Thanks to socialism, Venezuela is a basket case.
This video from John Stossel asks if the United States can and should learn from this bad example.
The easy answer is yes. Indeed, you can click here and here to get 56 examples of why we should not copy Venezuela’s descent to statism.
The main thing to understand is that the world is an economic laboratory and the various countries are experiments showing what works and what doesn’t work.
Nations such as Venezuela clearly are wretched examples of what happens if there is a large amount of bad policy.
Other nations, by contrast, are examples of what happens if there’s a medium level of bad policy. Think Greece, Argentina, and Italy.
While countries such as the United States and Denmark show what happens if there is a (comparatively) modest amount of bad policy.
All this is depicted in the “socialism slide,” which I created back in 2019 to show how nations score in the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom of the World.
The good news is that the United States would have to fall a long way down the slide before approaching Venezuela-style economic despotism.
Even Biden’s plan would represent just a small step in that wrong direction.
P.S. I’m focused on the dangers of copying Venezuela’s bad economic policies, but I agree about the downsides of the other two policies – gun control and speech control – mentioned in the video.
P.P.S. I’ll never stop being amazed that the New York Times wrote about Venezuela’s economic crisis and never once mentioned socialism.
[…] Is Venezuela a Warning for the United States? […]
Stossel is so brilliant… Republicans should learn from him and forget Teedy Rosenfeld and Hitler
No, the United States isn’t a possible Venezuela. The Biden presidency is Venezuela on steroids. It gives up oil production to allow other countries to increase their carbon uses. It turns friends into emerging opponents….Canada, Mexico, France, Israel, Turkey….., it promotes Russian oil exports, favoring its pipeline to Europe, …, it expands imports, and increased investments in China…., it undercuts U.S. employment, and wages, manipulating immigration…., it harms the education of the nation’s children further by closing schools,…., it cuts the value of individual savings through inflation, especially of the aged….., it increases its borrowing to be paid by future generations, an economic form of child abuse, it locks in the disaster of a mentally ill president for at least another year….., it sells political influence to all buyers, like China, Russia, and other procurers of power….., it surrenders effective public management to colluding Deep State sectors…., while it enriches family, and friends….and that is for starters.
[…] Is Venezuela a Warning for the United States? […]
It would be interesting to see where you would rank China & Taiwan on those graphs