Reports in from Venezuela that starving people in that country, the beneficiaries of those glories of Bolivarian socialism, are now breaking into the zoos and butchering the animals in order to be able to eat them. We have seen this before of course, but when the Parisians did it they did actually have the excuse that the Germans had been besieging the city for 99 days. The Venezuelan equivalent stems from nothing but ghastly, silly and incompetent economic policy–but then such is Bolivarian socialism.
One report here:
Zoo animals are being stolen from parks in western Venezuela and police believe they are being snatched to be eaten by the starving local population.
A wave of animal thefts in city of Maracaibo near the Colombian border – including tapirs and a buffalo – have been linked to the chronic food shortages in Venezuela
Most recently, two collared peccaries, similar in appearance to boars, were stolen over the weekend, local police say.
I’d actually be quite interested in trying peccary bacon to be honest, but I do indeed hope never to be riven to stealing one from a zoo as a result of Jeremy Corbyn gaining power.
“What we presume is that they (were taken) with the intention of eating them,” Luis Morales, an official for the Zulia division of the National Police, told reporters on Tuesday.
The chaotic collapse of the country’s socialist economic model has created chronic food shortages that have fuelled malnutrition and left millions seeking food anywhere they can find it, including in trash cans and dumpsters.
That’s what bad economic management can do for you, reduce the country with the world’s largest oil reserves to a nation of dumpster divers. Well done there, well done.
Do note, as I continually do, that this isn’t about socialism per se. There’s nothing wrong with the idea that the poor should get a fairer shake of the stick for example, no problem at all with–voluntary of course–workers’ cooperatives and the like. We have them in our own economies, they work just fine. It’s the method by which they tried to bring this all about which was the error, a gross one of course. For they decided that what Venezuela didn’t need was a market system nor the prices that guide such. So, they just fixed prices at what they thought were fun numbers and then stood by as the entire productive and distributive capacity of the nation collapsed. Because that’s what the price system does, coordinates the productive and distributive capacity of the nation. We have no other method, as Hayek pointed out we cannot even calculate, let alone manage, the economy without using market mechanisms.
[Disclaimer]
