Kevin Williamson
nailed it when he described Venezuela's descent.
"The central planners in Venezuela were arrogant and hubristic, as they always are. (As, indeed, the entire concept of central planning is.) When oil revenues proved insufficient to sustain their program, they printed money; when the foreign-exchange markets responded by devaluing Venezuela’s currency, they enacted controls on foreign exchange; when prices rocketed out of control (Venezuela’s inflation rate is difficult to calculate, but it is estimated to have been around 18,000 percent a month in April), they enacted price controls; when producers declined to produce at those artificially low prices, they seized their assets.
Venezuelans are not fools — they noticed that this wasn’t working as advertised. When the critics began to say so, their newspapers and broadcast facilities were shut down; when they protested individually, they were jailed or assassinated; when they protested en masse, they were massacred. When central planning fails — and it always fails — the result is almost never the relaxation of political regimentation but the redoubling of efforts to impose the plan by increasingly brutal application of force. Sometimes that force takes the form of killings, torture, and beatings. In the old Soviet Union, in North Korea, and in Venezuela, it also has taken the form of politically imposed hunger. The largest share of the 100 million human beings murdered by socialist regimes in the 20th century died of hunger: in the cities, in the countryside, and in the gulags. The Holodomor alone killed between 7 million and 12 million people. Mao’s famine killed between 20 million and 43 million, and many of those deaths happened in places where food
production remained at or close to normal rates: Appropriation of economic output for political purposes is always part of the plan."
