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.
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Image credit: ZiaLater | CC BY-SA 3.0.
