Venezuela’s Problem Confirmed to Be Socialism, Not Low Oil Prices

Socialism would have worked fine in Venezuela, except for the fall in oil prices, right moonbats? Or maybe not, as even the New York Times admits:

A general with no energy experience has been installed as the head of the state oil company. Arrests, firings and desperate emigration have gutted top talent. Oil facilities are crumbling, while production is plummeting.

As the rest of the oil-producing world recovers on the back of stronger energy prices, Venezuela is getting worse, the result of dysfunctional management, rampant corruption and the country’s crippling economic crisis. The deepening troubles at the state oil company, the country’s economic mainstay, threaten to further destabilize a nation and government facing a dire recession, soaring inflation and unbridled crime, as well as food and medicine shortages.

Due to higher prices, things are looking up for other oil-exporting countries, including even dysfunctional hellholes like Libya and Iraq…

Not Venezuela, the country with the largest proven reserves in the world. The state-owned oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela, known as Pdvsa, teeters on the brink of collapse, its failures at once a symptom and a cause of the nation’s downward economic spiral.

Despite Maduro barking the standard socialist dictator rhetoric about the evils of capitalist America, Venezuela has been importing gasoline and diesel from the USA to meet domestic needs. But that won’t go on for long, since they can’t pay for it with the whole country about to go into default.

Socialism is socialism, no matter where tyrants and fools inflict it. This sums up the spirit of the Soviet Union:

Employees have lost all interest, said Emilio, a worker in the Cardón refinery who asked that his last name be withheld because he feared punishment by the authorities for criticizing the company. He said they were simply punching the clock.

Workers spend their days playing cars and dominoes, production having slowed to a crawl.

Milton Friedman’s wise words ring ever truer:

Under Chavez/Maduro, Venezuelans effectively put the federal government in charge of everything. Now they have nothing — not even oil, despite floating on a sea of it. No one even vaguely familiar with the past 100 years of world history could have expected a different outcome.

But maybe Bernie Sanders, with his keen grasp of economics, will be the first to make socialism work.

On a tip from Bodhisattva.