SOMEONE TELL BERNIE: Humanitarian Disaster Unfolds in Socialist Paradise of Venezuela

Venezuala crisis

If you believe Bernie Sanders, all we have to do to solve America’s problems is take wealth away from the evil rich and redistribute it to people who have less.

That plan hasn’t worked out too well in socialist countries like Venezuela.

The CATO Institute reports:

Socialism Has Created a Humanitarian Disaster in Venezuela

Venezuela’s accelerating economic meltdown is rapidly turning into a full-fledged humanitarian crisis. For too many in that country, the pervasive shortages of food, medicine, electricity, and other basic goods are making everyday life a nightmare. It is Venezuela’s version of the “winter of discontent,” except that it has been brewing for much longer and its unfolding consequences are far more frightening.

Margaret Thatcher’s dictum that the problem with socialists is that “they always run out of other people’s money” faced a unique challenge in Venezuela: during the course of a decade and a half, the government received nearly $1 trillion in oil revenues— the equivalent in today’s money of more than seven Marshall Plans. This was enough to mask the effect of hundreds of expropriations, stifling economic controls, and otherwise running the private economy into the ground.

Part of the windfall was spent on social programmes, which temporarily improved some social indicators and made the regime popular among poor Venezuelans. But a couple of years ago, the then minister of education admitted that the aim of the regime’s policies was “not to take the people out of poverty so they become middle class and then turn into escuálidos” (a derogatory term to denote opposition members). In other words, the government wanted grateful, dependent voters, not prosperous Venezuelans.

Maybe we need an international exchange program through which Bernie Sanders supporters can spend some time in countries like Venezuela to see how wonderful life is there.

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Thanks for sharing!