Life isn’t much fun these days in the world’s socialist paradise. If you had to choose a country you didn’t want to live in, Venezuela would be near the top of the list. Corrupt, dysfunctional, bankrupt, crime-ridden, drug-infested, short of practically every basic commodity, it can’t keep the lights on, keep the government running or brew its own beer. Last weekend six army officers were arrested for stealing goats from a farm because they were hungry. Venezuela has become the basket case of the western hemisphere, a case study on how not to run a country and a living example of what happens when a left-wing government is let loose with utopian economics. The cruel irony is that Venezuela has the world’s largest oil reserves — 298 billion barrels —the raw material on which to build a pleasant and prosperous nation. Yet it recently began importing oil from the U.S., a country it has spent a decade deriding as a mortal enemy.
How socialism turned oil-rich Venezuela into a basket case
