Younger generations in the US keep favoring “Socialism” even though they have no real idea what it is or what it does to a society. The history of Socialism and Communism are not properly taught in schools today and instead children are being softly propagandized of the benefits of a utopian socialist society. It doesn’t exist and never has. Every place this ideology has been tried it has failed and failed miserably. It has killed more people than all the world wars combined.
Here is a personal perspective from a former Venezuelan who watched his country and his father die due to this invalid ideology.
Since the election of Chávez in 1998, the government has removed eight zeros from the constantly inflating currency and twice changed its name. It is expected that in 2020 there will be still another currency with even more zeros lopped off—with one new currency unit equaling hundreds of billions of old bolívars since Chavism started. The International Monetary Fund has indicated that inflation could be anywhere between 1 million and 10 million percent by the end of 2019, but it’s hard to know for sure since the government has stopped bothering to publish many basic economic indicators.
Venezuela now has the lowest average minimum salary in the world: just $2 a month, one-tenth the figure for impoverished Cuba. There are general shortages of almost everything, including gasoline, despite the fact that Venezuela has the largest petroleum reserves in the world. The water and electric systems are collapsing: Major national blackouts started in early 2019, with some parts of the country going dark for weeks. Telephone and internet services fail constantly, due to the electrical disruptions and a lack of system updates. Most patients who require cancer treatments or dialysis are just dying. Our former “capital of Heaven” now has no gas, no light, no food, no water, no jobs, no money, no medicine, and no hope.
It’s no wonder people are leaving. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees estimates that more than 4.3 million people, or around 14 percent of the population, have fled Venezuela, and the total could pass 5 million by 2020. This kind of massive refugee crisis is a first in the Americas, and it’s creating serious regional problems. The number of murders has grown from 5,000 a year before Chávez to around 25,000 today, though the government has stopped publishing those figures, too. That’s about a half-million murders—a whole city dead—since the advent of Chavism.
Reason.com