Hunger by Design: How Venezuela Keeps Dissidence Under Control
https://panampost.com/editor/2016/06/19/hunger-in-venezuela-keep-dissidence-under-control/excerptBy Guillermo Rodríguez
If you want to know how politicians think and act, forget lofty goals and idealism. You have to identify their material objectives and available resources to figure out the most efficient way they might achieve them in the context of their political opposition.
By laying out this economic framework known as “politics without romance,” James M. Buchanan won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1986. Applying this approach to the recent developments in Venezuela may help understand the rise of authoritarianism in the country.
The country’s economy is in complete disarray after financing its socialist revolution, a time when oil prices were much higher than they are today.
A meatier excerptBut because they no longer have petrodollars to hand out among the people, they will now use the little food that is left: government rationing will be done through a criteria of political loyalty, nothing more, nothing less.
That is why the ruling party created committees with the power to extort and confiscate: CLAPs, local supply and production committees, made up of the most loyal bases of the PSUV.
Venezuela is transitioning from a system of open rationing to one where only the politically connected will get food.
