Shopping in a Socialist Paradise

One would think that the world's would-be dictators, socialists and communists who hunger for power would at least have figured out by now that, while instituting the trappings of a police state is one thing, introducing the trappings of a socialist, command directed economy is another thing entirely. One needs to look no further than China and the Soviet Union to figure that one out. The difference between Deng Xiao Ping and Krushev would seem to be that someone gave the former a copy of The Wealth of Nations. Apparently, they are out of Adam Smith down in Venezuela also. Thus, while the darling of the Hollywood left, Hugo Chavez, is off attempting to turn all of Latin America into a Socialist heaven, average Venezualens seem to have more prosaic concerns:

Venezuelan construction worker Gustavo Arteaga has no trouble finding jobs in this OPEC nation’s booming economy, but on a recent Monday morning he skipped work as part of a more complicated search — for milk.

The 37-year-old father-of-two has for months scrambled to find basic products like cooking oil, beef and milk, despite leftist President Hugo Chavez’s social program that promises to provide low-cost groceries to the majority poor.

“It takes a miracle to find milk,” said Arteaga, who spent two hours in line outside a store in the poor Caracas neighborhood of Eucaliptus. “Don’t you see I’m here slaving away to see if I can get even one or two of those (containers)?”

Venezuelan consumers are increasingly facing periodic shortages of basic food products as the economy shows signs of overheating amid record revenues from an oil boom. . . .

A black market has sprung up where informal vendors illegally peddle bags of sugar, beans and precious powdered milk — for as much as double the regulated price. . .

Read the article at Hillbilly Politics where, as she puts it, money can't buy me love, [but in] Venezuela, it can't buy me food, either.