LiveWire

But nothing on failed Socialist policies that reduced a once-prosperous nation to its citizens ready to kill for a bag of onions.

Via NewsBusters.

The latest installment in leftist excuse-making when socialism fails goes into the “It would work if leaders just had the right people handling things” file.

It comes in the form of a Friday morning “analysis” at the Associated Press. Writers Jorge Rueda and Joshua Goodman want readers to believe that the economy in the Bolivarian socialist and once fairly prosperous nation of Venezuela would be in much better shape today if the military didn’t botch the responsibilities de facto dictator Nicolas Maduro had previously given it to handle the nation’s “battle against widespread food shortages.” Now the AP pair believe it will get even worse, because the military has essentially been given total control in this area….

The AP writers completely fail to understand that the military’s job isn’t to grow crops, get food to market, or find the money to buy food to import. That was formerly handled reasonably well by the Venezuela’s private sector and pre-Hugo Chavez governments. The private sector has since collapsed because of government seizures of land, agribusinesses and supermarkets, price controls and intimidation. Rampant inflation accompanied by those price controls have made it uneconomical for farmers to farm, and, more broadly, for workers to work. As the AP reported earlier this week in an unusually well-done but lengthy Tuesday morning dispatch which was then cut by 80 percent during the rest of the day to remove the most damning material, “fields lie fallow while farmers spend their days waiting to buy imported goods” in hours-long-lines. Military control of farming won’t change any of this.

The military can’t create plenty out of virtually nothing, and the reason there’s virtually nothing is that Maduro’s socialist government has taken over the entire enterprise in the process of ruining Venezuela’s economy.

Venezuela’s devolution into a super-sized and potentially far worse version of Cuba continues. The Venezuelan people, almost 90 percent of whom “say they do not have money to buy enough food,” are now enduring a government-created famine, as the world mostly stands by — partly because press exposure of the dire circumstances has been so light, and partly because even when the press deigns to expose it, it makes excuses for a form of government which has, once again, utterly failed.

Related:

Activist Post: Venezuela Is Out Of Food: Here’s What An Economic Collapse Really Looks Like

****************************************************