Bernie Sanders’ Pro-Socialism Narrative Just Collapsed Completely – by Carmine Sabia

The socialist Utopia of Venezuela that Sen. Bernie Sanders championed as the ideal has collapsed in on itself.

The cornerstone of Venezuela’s economy, oil production, has fallen by 216,000 barrels a day in a December, the 15th month in a row it has declined. Which means it will probably not be able to take advantage of the global spike in the price of oil, The Wall Street Journal reported.

In 2017 production fell 29 percent to an average of 649,000 barrels a day. A decline that “could turn its economic crisis into a humanitarian disaster,” it said.

This ranks among the deepest declines in the industry’s recent history. Russia’s output slid 23% during the fall of the Soviet Union, and Iraq’s output dropped by the same share after the 2003 U.S. invasion, according to data from OPEC and BP Statistical Review.

The decline has been caused by a deep economic crisis and widespread corruption and mismanagement, compounded by a purge of state-run Petroleos de Venezuela SA by President Nicolás Maduro that has paralyzed the oil giant. U.S. sanctions have scared off some of the last remaining investors.

“In Venezuela there is no war, nor strike, but what’s left of the oil industry is crumbling on its own,” former PdVSA director Evanán Romero, told the Journal.

“The only discussion right now is how much is it going to decline by. There is no talk of a turnaround,” Medley Global Advisors analyst Luisa Palacios said.

The socialist nation relies on oil production for 95 percent of its hard currency which has caused the economy to shrink by 40 percent in the past four years. It has had to cut back on imports of everything, including food and medicine.

Venezuela, which had economic freedom in the past even when it was ruled by dictators, used to be an economic power that imposed low taxes on its people, even as it denied basic freedoms.

That started to change when the nation’s first democratically elected president, Rómulo Betancourt, who founded the communist party in Costa Rica, started to implement moderate socialism. And it got worse when despot Hugo Chavez took the reigns and began more expansive socialism, Rafael Acevedo, wrote in an o-ed for Business Insider.

Over time, the destruction of economic freedom led to more and more impoverishment and crisis. This in turn set the stage for the rise of a political outsider with a populist message. This, of course, was Hugo Chávez. He was elected in 1998 and promised to replace our light socialism with more radical socialism. This only accelerated the problems we had been facing for decades. Nevertheless, he was able to pass through an even more anti-private-property constitution. Since Chávez’s death in 2013, the attacks on private property have continued, and Chávez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro, promises only more of the same. Except now, the government is turning toward outright authoritarian socialism, and Maduro is seeking a new constitution in which private property is almost totally abolished, and Maduro will be allowed to remain in power for life…

We have experienced hyperinflation. We have people eating garbage, schools that do not teach, hospitals that do not heal, long and humiliating lines to buy flour, bread, and basic medicines. We endure the militarization of practically every aspect of life.

But in 2011 this is what Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders believed was the ideal form of government. A government that controlled every aspect of the economy and destroyed private property ownership in favor of a collective.

“These days, the American dream is more apt to be realized in South America, in places such as Ecuador, Venezuela and Argentina, where incomes are actually more equal today than they are in the land of Horatio Alger. Who’s the banana republic now?” he wrote.

It is still Venezuela Sen. Sanders. Socialism still only works in your Utopian dreams.

But you are correct that is does create more economic equality. Everyone is equally poor.

Said Acevedo, “Anyone in Venezuela would be happy to eat out of America’s trashcans. It would be considered gourmet.”

Is that your American Dream?