video is pretty entertaining. Ami Horowitz interviewed New York millennials, asking about their views on the all-important question of income equality. Actually, anyone who thinks about the subject for two minutes should be able to figure out that a society without income inequality would scarcely be worth living in. But these people are without a clue. Horowitz continues with questions about Venezuela, where starving people are fighting over dead »

McMaster’s Obama holdovers, a second look

Featured image I’ve been critical of H.R. McMaster, President Trump’s national security adviser, and I continue to have reservations about him. However, I now believe that one of my posts on the subject was unfair and needs to be revisited. The post in question discussed Obama administration holdovers on McMaster’s staff. It was based on an article in the Daily Caller by Richard Pollock and Ethan Barton. Throughout the post, I tried »

The Associated Press Departs From Venezuela

Featured image 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 »

The Best of Power Line: Sean Penn and Venezuela Revisited

Featured image Leftists who loved Venezuelan socialism are strangely quiet right now, so we think it is fitting to revisit an old post about one of Hugo Chavez’s greatest boosters, Sean Penn. From December 28, 2012, here is “Sean Penn: Bard for Our Time“: There are a handful of writers, Shakespeare being the best example, whose works best come to life heard aloud rather that read silently on the two-dimensional page.  Sean »

Leftists Riot In Hamburg and Caracas

Featured image 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 »

What Venezuela’s Medical Crisis Tells Us About Socialism

Featured image 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 »

The Venezuela Diet, By Remy

Featured image I’ve been waiting for this. Or at least something like it. Take it away, Remy! »

Socialism, the 21st Century Diet Plan

Featured image 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 »

Socialist Death Squads Rule Venezuela

Featured image 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 »

Santa Claus Isn’t Coming to Venezuela

Featured image 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 »

The Venezuelan Abyss

Featured image 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 »