For a long time I have been saying (along with a lot of other people), that Hugo Chavez was running his country into the ground. He diverted investment funds from PDVSA, Venezuela’s state-run oil company, into social programs. As long as the price of oil kept rising, he could do that. Unfortunately, Venezuela’s sour, heavy crude is particularly hard to get at and refine, and requires a high rate of investment in order to keep production up. As a result, the number of barrels per day (bpd) that Venezuela produces has declined pretty sharply since he took office in 1999.
As a consequence, the money that Chavez used to paper over the cracks in his socialist paradise has vanished, and the cracks are deepening:
President Hugo Chávez has been facing a public outcry in recent weeks over power failures that, after six nationwide blackouts in the last two years, are cutting electricity for hours each day in rural areas and in industrial cities like Valencia and Ciudad Guayana. Now, water rationing has been introduced here in the capital.
The deterioration of services is perplexing to many here, especially because the country had grown used to cheap, plentiful electricity and water in recent decades. But even as the oil boom was enriching his government and Mr. Chávez asserted greater control over utilities and other industries in this decade, public services seemed only to decay, adding to residents’ frustrations.
Nothing is free. Everything has to be paid for. Pay attention, liberals – for the last time, will you please understand that government can’t get it right? That the more you turn over to government, the worse things get? There was a joke during the Cold War perhaps you younger people don’t remember:
What happens if the communists take over the Sahara desert?
Nothing for ten years. Then there’s a shortage of sand.
It might make you liberals feel good that Chavez talks about social justice, but all he’s really about is megalomania. He wants power for himself and simply to have it. He tried to gain power by a coup. When that failed, he took up the populist cudgels and managed to win the Presidency – and since that time he’s called upon paid thugs, again and again, to intimidate people in to giving in to his rule. And now he’s just shy of Stalinist in his control – and the Venezuelan economy is collapsing.
So, too, it would be in the United States, if we turned over more and more things (such as health care) to the government. Government cannot do other than get it wrong whenever it steps outside its proper bounds.
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