One week, the administration declared that eggs would now be sold for no more than 30 cents a carton. The next week, eggs had disappeared from supermarkets, and still have not come back.
Hannah Dreier on Venezuela’s end-stage socialism:
In the early days, the shortages seemed almost whimsical. My Venezuelan friends were used to going on Miami shopping sprees. When I made trips home, they asked me to bring back perfume, leather jackets, iPhones and condoms. I usually took two near-empty suitcases to carry back the requests, plus food and toiletries for myself. As the crisis deepened, the requests became harder to fill, and traced the outlines of darker personal dramas: Medication for heart failure. Paediatric epilepsy drugs. Pills to trigger an abortion. Gas masks.
And things were still somehow getting worse. The first time I saw people line up outside the bakery near my apartment, I stopped to take photos. How crazy: A literal bread line. Then true hunger crept into where I lived. People started digging through the trash at all hours, pulling out vegetable peelings and soggy pizza crusts and eating them on the spot. That seemed like rock bottom. Until my local bakery started organising lines each morning, not to buy bread, but to eat trash.
And from a safe distance, our betters speak.
Corbyn’s last known public utterance on Venezuela was in June 2015 – he gave a speech at a rally blaming the USA for anything that might be wrong with the place.
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/London-Shows-Solidarity-with-Venezuela-against-US-Intervention-20150604-0040.html
By that stage opposition figures like Antonio Ledezma and Leopoldo López had been arrested on trumped up charges and were being kept under house arrest.
I haven’t seen anyone challenge Corbyn on his support for this regime. Probably it wouldn’t make any difference in any case, since millions of people think he’s a decent old stick and won’t be told otherwise.
I think the support people like Thatcher and Hayek evinced for Pinochet will always be a stain on their reputations. But how the left goes on convincing people that they are ‘nice’ when they constantly act as cheerleaders for this sort of regime is utterly beyond me.
Well, sure. But remember, true Socialism has not been implemented properly. All we need is the right savior to bring our egalitarian paradise to fruition! It’s science, man! Not like those infernal Christians who insist on believing all that clap-trap about heaven and such–all without any evidence whatsoever! Those morons and their magical thinking, right?
Supply and demand: how DO it work?
@Spork
Where Maduro made his mistake was in declaring eggs could only be sold at $.30 per dozen. He should have said they’d be free. Clearly, he was/is not the man for the job.
It’s a good thing it’s impossible for a black market to exist, because at least with the price at $.30 per dozen there’s no point in stealing them. Oh wait.
Also a good thing that costs of production have no relevance to final cost and people will willingly destroy themselves to nobly provide The Holy Eggs. Also oh wait.
Of course, cuddly Ken Livingstone says (yesterday) that it’s all because they didn’t execute the elite.
Looking for that to be spread across the media other than tucked away in the original Times story. Wonder why not?
“Hugo Chávez did not execute the establishment elite, he allowed them to continue so they’re still there. I think there’s a lot of rumours they’ve been blocking the important food and medicines and things like that because they control a lot of the companies… And America has got a long record of undermining any leftwing government as well. So I suspect it’s not all just down to the problems of the [Venezuelan] government.”
Loved Iowahawk’s tweet: “What’s the difference between socialism and the Chicago Cubs? The Cubs are right once every 108 years.”
“…the shortages seemed almost whimsical…”
Ah yes, the pure whimsy of poverty.
I think the support people like Thatcher and Hayek evinced for Pinochet will always be a stain on their reputations.
But of course. In the context of how one addresses authoritarianism/totalitarianism, those on the right must have more virtue than Caesar’s wife, while those on the left are to be celebrated for their open-mindedness. Been true as long as I can remember.
And we mustn’t forget the chronically charmless Seumas Milne.
@Rev Spooner: The devil of the thing is, the establishment elite (such as actually exist) may well be diverting some food and medicine to themselves, but the total breakdown of normal channels would be the only reason why – and the reason there isn’t enough. A dash of cart-before-horse, a little witchfinding, a tiny dash of out-of-context truth, and the lie is birthed.
If one first stomachs the delusion that anyone not doing what you would do, pure in socialism, and substitutes the getting of evil jollies as the only possible alternative, the cartoon world takes form. A world in which it’s allegedly sane to claim that a company would quixotically hold food and supplies for ransom for giggles and to militate against the political powers that be, rather than using their command of such food and supplies to buy a cadre, influence, and good will to effect change.
It requires them to be not only evil, but foolish in a manner contrary to their own greed. Utter nonsense.
Of course, the responses to Michael Crick’s tweet make the predictable claim that “US sanctions” are to blame… the Defiantly Blinkered Left, what would we ever do without them?
It’s rather rote at this point. The US controls everything, including those things which the US obviously does not control, which means that “the US” is here a stand-in for “the conspiracy”, and that in turn often “the Jews”. Which they now get to tar as being belligerent, declasse, and burger-eating retards as well, by association with Evil Amerikkka.
It remains, of course, a mystery as to how the US prevented the ongoing refinement of Venezuelan crude by ensuring Venezuela was too incompetent to even ship it to the necessary US refineries. How devious.
Sporkatus,
That the “good” Emperor Hugo seized control of the oil facilities in Venezuela, dismissed all of the management and skilled workers, and replaced them with political cronies, had NOTHING to do with it…
Devious Yanqis, damn them.
Shorter version, You can’t fix stupid.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDvQ77JP8nw
Our betters speak.
When Seumas Milne met Madura.
Saw this at Samizdata. Had a good chuckle.
The devil of the thing is, the establishment elite (such as actually exist) may well be diverting some food and medicine to themselves
Meanwhile the Government Elite divert quantities of staples to maintain loyalty within the Maduro troops. Soldiers are rewarded with Toilet Paper, Tampons and Toothpaste.
Remember all those left-wing pundits who drooled over Venezuela?
Also.
Too.
So if we got together and pooled a couple hundred grand for a boatload of quality Procter & Gamble products, we could effectively take over the country? What are we waiting for?!
Soldiers are rewarded with Toilet Paper, Tampons and Toothpaste.
Subsequent awards are indicated by oak leaf clusters, except the oak leaves are really oak leaves because you only get the TP once.
Those who are enticed by socialist Bernie’s promises of free healthcare and free college should pay attention to what happened when Venezuela mandated just a *lower* (not zero) price for eggs.
Jungle Jim,
The egg thing in V. happened because there is a lower bound on the possible quality of eggs.
No such lower quality bound exists for tertiary education or healthcare, so the “supply”, in form sort of vaguely resembling what it says on the label, may continue to be provided, no matter what the price or COGS.
Hmm. Perhaps I have hit on a general principle.
The law of Supply and Demand, of course, presumes that the Supply is not, in some sense, fraudulent. When it is, there may be no necessary connection to Demand or Price or Cost.
“I think the support people like Thatcher and Hayek evinced for Pinochet will always be a stain on their reputations.”
Do you mean failing to condemn Pinochet for stopping the left from turning the nation into another Cuban style Stalinist nightmare?
Hayek, by the way, expressed disapproval for Pinochet’s authoritarian rule, but because he gave free market advice the left twisted that into “evidence” that he approved of “fascism”…which shows how large a fraction of the “democratic left” act in bad faith and on behalf of stalinists.
Fred the Fourth:
We are already seeing education testing the lower quality bounds, even without a price cap, aren’t we?
Well, I’m glad that’s settled.
Venezuela Repeals the Laws of Supply and Demand
It’s been coming, for some time
https://www.aei.org/publication/venezuela-repeals-the-laws-of-supply-and-demand/
ftumch: that article is from 2011. Amazing, really, that utter collapse took 6 more years.
Loyal police officers are rewarded with rolls of toilet paper.
Marxism in a nutshell.
Nothing would improve the human condition as much as the summary execution of those claiming to improve the human condition.
Well, I’m glad that’s settled.
Always wanting a do-over.
As Kristian Niemietz says here, in response to the conceit that “actual socialism” has never existed because there has never been “a classless system… in which all were equal”:
But then leftism is a license for bad faith.
state capitalism
This is an anti-concept, designed to evade the real nature of the issue.
What it really means is: socialism.
In the Niemietz thread, there’s one chap saying, apparently in all seriousness, that the problem isn’t socialism or communism, but “authoritarianism.” As if the latter were in no way related to the former, not its very basis, a key part of its appeal, and the reason it attracts so many sociopaths.
See also this, again by Kristian Niemietz: But That Wasn’t Real Socialism, Part One:
And Part Two.
Somewhat relevant, this, by David Horowitz, on peddling Marxism in academia:
The following quote, from the comments, jumped out:
And for those who missed it, this may be worth watching.
OT
This dates from May this year, but I’ve only just come across it now:
I am angry. Angry because now even questioning these issues is seen as an act of hate, discrimination, or intolerance. Angry because wanting to have open conversations is now considered hate speech. I am angry that [ … ] I am now being forced to police my language […]
When I first attempted to ask in conversations and online, […] I was met with slurs, threats, and even a death threat.
[Several prominent speakers] have also faced threats, being fired, being no platformed, and in other ways censored […]
What makes this fascinating, in just oh so many ways, is the original context in which this appeared (the continual references to being angry leave a hint as to what that might be).
I fear the opportunity for this writer to self-reflect on other contexts where precisely the same complaints could very easily be applied will be missed – to no one’s surprise.
Pinochet should be praised for one thing : he left without a bloody war. It astounds me how many people can’t bring themselves to do that and at the same have nothing but praise for Castro’s longevity and doesn’t mention Castro arresting people circulating a petition about holding elections.
Didn’t Pol Pot strive for the “classless system” by targeting the intellectual class, among others, for extermination?
Oh wait—I suppose that wasn’t the real intellectual class. Even Pol Pot couldn’t do socialist mass murder correctly.
I guess that’s the wet dream of every commie—a better Pol Pot. Someone who will do it right next time.
Don’t forget Ken Livingstone.
https://order-order.com/2017/08/03/ken-failure-kill-oligarchs-caused-venezuela-crisis/
“Pinochet should be praised for one thing : he left without a bloody war”
Indeed–because the purpose of his coup was to save the nation from a tyranny, in contrast to the purposes of socialist heroes everywhere which is to institute tyranny.
“It astounds me how many people can’t bring themselves to do that and at the same have nothing but praise for Castro’s longevity and doesn’t mention Castro arresting people…”
Which reveals what socialists really think as opposed to what they tell us they value.
I wonder if that idiot Bernie is still high on Venezuela?
Strange how Marx’s call for the extermination of the hopelessly backward in their millions, dispossession and forcible “reeducation” of the educable, and destruction by force of all the productive organs of society doesn’t make Marxism endorse those things, because we must instead refer to the Medina verses of the Karl-ran about the joys on the other side. As if a body politic inspired and enabled to crush and murder would attract only the best people (who would give it up), somehow devolving that total power to more locally centered total power at the same time as everything remained planned from the very top.
Total farce.
As if a body politic inspired and enabled to crush and murder would attract only the best people (who would give it up),
Well, quite. As noted recently, it’s remarkable how people who claim to have read the writings of Marx and Engels, their manifesto and correspondence, and who claim to know about Marx’s actual behaviour, can pretend that these were not the indicators of malign personalities. And that if their fantasies were enacted, horror would follow as a matter of course.
Socialism: further proof, as if it was needed, there is no such thing as a good theory that doesn’t work in practice.
Pinochet saved his country.
Although his methods were often ruthless (no excusing that, really), Pinochet may be the only 20th century dictator who left his country in better shape than when he found it (and stepped down voluntarily).
Off topic, but, well, take a look:
https://www.aol.com/article/2015/08/04/transgender-woman-froze-her-sperm-to-have-her-own-child-after-tr/21218130/
One-upmanship among the delusional continues apace…
Of course, left out of most discussions of Pinochet, is that in the aftermath Chile is one of, if not the most stable country in South America. No small feat in that neck of the woods.
Pinochet represents the id of someone with total and unremitting sanity, unrestrained by conscience. Someone who realized the end aims of his opponents (communist purge and murder) and begain threshing *first*. Not such a fool as to try to make alliance with the unreliable (see Iran), nor such a fool as to attempt to control the market or society in toto.
His type in fiction is the little-seen antivillain: someone with aims and designs counter to real villainy but whose means are abhorrent. The line between an idealist type antihero and antivillain is a thin one: Pinochet is Batman on a very, very bad day.
We should pray that the circumstances that produced Pinochet do not arise, because he is arguably the *best* outcome of such.
Current Doonesbury reruns . . .
17/7/31
17/8/1
17/8/2
17/8/3
One-upmanship among the delusional continues apace…
So Ray Stevens was something of a prophet then…
Pinochet is Batman on a very, very bad day.
So he was the Punisher then.
I once commented that I’d read that Pinochet killed fewer people during his entire reign than Castro had during his first year in power. I was promptly chided that I should not have a “calculus of evil”. I still think I’d rather have lived in Pinochet’s Chile than Castro’s Cuba.
So all this talk of Pinochet had me review his wiki-documented history. Interesting that the word “murder” shows up, based on how the page is today, 16 times. All in reference to Pinochet and his government. Soooo….flipping over to El Presidente Fidel Castro’s wiki, the word “murder” appears exactly three times. Once in a quote from Fidel saying that he was “executing murderers” who deserved it. Once when Marco Rubio was quoted as calling him such. And once in the footnotes in the title of a book referencing murder in the Caribbean.
The word “torture” appears 17 times on Pinochet’s wiki. The first half dozen I looked at were all in reference to the use of torture by Pinochet’s government. On Fidel’s page, the word “torture” appears exactly five times. All in reference to the use of torture by governments preceding Fidel’s.
Go figure.
Torture for extraction of information- torture. Torture for the giggles by the Castros, draining people of all their blood while alive – merely a bit of innocent whimsy.
“Pinochet represents the id of someone with total and unremitting sanity, unrestrained by conscience”
No conscience? Can you substantiate that? There have been many who had a conscience and who did terrible things that that would have preferred not to do but which they did because they knew the alternatives wwe worse.
I recall someone condemning the generals who planned the Dieppe raid knowing that they were probably sending men to their deaths because they needed to learn more about conducting an amphibious landing in France.
I wouldn’t necessarily contend that he had no conscience, merely that his certainty of what to do and how was not obviously bounded by one. No “but I can’t do it that way” quailing.
Conscience could be a liability – interesting topic of argument.
“No ‘but I can’t do it that way’ quailing.”
But we don’t really know what his thoughts were before he decided to do what he did.
And why would a decision to refrain from staging a coup be evidence that he was bounded by a conscience while a decision to stage a coup would be evidence of the opposite? One can make an excellent argument that if one understands the consequences of a Stalinist seizure of power, then one’s conscience would demand that one take all necessary steps to prevent that from happening.
Interesting comparison. One time playing Bane in an online rpg, I had him go back and take over Santa Prisca. Pinochet was who I modeled him on.
Soooo….flipping over to El Presidente Fidel Castro’s wiki, . . . On Fidel’s page, the word “torture” appears exactly five times. All in reference to the use of torture by governments preceding Fidel’s.
Go figure.
. . . Torture for the giggles by the Castros, draining people of all their blood while alive – . . .
Hmmm. So the authoritative source—stop snickering, you—doesn’t mention something about draining blood which does seem a rather suspiciously extreme story to claim of Castro, et al.
Therefore; A very easy bit of Googlemancy, does seem to turn up some certainly documentable sources.
Following that, one does note that the Website Of Record does rely entirely on volunteer contributors and editors, such as someone noticing some fact or another is missing from an article.
Perhaps if should someone feel the slightest bit bored sometime, there does appear to be a very handy project that someone can so helpfully contribute to.
I recall someone condemning the generals who planned the Dieppe raid knowing that they were probably sending men to their deaths because they needed to learn more about conducting an amphibious landing in France.
A fictional note, but also given Ephemeraren’t . . .
Oh, and in parallel, my two favorite Star Trek episodes just happen to be In The Pale Moonlight and Thine Own Self.
Perhaps if should someone feel the slightest bit bored sometime, there does appear to be a very handy project that someone can so helpfully contribute to.
Yeah, I get your point. But been there done that. Hal, I am not ignorant of the fact that Wiki gets its info from contributors. But do you really think not ONE SIGNLE PERSON who has viewed Castro’s wiki page has thought to contribute such? My point, if I must spell it out, is the general culture, including the information and historical culture, is decidedly, absurdly shifted far to the left. What I didn’t state, but will now, is that the more we pay people to sit on their asses and do nothing, the more time some of them have that eventually gravitates to seizing intellectual territory. Language territory. Not that I disagree that we should dive in there and fight it out but I have other work to do, unlike the leftist clowns who seem to be in control of these things. Given that you seem to enjoy pointing such inaccuracies out, why don’t you give it a try and let us know how it goes?
I have made maybe a dozen Wikipedia contributions in my life. Mostly benign, non-political things such as the effectiveness of the bazooka in the Pacific in WW2, the odd baseball or rock and roll tid bit. One of my two ventures into wikiing even remotely political facts was upon observing that the Pol Pot entry mentioned his having been a student at a French engineering school, EFR. When clicking over to EFR I noticed they had a “Notable Alumni” section that did not mention him. My OCD required that I add him. Well that kicked off an interesting debate. We went round and round for a bit with the argument that such was just an urban legend or such told to each other by students. It finally seems to have settled on “attended but failed his exams”. A similar debate has raged on Ted Bundy’s page regarding “cause of death” oscillating from “homicide” (I think at one time it did read “murder”) to “execution by electrocution” as it stands (temporarily of course) now.
And to cut the inevitable argument off at he pass, of course Wiki is a poor source of historical accuracy. In most cases. But it has to a significant extent become the document of record for the vast majority of people. Wrong as that may be, the culture is what it is.
The regime in Cuba is itself well aware of Wikipedia’s existence.
On a side note, a few years ago I ran across an article regarding evidence that most of those Pinochet was alleged to have “disappeared” may have in fact disappeared themselves. In other words, they fled the country they would have turned, or would have been used to turn (as useful idiots) into the next Cuba.
Pinochet was a political equivalent of a Patton or a Sherman. He knew the followers of Marx viewed their struggle as a (holy) war, and he treated it as a war.
Doesn’t the situation in Venezuela prove that the United States did the right thing when they tried to stop the marxist/socialist/communist revolutions in the Americas during the Cold War? Now, I happen to believe that the Latin American countries should have been allowed to ruin their nations by turning them into communist hellholes, but I can’t help thinking that maybe the Americans were onto something…
Pinochet may be the only 20th century dictator who left his country in better shape than when he found it.
Ataturk.
Lee Kwan Yew.
There would also be many people who would argue the case for Admiral Horthy, Anwar Sadat and Chiang Kai Shek (for Taiwan). I can imagine people arguing that Suharto, Józef Piłsudski, etc did more harm than good, albeit they also had large downsides.
None of these men were full on dictators, but then neither was Pinochet. Most kept their killing to direct enemies — as they didn’t have to deal with the ridiculous concept of “class enemies”. The best didn’t even have to kill anyone much.
Nor did they have to jail and harrass “wreckers” since their economies were successful. In fact, if you run the country well, most people will barely even consider you a dictator, and hence you can pretend to be a Prime Minister like Lee Kwan Yew or Mahathir Mohamad.
Speaking of Lee Kuan Yew, there’s a funny story I heard about him, which may or may not be true, but certainly sounds like the sort of thing he might do, concerning one of the alleged means by which he maintained his semi-dictatorial one-party rule for several decades.
Consider the following: if an opposition party were growing strong enough to challenge Lee’s rule, then it is practically a tautology that such a party would contain many politicians and have a lot of money flowing around.
And as the cynics will tell us, it is a trivial piece of political arithmetic that if you put a lot of politicians in a room with a lot of money, the result will be corruption.
So whenever an opposition party started looking like a threat, Lee would simply have the police send some investigators to check for corruption, and they’d find some.
And what I find wonderful about this routine is that it superficially has the form of “arrest political dissidents”, but here on entirely legitimate causes rather than trumped-up excuses from some tinpot dictator.
“Pinochet should be praised for one thing : he left without a bloody war.”
Merely a bloody “peace”.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/chile-dictatorship-victim-toll-bumped-to-40-018-1.998542