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In the photo you can see how in one of these places, intended to sell food at prices regulated by the government, and ultimately, under government administration, is completely empty, the shelves that once used to be completely full of provisions , now they are only meant to load some of the cleaning products that are not yet depleted.
People don't even bother to go to these places, since they will not find anything. The failure has been so evident that President Nicolás Maduro himself announced a couple of months ago that the company would be sold and would return to the private sector.
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But what caught my attention in this particular photo, was not the empty shelves, that's something I'm used to seeing, but the poster that appears above the premises, which in an ironic, but true way, proper to a socialist government that boasts of anything that is capable of achieving, no matter how useless this may be, he says "Un logro de la Revolución Bolivariana", which could literally be translated as "An achievement of the Bolivarian Revolution."
Venezuela has become nothing more than a sad example of what happens when socialism comes to your country, is not the only example, and perhaps not the saddest, but the most recent, and the one that shows us that we have learned nothing from our past.
Something that keeps spinning in my head is the growth and resurgence of socialist ideas in all of Western society, the countries that shone for being the apex of capitalism (although they never fully developed it), to this day they are trying, at least a large part of their population, to put into practice these statist ideas that have failed each and every time they have been tried.
I do not question the good will that many of these people may have, I know that the vast majority of people who adhere to these ideas believe they are doing the right thing, believe they are helping people and/or the world, hell, If I thought that the people who support the socialist regimes were really evil, then I would have taken my bags and left the country years ago, but the reality is that both socialist politicians and socialism itself, in essence, theory and practice, in all its approach, is wrong. The elite of socialist politicians is the most disgusting and corrupt that a country can have, adding to the corruption and inherent impudence that politicians of any kind and idea already have.
Whether due to ingenuity or ignorance, many people are being indoctrinated to these ideas since young, and they are being radicalized, all this within the western society.
If I tell you in summary form, because I have already told it extensively in other of my publications, what socialism did to Venezuela, then you will be able to understand the magnitude and the great failure that this example represents. Without any excuse.
Venezuela, which as we saw in the photo above, now has no food, used to be the richest country in all of Latin America, in fact, its economy was the second largest in the entire American continent (only behind the United States) for some decades in the past. The Venezuelan wealth generated by oil exports was so high that the country handled exceptional figures, even if we compare them with a European country, between 1973 and 1998 for example, since the creation of PDVSA, which is the monopoly company that controls the oil in Venezuela, until the arrival of Hugo Chávez to power, Venezuela obtained by oil revenues the equivalent of 20 Marshall plans (250 billion dollars), that is, 20 times the money that was necessary to rebuild all of Europe after the Second World War.
In the 20 years that chavism socialism has been in power, income not only increased, but multiplied exponentially during the oil bubble that took place between 2003 and 2013, and in this period of 10 years, the socialist Venezuela I get to manage more money for oil revenues than all the money that the country had managed during the 40 years before Chávez came to power. How many Marshall plans will that be?
Venezuelan socialism was the one that handled the most money in history, not even the Soviet Union proportionately managed as much money as Venezuela, which only has a population of 30 million people. However, and without forgetting the empty shelves of that photo above, the socialist government wasted money on all kinds of subsidies, which today are useless, and if you want to know how stupid was the waste, think that if you are a low class citizen in London, the capital of the United Kingdom, and you have used public transport, so you probably should thank the Venezuelan government, which in 2007 started a public transport subsidy in London to "favor the more needy ", thus reducing the passage in half. Of course this was just a maneuver to buy public opinion, while helping his comrade, the former mayor of London Ken Livingstone, who belongs to the Labour Party.
Labour Party? Does it sound? If you live in the United Kingdom, Australia or even Norway, you will have an equivalent to this party, and yes, it is of socialist tendency, although it is described as a social democrat. Do you sound Jeremy Corbyn? Maybe not, but if you live, again, in the United Kingdom, then I'm sure you know I'm talking about the main leader of the UK Labour Party, who, as you can guess if you paid attention, was a very good friend of Chavez, and even to this day continues to support the government of Nicolás Maduro. Don't forget the empty shelves in the photo of the beginning while I tell you this, you must be very clear that they are the same, and also what they are capable of doing no matter how rich the country they are arriving to.
No matter what country you are in, you can be sure that if you look with the right eyes, you will find an equivalent to Chávez, or maybe Maduro, willing to convince you with any kind of ideas that sound "charitable", "correct", "beneficial" or even "necessary", but do not believe them, it is just talk, these people just want to take power, they are megalomaniacs, they have delusions of greatness, they would not mind subsidizing 51% of the population to guarantee their votes and then do a disaster the country, will turn democracy into an Occlocracy, as they are already doing in some countries, and then with the dictatorship of the proletariat and the tyranny of the majority, will make their slight majority crush the opposition. Remember this, Chávez was popular, but never reached more than 50% of the entire national population in his favor.
You may think that I am exaggerating, that the speech of leftist politicians in your country is not openly socialist, and that the Venezuelan case is not comparable to your country, but I will tell you something, those "social-democratic" politicians of Europe and the United States, they are not really social democrats, they are socialists, many of them supported the government of Venezuela, such as Jeremy Corbyn (United Kingdom), Jean-Luc Mélenchon (France), Pablo Iglesias (Spain), just to mention a few. Many of them are afraid to say that they are socialists openly, as Bernie Sanders did, but it is only because they are afraid to take off their mask and expose themselves, Hugo Chávez did not say he was a socialist before taking power, in fact, he did it 5 years after taking the presidency, in his election campaign he said he would not expropriate, and quoted, "absolutely nothing", he also said that Cuba was a dictatorship, and detached himself from it, and said he wanted to establish a government similar to Tony Blair in the United Kingdom, that is to say "social-democratic", but to this day, 21 years after that, we can look back and know that he was lying, and he did it shamelessly, just as today's progressive politicians do in Europe and the United States, just as Chávez placed the United Kingdom as a model, Bernie Sanders does the same with Scandinavia, but he is lying, he is a socialist, and they want a totally socialist state, which is what all socialists want .
Do not think that your country is too rich for a crisis of this magnitude to happen to him, Venezuela also was rich, and it happened. Do not believe that your country has greater democratic traditions, Venezuela also had it, it was the first democracy in South America, and it lost it. Do not think that the politicians of your country are honest, why they are not, Venezuela is not an exception, your country either.
To finish I could put some photos of the Venezuelan crisis, people eating from the trash or people without food, empty shelves and rows of people waiting to buy food, hospitals without medication but full of sick people, but I don't want to ruin your day, I just want make them aware of how easy and fast they can lose everything, absolutely everything, simply by making a wrong decision, or by not doing enough so that other people don't make that decision for you.
