Hey kids: Don't be a sucker for socialism

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I was reading this last page yesterday, and since I was having a chat with someone who grew up and worked in a socialist system and then went on to work in a capitalist system. I told them "You know, I hear from these Americans who talk a lot about how unfree people are in socialist systems." They looked at me and said "That's crazy! We had much more freedom in socialism than in capitalism."

'Santa Claus isn't coming,' recession-hit Venezuelans tell kids

As a harrowing economic crisis makes food scarce for millions of Venezuelans, many families cannot buy their children Christmas presents, decorate their home, or even host a holiday dinner.

The oil-rich country is suffering the third year of a recession that has sparked product shortages and galloping inflation. With a recent currency depreciation pumping up prices even higher, some parents are simply canceling Christmas.

"Last year I bought everything for my daughter," said Dileida Palacios, a 40-year-old hairdresser dressed in black to mourn her son killed in crime-rife Venezuela a few weeks ago.

"This year I had to tell her everything is tough and Santa Claus isn't coming." ...

Once merrily decorated during the holidays, Caracas looks shabby. Many stores are empty, closed or selling cruelly expensive toys, Christmas trees, and holiday treats like "hallacas," a cornmeal dish wrapped in plantain leaves....

President Nicolas Maduro's leftist government accuses businessmen and rival politicians of seeking to stoke anger and ruin Christmas.

State media has feted the arrival of 200 containers of toys and food in Venezuela's otherwise largely deserted ports, and Maduro lit a cross on Caracas' Avila mountain in November to usher in early holidays.

His government confiscated 3.8 million toys from importer Kreisel, accusing the company of hoarding and price gouging.

Two Kreisel executives have been jailed, and Socialist Party committees have been distributing the toys to children.

"That's what you call a reinforcement for Father Christmas, right?" the president laughed, stroking his mustache during a recent speech on state TV. "Saint Nicolas without a beard; Saint Nicolas with a mustache!"

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-venez ... SKBN1491S3

American neo-liberalism is fascism with a smiley face. No concentration camps, no jack boots. Just regulations for smothering the life out of productive people.

There was a best-selling book a few years ago that developed this very idea -- "Liberal Fascism" by Jonah Goldberg. Some quotes are here:
https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/8 ... -mussolini

“The Nazis played the same games against Jews that today’s left plays against 'Eurocentrism,' 'whiteness,' and 'logocentrism.' When you hear a campus radical denounce 'white logic' or 'male logic,' she is standing on the shoulders of a Nazi who denounced 'Jewish logic' and the 'Hebrew disease'...The white man is the Jew of liberal fascism.”

“Crisis is routinely identified as a core mechanism of fascism because it short-circuits debate and democratic deliberation. Hence all fascistic movements commit considerable energy to prolonging a heightened state of emergency.”

Then Jonah Goldberg is a damn fool. Jews were a long persecuted minority in Europe, whereas whites in America are hardly a minority, or persecuted. There isn't anything wrong with condemning racism that dehumanized non-whites/non-Europeans. There isn't anything wrong with promoting the notion that non-whites can and should share in the prosperity enjoyed so long by whites.

This is how socialism ends. The only thing left is cannibalism.

No Food, No Medicine, No Respite: A Starving Boy’s Death in Venezuela

MATURÍN, Venezuela — His name was Kevin Lara Lugo, and he died on his 16th birthday.

He spent the day before foraging for food in an empty lot, because there was nothing to eat at home. Then in a hospital because what he found made him gravely ill.

Hours later, he was dead on a gurney, which doctors rolled by his mother as she watched helplessly. She said the hospital had lacked the simplest supplies needed to save him on that day last July....

Venezuela has suffered from so many ailments this year. Inflation has driven office workers to abandon the cities and head to illegal pit mines in the jungle, willing to subject themselves to armed gangs and multiple bouts of malaria for the chance to earn a living.

Doctors have prepared to operate on bloody tables because they did not have enough water to clean them. Psychiatric patients have had to be tied to chairs in mental hospitals because there was no medication left to treat their delusions.

Hunger has driven some people to riot — and others into rickety fishing boats, fleeing Venezuela on reckless journeys by sea.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/25/world ... unger.html

Late-stage socialism:

How Venezuela’s corrupt socialists are looting the country to death

Venezuela is no longer a country with a government, institutions and a civil society. It’s a geographic area terrorized by a criminal enterprise that pretends to govern, with a civil society made up of two sets of people: accomplices and victims.

More than 30 million of the latter.

The Hugo Chavez-led looting spree began in 2000. By “looting,” I mean fraudulent government contracts, a celebration of bribery, phantom payrolls across all government ministries, bogus government grant programs, the sacking of Venezuela’s gold reserves and a massive currency exchange scam.

More than $1 trillion has disappeared — some of it wasted on social programs that produced nothing — and a staggering amount has ended up in bank accounts in Andorra, Panama, New York, Hong Kong and Switzerland.

And the pillaging has turned Venezuela into a dystopian landscape. There are shortages of every imaginable foodstuff and basic necessity; diseases once thought eradicated are back with a vengeance; and a crime wave that has given Caracas the highest murder rate in the world.

Loving parents are putting their children up for adoption because they have nothing to feed them; the elderly are starving; patients with treatable conditions are dying in hospitals that lack basic medicine like insulin and oxygen, where vital equipment has been pilfered and emergency rooms operate without electricity. In a gruesome twist, even the morgues can’t handle the number of unclaimed bodies, so they rot in hallways.

In one city just before Christmas, more than 80 percent of supermarkets, bodegas and food stores were looted. The ransacking spread to private homes. Meanwhile, the government does little to stop the disorder. The more chaos there is, the less President Nicolas Maduro needs to worry about antigovernment protests or marches.

http://nypost.com/2017/01/10/how-venezu ... -to-death/

Are you a troll?

I met a Socialist in real life ... this is the mentality ...

This was the way it was under, at least, the USSR.

The rank-and-file suffered, while the folks in the Politburo basked in riches.

Socialism is fine as a theory---but the way we have practiced it in the past has proven quite atrocious at times.

It can be that way under capitalism, too, unless workers organize, and collectively grab business below the belt, and twist hard to make them share the wealth.

Absolutely, this can happen under capitalism.

And it was happening in the late 19th century.

That's why we have regulatory agencies today.

Just a few years ago, Venezuela was the richest country in all of Latin America. Now, it's the poorest country in the entire Western Hemisphere:

From ABC Spain:

In 2016 Venezuela became the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere, sinking below Haiti and Cuba, according to new statistics released by la Encuesta Nacional de Condiciones de Vida (Encovi).

According to these statistics, 82% of Venezuelan households are poor.

This is where Bolivarian socialism has led a nation with one of the world’s largest oil reserves.

Were it not for the Chavez-Maduro dynasty, Venezuela could be rivaling Dubai or Kuwait in wealth and per capita income.

http://babalublog.com/2017/02/19/surpri ... -americas/

Socialism: The Cure for Obesity!

Study: Venezuelans lost 19 lbs. on average over past year due to lack of food

In a new sign that Venezuela’s financial crisis is morphing dangerously into a humanitarian one, a new nationwide survey shows that in the past year nearly 75 percent of the population lost an average of 19 pounds for lack of food.

The extreme poor said they dropped even more weight than that.

The 2016 Living Conditions Survey (Encovi, for its name in Spanish), conducted among 6,500 families, also found that as many as 32.5 percent eat only once or twice a day — the figure was 11.3 just a year ago.

In all, 82 percent of the nation's households live in poverty, the study found.

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2017/02/20 ... -food.html

What happened next:

Dire Measures to Combat Hunger in Venezuela

Venezuela has been teetering on the brink of political meltdown and economic collapse for months. Food shortages have now grown so severe that religious leaders are urging people to label their tossed out food for those scavenging to fill their empty stomachs.

A prominent priest and vocal opponent to President Nicolas Maduro’s regime urged followers to label their trash so the hungry can forage “with dignity.”

“Try to preserve food waste so that people who eat out of garbage cans can praise the Lord,” Father Jose Palmar wrote in a social media post, as Panam Post reported.

http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/03/03/dir ... bel-trash/