"Socialism: it just hasn't been implemented by the right set of people - yet" - Granite Grok

“Socialism: it just hasn’t been implemented by the right set of people – yet”

Certainly not in the late Chavez’s Venezuela – last time it was foreign currency black markets, rotting food on the docks, and toilet paper hording.  Socialism – the promise of a Utopia for Everyone!  I guess that 130 years, in lots of countries world-wide, not ONE set of folks has gotten it right yet!  Small countries, medium sized countries, and large ones; poor developing ones, a poor one that was faux superpower, and rich ones that are going broke.  Back to Venezuela: (emphasis mine, reformatted)

…Gonzalez is on a list of 31 breast cancer patients waiting to have tumors removed at one of Venezuela’s biggest medical facilities, Maracay’s Central Hospital. But like legions of the sick across the country, she’s been neglected by a health care system doctors say is collapsing after years of deterioration.  Doctors at the hospital sent home 300 cancer patients last month when supply shortages and overtaxed equipment made it impossible for them to perform non-emergency surgeries.  Driving the crisis in health care are the same forces that have left Venezuelans scrambling to find toilet paper, milk and automobile parts. Economists blame government mismanagement and currency controls set by the late President Hugo Chavez for inflation pushing 50 percent annually...Doctors not allied with the government say many patients began dying from easily treatable illnesses when Venezuela’s downward economic slide accelerated after Chavez’s death from cancer in March. Doctors say it’s impossible to know how many have died, and the government doesn’t keep such numbers, just as it hasn’t published health statistics since 2010.

…The country’s 1999 constitution guarantees free universal health care to Venezuelans, who sit on the world’s largest proven oil reserves. President Nicolas Maduro’s government insists it’s complying. Yet of the country’s 100 fully functioning public hospitals, nine in 10 have just 7 percent of the supplies they need, Natera said.

Free Universal healthcare – as with all Socialist systems, Free never means what the rest of us think it is, universal is just a marketing lie to the rubes, and as the above shows, if access to the places, supplies, and equipment needed to, you know, actually deliver healthcare is rationed, that phrase is meaningless.

Venezuela is just the latest failed experiment in top-down control – just add them to the ash pile where millions before it tried to enforce it on their people – abject #FAIL.  Yet, there is just something about some people who decide, contra Hayek’s “fatal conceit of knowledge” warning, that they know best, they can do better, and that they are The Ones that will be successful.

They are willing to gamble their political ideology against the well-being (and sometimes their lives) of their fellow countrymen.  Democide in Socialist / Communist nations have killed far more people in their Long March to these unobtainable Utopias than all of the wars in the last 130 years – combined.  Not one has succeeded to the extent that the US has over that time frame.

Why?  We valued Freedom for the Individual over the Equality of the masses.  We believe that each person knows what is best for themselves and not some bureaucrat in DC.  And even if that person fails, even to failing badly, that only affects them (and their family).  But when an entire Government fails due to trying this failed philosophy once again, the population of an entire country suffers – and suffers badly to the point of death for some.

But it seems we have a cadre in the political world hellbent on bringing that hell to our shores – with the main FORWARD! chanting collectivists fusterclucked in DC but with cheerleaders in the MSM, the Media, and the Academy.  The only reason that I can come up with as to why these totalitarians truly believe they have a right to control others?

Pure Evil.

For the willingness and desire to control others is akin to slavery.  You see, in Socialist countries, while the words are high minded, mighty sounding, and broad uplifting and one can get caught up in it all, it still comes down that their citizens are treated as mere chattel.  And with Obamacare, does anyone else feel that we have become such?

(H/T: AP)

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