By Jeff Jacoby
Sunday, December 25, 2016
When the Cold War ended 25 years ago, the Soviet Union
vanished into the ash heap of history. That left the West’s “useful idiots” — Lenin’s
term for the ideologues and toadies who could always be relied on to justify or
praise whatever Moscow did — in search of other socialist thugs to fawn over.
Many found a new heartthrob in Hugo Chavez, the anti-Yanqui rabble-rouser who
was elected president of Venezuela in 1998 and in short order had transformed
the country from a successful social democracy into a grim and corrupt
autocracy.
An avowed Marxist and protégé of Fidel Castro, Chavez
gradually seized control of every lever of state power in Venezuela. The
constitution was rewritten to strip the legislature and judiciary of their
independence, authorize censorship of the press, and allow Chavez to legislate
by decree. Before long, the government acquired a stranglehold over the
economy, including the huge and profitable energy sector. (Venezuela has the
largest oil reserves in the world.)
With petrodollars pouring in, Chavez had free rein to put
his statist prescriptions into effect. The so-called Bolivarian revolution over
which he — and later his handpicked successor, Nicolas Maduro — presided, was
an unfettered, real-world example of anticapitalist socialism in action.
Venezuela since at least the 1970s had been Latin America’s most affluent
nation. Now it was a showpiece for command-and-control economics: price and
currency controls, wealth redistribution, ramped-up government spending,
expropriation of land, and the nationalization of private banks, mines, and oil
companies.
And the useful idiots ate it up.
In a Salon piece titled “Hugo Chavez’s economic miracle,”
David Sirota declared that the Venezuelan ruler, with his “full-throated
advocacy of socialism,” had “racked up an economic record that . . . American
president[s] could only dream of achieving.” The Guardian offered “Three cheers
for Chavez.” Moviemaker Oliver Stone filmed a documentary gushing over “the
positive changes that have happened economically in all of South America”
because of Venezuela’s socialist government. And when Chavez died in 2013,
Jimmy Carter extolled the strongman for “improving the lives of millions of his
fellow countrymen.”
In the real world, however, socialism has transformed
Venezuela into a Third World dystopia.
Venezuela this Christmas is sunk in misery, as it was
last Christmas, and the Christmas before that. Venezuelans, their economy
wrecked by statism, face crippling shortages of everything from food and
medicine to toilet paper and electricity. Violent crime is out of control.
Shoppers are forced to stand in lines for hours outside drugstores and
supermarkets — lines that routinely lead to empty shelves, or that break down
in fistfights, muggings, and mob looting. Just last week the government
deployed 3,000 troops to restore order after frantic rioters rampaged through
shops and homes in the southeastern state of Bolivar.
In the beautiful country that used to boast the highest
standard of living in Latin America, patients now die in hospitals for lack of
basic health care staples: soap, gloves, oxygen, drugs. In some medical wards,
there isn’t even water to wash the blood from operating tables.
Socialism invariably kills and impoverishes. Gushing oil
revenues amid a global energy boom could temporarily disguise the corrosion
caused by a government takeover of market functions. But only temporarily. The
Chavez/Maduro “Bolivarian revolution” has been economic poison, just like every
other Marxist “revolution” from Lenin’s Russia to Kim Il Sung’s North Korea to
the Castros’ Cuba. By shredding property rights, dictating prices, and trying
to control supply and demand, socialist regimes eventually make everything
worse and virtually everyone poorer. Conversely, when governments protect free
markets and allow buyers and sellers to interact freely, prosperity expands.
For three years in a row, Venezuela has ranked No. 1 on
Johns Hopkins University economist Steve Hanke’s “misery
index,” which ranks each of the world’s countries according to a formula
that adds its unemployment, interest, and inflation rates, then subtracts its
annual change in gross domestic product per capita. With Venezuelan currency
virtually worthless — hyperinflation this year is estimated at higher than 700
percent — residents have to resort to humiliating workarounds. Reuters reported
this month that Venezuelan women have been flocking across the border into
Colombia and selling their hair to earn some money with which to buy food,
medicine, or diapers.
The government in Caracas, meanwhile, clings tightly to
its socialist dogma, blaming the country’s woes on Colombia’s mafia or greedy
businessmen. A fortnight ago, government agents raided a toy distributor,
confiscating nearly 4 million toys on the grounds that the company was planning
to sell them at inflated prices. The regime says it will make the toys
available at below-market prices to the poor — thereby ensuring that in
Venezuela next Christmas, toys won’t be available at any price. If nothing
else, Venezuelan socialism has accomplished this much: It has transformed the
Grinch from fiction into reality.
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