Bernie Sanders’ Socialist Utopia Hits 510% Inflation
V. Saxena
May 31, 2015
Reporting by the Foundation for Economic Education reveals that Venezuela’s inflation rate just hit a whopping 510 percent:
This is the highest rate in the world. It’s well above the second-highest rate: Syria’s, which stands at 84%.
Venezuela has not always experienced punishing inflation rates. From 1950 through 1979, Venezuela’s average annual inflation rate remained in the single digits.
It was not until the 1980s that Venezuela witnessed a double-digit average, and it was not until the 1990s that Venezuela’s average inflation rate exceeded that of the Latin American region.
Today, Venezuela’s inflation rate is over the top.
Furthermore, a report released by Fusion in April noted that “Venezuela’s product shortages have become so severe that some hotels in that country are asking guests to bring their own toilet paper and soap.”
And last week Michelle Malkin wrote that, in Venezuela, “food distribution is under military control” and “the currency of the socialist paradise just collapsed on the black market by 30 percent.”
Yet avowed socialist and 2016 presidential candidate Bernie Sanders genuinely believes that we need to follow Venezuela’s path down the sordid road of socialism by expanding the government and effectively wiping out free-market capitalism.
“You don’t necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants when children are hungry in this country,” the old socialist complained to financial journalist John Harwood earlier this month.
The premise was that hunger could conceivably be solved if we stopped using so many resources for seemingly unimportant tasks like advertising and marketing, i.e., tasks associated with a capitalist economy.
According to Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby, however, “in the real world, the opposite is true“:
Hunger and deprivation are rarest where trade is freest.
And judging by the facts I outlined above, Jacoby’s thesis appears to be quite valid …
http://downtrend.com/vsaxena/bernie-sanders-socialist-utopia
