The Socialist Sinking Ship: Then and Now

A little late to the party, the BBC wonders at the surreal and ongoing failure of the Venezuelan regime to provide its citizens with life’s basic amenities. Goods such as flour, sugar, cooking oil, shampoo and detergent, and the oft-mentioned toilet paper are now in such short supply that people are given time off work to queue in front of the stores. But in good socialist fashion, matters seem otherwise pretty “well organized”. Authorities are advising stores to allow customers to queue in underground parking lots so that they don’t get sunburnt, and have also instituted some measures to trim down the number of shoppers: people can “only buy scarce goods on certain days of the week depending on what number their ID card ends in”.

At this stage, further comments on the economics of what’s happening in Venezuela (which we wrote about in the past) are hardly necessary. It’s interesting to point out, however, that around the world these kind of ultimate failures of socialism not only originate from the same causes, but tend to manifest themselves in strikingly similar manner.

About 30 years ago on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, Romanians used to wait in line for hours in front of mostly empty shelves. But for them, the situation had long ceased to be a temporary crisis, as Venezuela’s problems are still portrayed. The Romanian communist regime, in place already for more than two decades, had rationalized most food shortages as...
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