Venezuela Closer To The Brink

It is fascinating watching as Venezuela collapses, seeing it as yet another real life example of what Ayn Rand warned us about 60 years ago. It went from being one of the wealthiest nations in South America to the poorest. It wasn't happenstance or natural disaster which brought about this transformation from wealth to poverty. It was caused by deliberate actions taken by Venezuela's socialist government.

Anyone even slightly cognizant of Socialism's major fault, that being that eventually the run out of other people's money and everything then falls apart, could see that Hugo Chavez and his minions chose to ignore the lessons history has taught about that gawd-awful ideology. It's like Chavez, Maduro, and the other Chavistas used Atlas Shrugged as a how-to manual and not a warning.

Their latest dive into Ayn Rand's dystopian tome: Arresting bakers because they can't make enough bread.

Facing a bread shortage that is spawning massive lines and souring the national mood, the Venezuelan government is responding this week by detaining bakers and seizing establishments.

In a press release, the National Superintendent for the Defense of Socioeconomic Rights said it had charged four people and temporarily seized two bakeries as the socialist administration accused bakers of being part of a broad “economic war” aimed at destabilizing the country.

Juan Crespo, the president of the Industrial Flour Union called Sintra-Harina, which represents 9,000 bakeries nationwide, said the government’s heavy hand isn’t going to solve the problem.

“The government isn’t importing enough wheat,” he said. “If you don’t have wheat, you don’t have flour, and if you don’t have flour, you don’t have bread.”

He said the country needs four, 30-ton boats of wheat every month to cover basic demand.

So it isn't that there isn't enough wheat, and hence flour to bake bread. It's that the greedy bakers are 'destabilizing the country'. To me it appears the Venezuelan government has no understanding of cause and effect, meaning that they either don't know or don't care that no amount of coercion can force bakers to make enough bread if there are no ingredients available.

We've seen that before when the Venezuelan government chastised, and in some cases, arrested factory owners and managers because their factories weren't producing any goods. That there were no raw materials available and/or the electrical supply was spotty or non-existent didn't make any difference. It was the fault of the 'greedy factory owners destabilizing the country' that was causing the problem. Funny that the arrests did not motivate other factory owners to get their factories operating again seeing that they were in exactly the same situation as those who were detained – no materials and no power.

That the Chavistas were the ones who created this crisis to begin with is something they can never admit. It has to be the fault of someone else. Therefore there will be no changes until a revolution takes place that removes the Chavistas from power.