After years of idiotic socialist policies, Venezuela’s economy is on the verge of complete and utter collapse.
by Joey Clark
Despite having some of the earth’s largest oil reserves, the country is essentially bankrupt, ransacked by incompetent government central planners.
Matt O’Brien reports:
“…Chávez turned the state-owned oil company from being professionally run to being barely run. People who knew what they were doing were replaced with people who were loyal to the regime, and profits came out but new investment didn’t go in. That last part was particularly bad, because Venezuela’s extra-heavy crude needs to be blended or refined — neither of which is cheap — before it can be sold. So Venezuela just hasn’t been able to churn out as much oil as it used to without upgraded or even maintained infrastructure. Specifically, oil production fell 25 percent between 1999 and 2013.
“The rest is a familiar tale of fiscal woe. Even triple-digit oil prices, as Justin Fox points out, weren’t enough to keep Venezuela out of the red when it was spending more on its people but producing less crude. So it did what all poorly run states do when the money runs out: It printed some more. And by “some,” I mean a lot, a lot more. That, in turn, became more “a lots” than you can count once oil started collapsing in mid-2014. The result of all this money-printing, as you can see below, is that Venezuela’s currency has, by black market rates, lost 93 percent of its value in the past two years.”
Yet despite looking in the mirror at their own guilty faces, Venezuela’s ruling party decided to double down on their fiscal and monetary profligacy by adding good ol’ fashioned price controls, leading to shortages for goods and services across the board: a dearth of food, beer, and toilet paper.
Yet, while of most of the Venezuelan population can barely find the means to properly wipe the collective asses (maybe they should use the abundance of inflation inducing Bolivars), Socialist President Maduro appointed a walking, talking rectum as the economy czar, Luis Salas, a man who claims there is no such thing as inflation.
Check out this hokum: Mr. Salas claims rising prices in stores do not signal inflation brought upon by moronic central bank money printing. No, Mr. Salas says such rising prices are due to “parasitic” businesses consumed by their avarice and selfish search for profit.
Maybe Mr. Salas should learn the opposite of “profit” is “loss” because that is exactly what Venezuela is doing: losing much of their wealth. Mr. Salas should also learn the true parasite is always and everywhere the state, especially the state of Venezuela. By leaching off the productive and creative people of Venezuela too much for too long, these selfish socialists kooks are killing their hosts while blaming those very hosts for running out of blood.
How long this vampire socialist state can continue remains to be seen, but for now, let us all learn a valuable lesson from the failures of socialism in Venezuela.