WHY VENEZUELA PUTTING ITS FOOD SUPPLY UNDER MILITARY CONTROL IS SO CHILLING

WHY VENEZUELA PUTTING ITS FOOD SUPPLY UNDER MILITARY CONTROL IS SO CHILLING

By: Benjamin Weingarten 

In the state of nature, force triumphs over all else. If societal progress is measured by movement towards voluntary individualism and away from coercion at the hands of strongmen, then by all accounts Venezuela is regressing into this decivilized state.

That is the takeaway given the news breaking this week that Venezuelan potentate President Nicolás Maduro is putting the country’s military in charge of its food supply.

Not even the most doe-eyed Bernie Sanders supporter could think it a wise or comforting decision to put the supply over a nation’s food in the hands of a defense minister.

As the Wall Street Journal details, “Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino…will be in charge of transporting and distributing basic products, controlling prices and stimulating production, according to a decree published Tuesday in the official gazette.”

If you think that Solyndra was an epic government-backed failure, it will look like child’s play compared to the scale of the catastrophe sure to take place now that Venezuela’s government is putting the very sustenance of the nation under the central planning of a military leader.

The symbolic value of such an act cannot be overstated. When the literal lifeblood of a nation is put in the hands of a police force, you know that said nation is on the brink of total collapse, leading to more crippling state control as disorder devolves into all-out chaos. Not even the most doe-eyed Bernie Sanders supporter could think it a wise or comforting decision to put the supply over a nation’s food in the hands of a defense minister. It is as irrational a decision as it is a chilling one.

It can only be called rational from Maduro’s perspective insofar as control over the food supply is a proxy for total control over the people in a struggle to retain power.

Naturally, it represents the exact opposite of what a nation that wishes to avoid starvation, let alone prosper, ought to be doing. It is the Venezuelan government’s widespread economic intervention, its abrogation of contractual and property rights and its debauching of its currency that has ruined any semblance of a functioning marketplace. Putting the food supply under military control is dumping kerosene on the fire.

The surest path out of the socialist death spiral must involve re-empowering the citizens by creating the conditions necessary for buyers and sellers to communicate through a healthy and functioning price mechanism. Citizens must determine the quantity, quality and price at which goods and services are to be produced, consumed and traded. Government does not have the ability nor the moral right to do so.

However jarring the denationalization of Venezuelan industry might be, such pains will pale in comparison to the starvation and bloodshed that the Chavez-Maduro regime’s tyrannical central planning will result in.

Meanwhile, man’s former last best hope on Earth is apparently MIA. As Senator Ted Cruz’s, R-Texas (A, 97%) national security advisor Dr. Victoria Coates noted just yesterday at Conservative Review:

The State Department issued a statement last week that acknowledged Venezuela’s “extremely difficult” past year, but urged “leaders of all branches of the government to engage in the national dialogue required to effectively address your country’s problems.”

In other words, rather than issuing a call for solidarity with the people of Venezuela as they try to regain their dignity, liberty and rights, our Department of State is proposing throwing a life line to a dying socialist regime that is the avowed enemy of the United States.

Unfortunately this statement is not a one-off; it is part of a deliberate policy initiated more than a year ago that is pursuing rapprochement with the Maduro regime rather than developing a plan to support his opposition.

And while we throw the Venezuelan people to the wolves by showing cowardice and complicity in not strongly opposing the Maduro regime, America maddeningly continues to follow in its footsteps. In spite of the self-evident disaster of Venezuelan state economic intervention, and the violent controls that its central planners are putting into place as their plans go haywire, the Democratic Party is now advocating again for the so-called “public option” on healthcare – that is, socialized medicine.

Writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association, in an article dated July 11, President Obama urges Congress to revisit a public plan option “to compete alongside private insurers in areas of the country where competition is limited.” Who knew that government-created competition was the answer to what ails us?

Examples abound around the world of the great man-caused disaster that is socialism. That we continue to attempt such collectivist experiments in spite of the abundant horrifying evidence defines insanity. When will we learn the lesson that freedom works?

- See more at: https://www.conservativereview.com/commentary/2016/07/why-venezuela-putting-its-food-supply-under-military-control-is-so-chilling#sthash.BxpugraB.dpuf