Venezuela to remove 5 zeros from currency due to 1 million % inflation
The joys of collectivism! The socialist Venezuelan government has decided to remove 5 zeros, not 3, from its currency in order to battle a yearly inflation rate of 1 million percent.
Not surprisingly, the country’s dictator, President Nicolas Maduro, claims the country’s problems are not because of socialist policies but because of the evil United States:
The government has said it is the victim of an “economic war” led by opposition leaders with the help of Washington, which last year levied several rounds of sanctions against Maduro’s administration and a group of top officials.
Meanwhile,
Venezuela’s minimum wage is now about the equivalent of $1 a month, which has left citizens across the country unable to eat properly or obtain basic medical care – fueling an exodus of Venezuelans seeking to escape the economic crisis.
As Margaret Thatcher so accurately noted when speaking of socialism, communism, and all other collectivist ideologies, “Sooner or later you run out of other people’s money.”
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
The joys of collectivism! The socialist Venezuelan government has decided to remove 5 zeros, not 3, from its currency in order to battle a yearly inflation rate of 1 million percent.
Not surprisingly, the country’s dictator, President Nicolas Maduro, claims the country’s problems are not because of socialist policies but because of the evil United States:
The government has said it is the victim of an “economic war” led by opposition leaders with the help of Washington, which last year levied several rounds of sanctions against Maduro’s administration and a group of top officials.
Meanwhile,
Venezuela’s minimum wage is now about the equivalent of $1 a month, which has left citizens across the country unable to eat properly or obtain basic medical care – fueling an exodus of Venezuelans seeking to escape the economic crisis.
As Margaret Thatcher so accurately noted when speaking of socialism, communism, and all other collectivist ideologies, “Sooner or later you run out of other people’s money.”
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Gedanken experiment:
At 1e6 % inflation, and since Maduro will not fix his economy, how long will it take to get back to this value for the $BS?
I wonder if Venezuela pays its Farmers, not to farm.
Venezuela is way beyond running out of other people’s money. With its grinding poverty and systemic malnutrition, Margaret Thatcher’s dictum can be modified to “the problem with Socialism is that, sooner or later, you run out of other people’s cats.”
But this isn’t real communism/socialism.
So anything bad that happens is not the philosophies failure but the failure of the dictators running it.
We have not tried “real” communism/socialism yet.
Does that sound like the lefts excuses yet?
pzatchok,
It does sound like the usual excuses.
Cuba, and many other socialist countries, blame the United States, too. Apparently, socialism and communism don’t work without U.S. (the other people) money. I wonder if Marx knew that?
It may be a strange concept to the left, but when a system depends upon the correct people running it, it is not the system that works, it is the people.
So far, socialism and communism are so unworkable that no one has been found who can get them to work. Even William Bradford of the Plymouth Colony could not make socialism work, resulting in half the colony dying, but the year that he tried free market capitalism, he was able to invite local Indians (twice as many as the surviving colonists) over for a three-day feast that we now consider to be the first Thanksgiving.
Free market capitalism, on the other hand, works no matter who works it. When the socialist Indian government and the communist Chinese government moved toward free market capitalism, just that small motion brought half of each of their people out of poverty in only a couple of decades. Even socialists and communists can make free market capitalism work, whereas the very same people cannot make socialism or communism work.
Venezuela is similar. Free market capitalism was working just fine, but then the socialists moved in, and now everyone is either starving or eating homegrown rabbits (per government direction). Come to think of it, the left has stated that socialism and communism require that a country be capitalist, first. Didn’t work so well for Venezuela or Cuba. I guess the capitalists are the other people whose money is needed to make the inferior systems work, while the money lasts.
A socialist state can only exist if a capitalist state subsidizes it.
Either by direct donations or by engaging in limited capitalism with that capitalist state.
Once they go fully capitalist they become independent of the need for outside support. And eventually become a full Republic.
China is getting to the point of being a free republic. But the ruling party is quietly fighting it all the way. The people will eventually win.
pzatchok-
Going to have to disagree with you on China; It’s a totalitarian slave state and will ultimately have to be annihilated, root & branch. (The entire ruling elite will need to be dispatched, with extreme prejudice.)
-Marxist thought defines “state capitalism” as a natural step toward imposing a full blown communist state.