It wants to spread the suffering:
As with the old lady and the fly, Venezuela’s government may be running out of encores. It can crack down on black-market activity, but that won’t make the shortages go away. It might redistribute the suffering a bit, but that’s not all it will do. The black market is often a sort of release valve for bad policy; shut it down, and you turn the formerly annoying into the totally intolerable.
There is, as Adam Smith once observed, “a lot of ruin in a nation.” President Nicolas Maduro seems determined to find out exactly how much Venezuela has left.
This is always how socialism ends. They’ve run out of other peoples’ money down there.
Most people would take notes on how to avoid this situation but Obama just thinks he can do a better job of managing the system.
And they’ll keep on saying that true socialism still hasn’t ever really been tried.
Those who say that generally claim that socialism would work if “the right people were in charge”, meaning themselves, of course. These people are genuinely unintelligent because they lack the ability to learn from experience. They may be “book smart” but they’re reading the wrong books.
From a 2011 trip to Asia, our Vietnamese guide said (as verbatim as I can recall), “Following reunification, Vietnam was a socialist country. Do you know what socialism is? It’s where if you work hard and someone else doesn’t, everyone gets the same thing. So no one works hard. About 20 years ago, the government changed the rules. Those who work hard get to keep more of what they make. Things are much better now.”
Those idiots who keep advocating socialism are blind to basic human nature. The only people who work hard without any chance to prosper from their labors are slaves and that’s because they fear the whip. The overwhelming majority of people will not work hard “for the common good”, especially when they see “the right people” who’re running the government prospering but everyone else suffering. Those who advocate socialism are either idiots or would-be slave masters. Stupid or evil, you make the call.
A guy named Hayek covered this topic a while back. When the planned economy fails (as it must), more control becomes necessary to hide the fail, which in turn promotes more failure, which again brings on more control. If it weren’t for all the people who are getting hurt because of it, watching this death spiral unfold might actually be fun.
The way to crack down on a black market is by fixing the regular market. Not repression.
First you have to admit there is a problem with the regular market. The repression is an attempt to deny that reality. Hayek wins again.
You don’t have to fix the regular market, because the regular market is a legalized black market, operating by the same rules by the same people. The US and UK free markets are former black markets operating by the common law of flea markets and other private transactions. As those capitalist markets evolve they get big and draw the ire of leftists who are convinced that ordinary people shouldn’t be allowed unsupervised buying and selling, lest someone exploit someone else. So they limit who is allowed to buy and sell, for the good of those they’re trying to protect, locking those people out of the expanding free markets and preventing them from realizing any capital gains, which are of course evil.
If progressives could bring about their vision, the US would be Venezuela.