Millions are fleeing Venezuela. I heard a radio report of the brutal exodus over frigid mountain passes on a narrow road filled with trucks and not much walking space by families including pregnant women and children. Venezuela is without food, power, and now water. Things are desperate.
So - why?
During my Conservative Years the answer would have been obvious - Socialism destroys economies, tyrannizes peoples, and crushes freedoms. Look at the Soviet Union. Look at Cuba. Look at - Venezuela. And, indeed, it is clear that Trump and Republicans will use the specter of Venezuela in their 2020 campaigns.
But, I am coming to a very different conclusion. It's not so much Socialism itself, it's authoritarian demands of loyalty over expertise. Venezuela is a clear warning to Americans about our own authoritarian who is doing the same thing here - Trump.
Venezuela has essentially one economy - oil. And Venezuela has ruined its only economy. How? By astonishing incompetence. By having the authoritarian presidents - Chavez and Maduro - replace industry professionals with political toadies whose only qualifications are political loyalty to the supreme rulers. Per Robert Rapier of Forbes:
"During the Venezuelan general strike of 2002–2003, Chávez fired 19,000 employees of the state oil company Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA) and replaced them with employees loyal to his government."
Oil production is complicated. It takes qualified, professional, educated and trained scientists, engineers, a craftspeople. So it is the same for government. The Departments of Energy, Agriculture, Education, State, etc. all require highly educated and trained professionals to run them. To keep America safe. To keep America growing and prospering.
But Trump has replaced the heads of almost all government agencies with political hacks whose only qualifications are loyalty to him. This is pointed out in terrifying detail in Michael Lewis's "The Fifth Risk". The most recent, and terrifying examples are Trump's desire to put Stephen Moore as the head of the Federal Reserve (the most complicated and demanding job for the top economists in the country - this man is an incompetent ideological nitwit with no approval of real economists). And even more cartoonishly, Trump now wants the amazingly ridiculous Herman Caine of the disastrous "9-9-9 (personal tax, sales tax, and corporate tax)" presidential campaign in 2012 before he was laughed off the stage.
So, I think the way Socialism destroys economies is political as much as economic. It's not so much that Socialism destroys incentives and as a result economies die. Perhaps it is that Socialism easily becomes tyranny and tyrants replace expertise with ideological loyalists who are ignorant and incompetent.
So here is the real question - where else to we see ideological and personal loyalty being the sole criteria for leadership in government? Trump. America. The Republican Party has abandoned principle, expertise, competence, and its soul to the whims of its authoritarian ruler - Trump.
If you think Socialism means Venezuela, then of course Socialism is bad, really bad. But if you think that Socialism is Social Security, Medicare, interstate highways, libraries, police departments, fire departments, NASA, bridges, museums, public schools, water and wastewater treatment plants, clean air and clean water regulations, inspections and codes in public safety, environment, and food quality - then Socialism is actually quite good. All of these things have been called Socialist. And they are, I guess. They are public funds for public good. They are the heartbeat of civilization. Take them away and you have Fascist tyrannies which end up in - Venezuelas.
By the way. I am thinking that as time passes the old fights between Right and Left, between Free Markets and Socialism, are going to become passé. The real split that is coming is between the old Boomers of my generation who see things in Right-Left terms, and the Young Millennial generation who will blow past such chasms and come up with whole new paradigms. They didn't grow up in the Cold War. They grew up in a land where they had to be trained how to stay alive during a crazed man with military assault weapons trying to kill them in school - and in a world where they went into six figure debts to get a college degree - and in a world where climate change is an economic and existential threat to humanity. They aren't in the thrall of old Boomer hatreds.
I have great hope and expectations of the Millennials, and for America.
