Venezuela’s ‘socialist paradise’ turns into a nightmare: medical shortages claim lives as oil price collapses

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• I heard that the bus driver that runs Venezuela has upped the toilet paper ration from two rolls a month to one roll.....if you can find a roll.

• Can anyone name a country where socialism has worked?

  • Oceana and Eastasia.

    • That's why they were always at war with each other. Now, where's my chocolate?

      • No chocolate, Victory Gin.

    • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPc25pbM95c

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBs9SS_h4GI

• When are we going to hear about Venezuela in the news? I mean seriously this is just terrible. I cannot believe it is not even discussed.

• Time to lock up socialists in little camps perhaps? You can only fail a couple thousand times before you need to go somewhere and get treated.....

  • Yes, many, many, little camps, where they can be more easily controlled.

    • let's see how their commune society works out THEN!

• Yet once again, it looks like socialism has failed only because the wrong people were in charge. That seems to be the case 100% of the time, not that is not a reason to not keep trying it over and over and over.

  • You're absolutely right, but that's why this article (the Telegraph one, not the IHTM pointer) irritates me. Venezuela has been disintegrating for well over a decade and the Chavez regime handed out AK47s in thousands to its private army. Also, Chavez changed the Venezuelan constitution whenever he felt like it.

    I don't think that it's a huge coincidence that Obama's adherents in the media started to attack the US Constitution when Chavez found the Venezuelan version insufficiently inflexible.

    Obama also condemned the Supreme Court of Honduras for preventing a president from trying to have an illegal extension of power. Tragically, that proper expression of a constitutional principle seems now to be described, even in the nominally "right-wing" press, as a coup d'etat.

    Daniel Ortega (remember him?) got away with the same thing in Nicaragua. Nobody in DC (or anywhere else) ever commented.

    • Andrew Wilkow has been smashing Venezuela for a couple of years in detail. He has gone over what has happened, & why it has happened.

  • It is either the wrong people or some malevolent outside force that stops socialism/fascism/communism/progressivism from working. It is never the core ideology. NEVER.

  • Those trying to do this here think they are the smartest socialists, & that they will be the ones to make it work. Of course, that's bullsh!t, but failure after failure, they always need more time, more money, & more control to make it work. Which it never does.

• Nevertheless, American Progressives will continue to agitate for socialized medicine for the masses(their wealthy backers, however, will still be free to utilize private medical care).

• I do wonder how it took the Telegraph so long to cotton on to what has been going on in Venezuela. None of this is news. Peter Foster writes as if the climate in Caracas suddenly changed, when Chavez died, but the current situation is only a continuation of what was happening before. The idea that the recent drop in the oil price is anything more than an addition to their predicament is absurd.

  There is currently a left-wing party angling for power in Spain. Four things you need to know: the party-leader has a pony-tail; the party-leader admires Che; the party as a whole admires Chavismo; the party could be the largest party, after the next Spanish election.

  If you've never seen Spain (genuinely a lovely country), now could be the time.

  Oh, I forgot to mention the name of that Spanish party: "Podemos". Remind you of anybody?

  • I been there, I had fun, but they do run the bulls and i think they still do bullfights (this may not be current) which indicates, to me, at the very least, that they're crazy lithperth anyway.