Commentary: New fail-safe diet involves merely moving to Venezuela

by WorldTribune Staff, February 27, 2017

Pretty much everyone in Venezuela can say they lost 19 pounds on the “Socialist Diet”.

Unwillingly, though.

“A new study of Venezuela’s stunning decline under Hugo Chavez’s socialist model, still followed faithfully by his lap dog successor, Nicolas Maduro, reports that the average Venezuelan lost 19 pounds in the last year,” Investor’s Business Daily said in an editorial on Feb. 21.

Food line in Venezuela’s San Cristobal.

“Today, the 2016 Living Conditions Survey finds, 32.5 percent of Venezuelans eat only once or twice a day, up from 11.3 percent just one year ago. And 93.3 percent of all people don’t earn enough to buy sufficient food.”

American Thinker blogger Ronald C. Tinnell called it “The Venezuelan Miracle Weight Loss Program.”

The Investors Business Daily editorial said it is a “shocking indictment of socialism, and should be a siren call to people around the world: Bring socialism to your country, and you bring misery. It’s the one thing that socialism produces an abundance of.”

Venezuela, with the second-largest oil reserves in the world, had once been one of the wealthiest countries in South America.

“It should be a rich nation, filled with prosperous people worried about gaining too much weight, not losing it to hunger,” the editorial said.

“But as formerly middle-class Venezuelans scavenge for food — some even stooping to dumpster diving and eating formerly beloved pets just to stay alive — socialists allied with Maduro have changed nothing. Maduro followed Chavez’s lead, spending all the money that the state-oil company earned on ‘social’ programs, all the while attacking small businesses and companies and effectively nationalizing the supermarkets.”

Inflation in Venezuela is close to 500 percent a year – the highest of any country.

“Looking at the problems with declining food stocks and roaring inflation, Maduro decided to put the military in charge of the country’s food distribution network,” the editorial said. “The result was predictable: Massive food shortages and rampant corruption, as armed military line their pockets by selling food on the black market.

The country’s infrastructure is collapsing. Children are dying by the hundreds from curable diseases, a lack of medicine, electricity outages and no incubators for newborns. The number of Zika infections is estimated to be nearly 700,000, according to a Venezuelan health organization.

The murder rate in Venezuela’s capital, Caracas, is 120 per each 100,000 inhabitants – the highest in the world. Higher even than Damascus, Kabul or Tripoli.

Investors Business Daily continued: “If Venezuela seems remote and of little concern, consider this headline: ‘Democratic Socialists Make Headway In U.S. After Trump’s Win.’ Yes, we know. The Democratic Socialists of America style themselves as kinder, gentler socialists. Think Sweden, they say, not Venezuela.

“But the truth is, whoever practices it or whatever those who follow it call themselves, socialism is an economic system based on mass greed and class envy that has failed time and time again. There are no successful socialist nations, anywhere. Those that find this model appealing despite its obvious failures are the desperate, the poorly educated, the uninformed and those lacking entirely in basic common sense.

“It is an economic philosophy of entitlement and grievance, one that always ends in poverty, wanton destruction, the breakdown of civilization and even death — as the Venezuelans, who willingly handed control of their country over to the socialists, are now finding out.”

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