SOCIALISM CAN KILL YOU, BUT IT CAN'T BURY YOU...
by Sultan Knish
Venezuela,
a failing socialist state, has gifted its people with the sixth minimum
wage hike in one year. The 150% increase last week won’t help too much
because inflation is up to 1.7 million percent.
Yes, you read that correctly.
Minimum
wage hikes don’t help when your currency isn’t worth the cost of the
paper it’s printed on. That’s literally true in Venezuela, which has
tried switching to an even more worthless cryptocurrency.
Forget the #Fightfor15, in Venezuela it’s a fight to afford basic food supplies or even a cup of coffee.
The
cost of a cup of coffee rose 285614% in a year and doubled in seven
days. Under the new currency, you can grab a cup of the good stuff for
400 bolivars. Too bad that the minimum wage is 4,800 bolivars and 90% of
the population is impoverished. It isn’t looking to buy a cup of
coffee, but is starving because it can’t actually buy food. Alternatives
have included eating zoo animals, pets and wild donkeys.
“Juntos:
todo es possible”, the Obamaesque slogan of the regime declaring,
“Together, anything is possible”, looms over a frightened starving
population from billboards decorated with socialist icons.
The
trouble is that anything really is possible. It’s possible to starve to
death, to sit in the dark because there’s no power, to be unable to go
to work because there’s no fuel, to be killed in food riots by
government thugs, to have your savings wiped out, or to die of a
treatable illness because there’s no medicine. Socialism has made
“anything” possible in Venezuela. But all the possibilities are
horrifying.
The regime’s other election slogan was, “Vamos Venezuela”. And Venezuelans are going.
10%
of the population has fled Venezuela escaping through Simon Bolivar
Airport, which has no water, no working toilets, no air conditioning and
barely any power, where government thugs demand money and jewelry from
passengers, or just marching on foot to escape the socialist mess any
way they can.
Those Venezuelans who remain can’t find medicine, lack drinking water and can’t even afford to die.
The
death rate in Venezuela is high. Between gang violence, outbreaks of
disease and food riots, the corpses are piling up, and no one can afford
to bury the dead.
Two
years ago, a public cemetery charged 240,000 bolivars for a burial,
while private cemeteries charged 400,000. The casket alone could cost
100,000 bolivars. Not that it matters because caskets have become hard
to obtain due to shortages of wood and metal.
The number of zeroes may have changed with the new currency, but has become no more affordable.
Meanwhile,
cemeteries, like every business, have seen employees vanish to wait on
food lines or work in the black market, which means that not only can’t
you bury the dead, but there’s no one to do the burying. Not only did
socialism force Venezuelans to wait on line to buy food to live, they
also had to wait on line after they were dead. Socialism is defined by
the line. You are born into it and die on line.
After
funerals became unaffordable, Venezuelans settled for cremating the
dead. But the iron law of supply and demand quickly fell into place. As
demand for cremation increased, so did the cost.
It wasn’t just the cost of a cup of coffee that doubled in a week: the cost of cremation rose 108%.
Major
General Manuel Quevedo , the 2019 president of OPEC, is Venezuelan even
as the country’s mourners can’t afford the cost of the gas with which
to burn their dead.
Quevedo,
a leftist Lenin-praising thug, was dispatched to take control of
Venezuela’s collapsing oil industry, but instead dealt it a fatal blow.
Protests were put down by force. Anyone who committed the crime of
actually knowing anything about the industry was locked up and replaced
by a regime loyalist.
The
socialist thug ordered workers to denounce anyone who opposed the
government. Instead, 25,000 workers out of 146,000 resigned last year.
And it’s worse than the numbers make it look because many of those
resigning are engineers and managers who can’t be replaced by hiring
just anyone.
Under
the socialist military regime, oil production fell 29% as drilling rigs
lacked crews and fires broke out in refineries. Those workers that
haven’t quit have been selling their uniforms in exchange for food.
Fuel
shortages broke out in an OPEC nation as its former production of 2
million barrels of oil dropped to 1.2 million. The situation is now so
bad that Venezuela will import 300,000 barrels.
Venezuela
is so broken that one of the world’s top oil producers and exporters is
now forced to import oil to be able to sell it at artificially
subsidized low prices to its population and to repay Russia and China.
The Maduro regime keeps touting Russian and Chinese deals as the answer,
but the problem is that Venezuela only has one thing that Russia and
China want, and it’s too socialist to even get at it.
With
a worthless currency, Venezuela is paying America, Russia and China in
crude and buying back barrels of oil because under military socialist
control, its refineries are no longer functional.
It’s
also trading natural gas for barrels of oil, and so Venezuela may have
the eight largest gas reserves in the world, but the families of the
dead can no longer manage to get natural gas to burn the bodies.
There’s no cooking gas, long lines at gas stations and no way to even cremate the dead.
In
the final triumph of socialism, Venezuela’s energy industry has
collapsed. There isn’t even enough gas left to burn the corpses left in
the aftermath of the failed socialist experiment forcing loved ones to
dump them in pits and mass graves.
You can’t live under socialism. You can die under it. But you can’t be buried under socialism.
Socialism
killed Venezuela as it will kill any country given enough time. First,
you run out of other people’s money. Then wage and price controls
destroy the supply and demand of the marketplace. And when there’s
nothing left in the stores, a government takeover will consolidate the
destruction.
It happened in Venezuela. And it can happen here too.
Seven
years ago, Senator Bernie Sanders wrote an editorial, claiming that
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 asked.
It’s the socialist dictatorship with no food, no power, no water, no hope and true income equality.
Incomes
are more equal in Venezuela. Everyone, except the regime and its
loyalists, has nothing. Not even a grave in which to bury the dead.
That’s not the American dream, that’s the socialist nightmare.
