Well, the death throes of Venezuela
continue apace. I will not reiterate how I've been predicting this for years because it was, well...predictable. Where Venezuela is now is where ALL SOCIALISM ends. Always. Full stop.
And, frankly, the Venezuelans deserve their fate. They bought the bill of goods that Chavez and his criminal gang were selling for years. Enthusiastically too. They fell pathetically into a trance under the transparently cynical cult of personality that Chavez built around himself. And they had the misery of nearby Cuba as well as the recent examples of the USSR and Argentina to learn from. But learn they did not. They were dupes of a world-historical magnitude...some of the greatest suckers ever to walk the planet.
Now the New York Times (and others in the liberal MSM, redundancy alert), who can't avoid the situation any longer (hey, where are Sean Penn, Harry Belafonte, and Bobby Kennedy Jr. now, huh??) are reporting on it, but in a classic libtard way.
Here is the Crimes reporting on the "public health" crisis. Public health, huh? Venezuela has an EVERYTHING crisis. Yeah, a total meltdown of every aspect of society will affect healthcare, but yeoman work there NYT for finding a liberal hobbyhorse angle rather than the all-encompassing destructive force that is authoritarian socialism.
Other coverage seems to chalk Venezuela's problems up to bad luck in the form if collapsed oil prices. Yeah, low oil prices hurt, but Venezuela's problems are not solely oil-related, they are, again, everything-related. The entire economic system was wrecked by the destruction of productive capacity, both in physical and human forms. This wasn't bad luck, it was a conscious policy crusade of the Chavistas, and oil was just the mechanism by which the Potemkin facade was propped up.
Many lessons here. First and foremost, for Americans, is to see how the media aid and abet this kind of destruction, by turning a blind eye, soft-pedaling and obfuscating.
