Venezuela and the Radicalized Democrats

Bloomberg sums up the situation ham-fisted socialism has created in Venezuela, which was until recently the wealthiest country in Latin America:

It’s hard to overstate how disastrous the reign of Hugo Chavez and his successor Nicolas Maduro has been for Venezuela. A recent series of Bloomberg articles vividly depicts the hellish, never-ending struggle for survival in Caracas, the country’s capital. Hungry children roam the streets, people are fleeing the country, health care is almost nonexistent, violence is endemic, even water is scarce. Chavez’s so-called Bolivarian revolution took a peaceful, middle-income country and transformed it into a nightmare that puts the ruinous Soviet Union of the 1980s to shame.

It’s important for other countries — including wealthy ones like the U.S. — not to ignore Venezuela, but to use it as a cautionary tale. Politicians like Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have embraced socialism, as have many young Americans.

The nightmare unfolding in Venezuela will not dissuade the oligarchical collectivist authoritarians who dominate the Democrat Party. They plan to put the socialist pedal to the metal:

The party agenda is increasingly embracing big-government policies like “Medicare-for-all” and guaranteed jobs programs — as well as an aggressive “Green New Deal” that would include all this and more as part of a fundamental overhaul to America’s economy and specifically its energy sector.

Obama declared war on this vital sector of the economy, boasting that he would cause energy prices to skyrocket and that anyone who tried to build a new coal plant would be bankrupted. His Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar gloated about the administration having its “boot on the neck” of BP. The moment they have the political leverage, Democrats will resume this senseless, damaging war — and escalate it.

As far back as last summer, Democrats viewed socialism more positively than economic freedom. At the rate they are radicalizing, by 2020 they will probably view Stalin more favorably than FDR.

Socialists as malevolently wacky as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have taken over not only Venezuela, but major countries. In Russia and China, the results were poverty, misery, slavery, and genocide on a massive scale.

Never mind the alarming Green New Deal. Even the relatively modest Medicare for All would cost tens of $trillions over a decade. With the USA already shouldering a $22 trillion national debt, economic collapse is hardly inconceivable. When it comes, anything is possible — as the horrors of the USSR and Mao’s China proved.

“Together, Ocasio-Cortez’s proposals would effectively eliminate fossil fuels from most of society, destroy millions of jobs and trillions of dollars of wealth, require ‘upgrading’ every home and business in America, create a national federal jobs-guarantee program, impose single-payer health care (costing trillions more), establish a new system of publicly owned banks, run up the national debt by countless trillions of dollars, and move the United States closer than ever to socialism,” Justin Haskins, a research fellow at the Heartland Institute, wrote in an op-ed for Fox News. “If we don’t stop it, it will destroy our economy for a whole generation of Americans.”

What is happening in Venezuela — or worse — can and will happen here if radicalized Democrats have their way.

On tips from Scott D and 1-Bodhisattva.

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