Socialism Is So Bad for Economies that a Video Game’s Currency is Now Worth Astoundingly More Than Venezuela’s

In the land of Azeroth, possessing a pile of gold pieces makes you more wealthy than an average citizen of Venezuela. This is sad, because Azeroth is the main setting of the massive multiplayer online video game World of Warcraft (WoW), and Venezuela is a real country.

Despite the fact that Azeroth is fake and Venezuela is real, Azeroth’s in-game currency is considered more real, and Venezuela’s bolivar more or less fake. This first began happening in July of 2017, when the bolivar dipped so low in worth that World of Warcraft’s gold piece overtook it. It was also slated to get even worse than that.

Now in May, nearly a year later, one WoW gold piece is worth seven times more than the bolivar according to Fortune, and that value chasm gets even wider when you venture into the black market:

Per Google, one U.S. dollar is worth 68,915 bolivar.

Compare that to the price of WoW tokens, official in-game credits that can be used to extend a player’s play time or buy in-game items. Tokens can be bought with either $20 real world cash or sold for a fluctuating amount of in-game gold. One tracking service lists the current gold price of a token as 203,035 pieces. That works out to about 10,152 gold gaming pieces per USD.

By those calculations, World of Warcraft virtual gold would be worth 6.8 times as much as the bolivar.

If you factor in the black market rate of the bolivar, though, the difference is even more staggering. Dolar Today, which tracks the black market rate of the bolivar, seems to say the currency’s current value is 636,771.03 per U.S. dollar.

By that figure, WoW gold would be worth nearly 62 times as much as Venezuela’s official currency.

The bolivar has been on a long decline due to socialist interference in the business sector. President Nicholas Maduro has run the country into the ground through seizures of private property, and bad policies made in the name of “social justice.”

Now the people are starving, and have all but abandoned Venezuela’s currency in order to adopt a barter system where they trade favors and utilize skills in order to conduct business.

This is an odd development, but this is what socialism does to an economy. It’s a far more destructive villain than WoW’s Death Wing will ever be, fellow kids.

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