Venezuela
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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November 7, 2016 — Steven Hayward
While we await the results of the election tomorrow that will determine merely the degree to which the U.S. will continue on its slow-motion journey to socialized mediocrity, let’s take in a few excerpts from a bracing new report about conditions in that latest people’s paradise, Venezuela: Public health in Venezuela is, in fact, getting rapidly worse. In 1961, Venezuela was the first country declared free of malaria. Now its
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November 1, 2016 — John Hinderaker
We have chronicled the sickening descent of resource-rich Venezuela into chaos and poverty. Along with the tragedy, there is a strong element of farce, as with Venezuela’s inability to produce or buy toilet paper. More serious than the toilet paper shortage, however, is the food shortage. Venezuelans are starving, and their socialist government has come up with a solution: grow your own fruits and vegetables. To its credit, the Washington
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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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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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August 13, 2016 — John Hinderaker
How bad have things gotten in socialist Venezuela? So bad that Venezuelans feel less secure than Syrians: Venezuelans feel less safe in their home country than civilians living in war-torn Syria, according to a new Gallup poll. Just 14 percent of Venezuelans said they feel safe in the country, compared with 32 percent of Syrian respondents who feel safe, according to the 2016 Global Law and Order Report. “Venezuela has
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July 30, 2016 — Scott Johnson
In his column “Socialism for the uninformed,” Thomas Sowell observed: “socialism sounds great. It has always sounded great. And it will probably always continue to sound great. It is only when you go beyond rhetoric, and start looking at hard facts, that socialism turns out to be a big disappointment, if not a disaster.” Sowell cited the slow-motion catastrophe in Venezuela as a case in point: “While throngs of young
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July 25, 2016 — Scott Johnson
Mark Falcoff is resident scholar emeritus at the American Enterprise Institute and author, among other books, of Cuba the Morning After: Confronting Castro’s Legacy. He is also on occasional contributor to Power Line. He writes: Not long ago when the Obama administration decided to end our diplomatic and political embargo of Cuba many friends and associates asked me, as a long time Cuba-watcher, what I thought about it. At the
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June 21, 2016 — Scott Johnson
If you seek to understand the catastrophe that has hit Venezuela, you can compare and contrast the views of New York Times reporter Nicholas Casey with those of Los Angeles Dodgers broadcaster Vin Scully. Winner: Scully. Even if he is clueless about causes, and he is, Casey can see what is in front of his nose. Give him that much. He is stationed in Caracas and he has the requisite
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June 11, 2016 — John Hinderaker
What happens when a National Public Radio host interviews a New York Times reporter on the subject of Venezuela’s economic collapse? You get a perfect storm of cluelessness. The host is Terry Gross, the guest is New York Times reporter Nicholas Casey, and the program is Fresh Air. Gross asks Casey about the utter disaster that Venezuela has become. Casey understands the depth to which Venezuela has fallen–he lives in
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May 22, 2016 — Steven Hayward
Back in the late 1970s the political scientist Paul Hollander performed a great public service with his book Political Pilgrims: Western Intellectuals in Search of the Good Society (still in print), in which he catalogued and eviscerated the naïve and mendacious leftists who always tromped off to the latest “people’s utopia” (Soviet Union, Cuba, Mao’s China, Albania, North Vietnam, even North Korea for a time, etc.) and came back proclaiming
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May 18, 2016 — John Hinderaker
We have chronicled the catastrophic decline of Venezuela’s economy under socialists Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro. The situation has gotten so bad that even the New York Times has taken note: “Dying Infants and No Medicine: Inside Venezuela’s Failing Hospitals.” By morning, three newborns were already dead. The day had begun with the usual hazards: chronic shortages of antibiotics, intravenous solutions, even food. Then a blackout swept over the city,
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May 8, 2016 — Steven Hayward
Socialism depends on consolidating and centralizing all power, so when things start to go wrong (as they inevitably do), this also is as inevitable as food shortages, black markets, and hyperinflation: Leader opposition party in Venezuela assassinated Venezuelan politician German Mavare, leader of the opposition UNT party, died Friday after being shot in the head, an assassination that occurred in the western state of Lara, his organization said. “The board
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April 27, 2016 — Steven Hayward
As everyone over the age of six knows (that excludes Sanders voters obviously), one of the first things you run out of in a socialist economy that attempts price controls is toilet paper. But with Venezuela’s hyperinflation, you could always swap out the worthless paper currency for the Charmin. Except: Venezuela Doesn’t Have Enough Money to Pay for Its Money Venezuela’s epic shortages are nothing new at this point. No
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April 22, 2016 — John Hinderaker
Venezuela, one of the world’s most oil-rich countries, can’t keep the lights on. The country’s socialist government has announced that Venezuelans will now be entirely without power for four hours a day. But that’s not the worst of it: they will have to sit in the dark without beer: As Venezuelans digest news that they’ll have no power for hours a day, they also may have to do without beer
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February 18, 2016 — Steven Hayward
John has already alerted us to the example of Venezuela’s collapsing socialist economy as a model of what life under President Bernie Sanders could be like—a prospect I’m calling “Colonel Sanders Cambridge Fried Economy,” since it would be a Cambridge (MA) professor’s dream to be in charge of fixing all of the things wrong with America. But today’s news out of Venezuela is just too much fun. First, this from
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