Sanders supporters take note: Here is socialism’s end game, in Venezuela where a burger now costs the equivalent of $170US. Excerpt:
If a visitor to Venezuela is unfortunate enough to pay for anything with a foreign credit card, the eye-watering cost might suggest they were in a city pricier than Tokyo or Zurich.
A hamburger sold for 1,700 Venezuelan bolivares is $170, or a 69,000-bolivar hotel room is $6,900 a night, based on the official rate of 10 bolivares for $1.
But of course no merchant is pricing at the official rate imposed under currency controls. It’s the black market rate of 1,000 bolivares per dollar that’s applied.
But for Venezuelans paid in hyperinflation-hit bolivares, and living in an economy relying on mostly imported goods or raw materials, conditions are unthinkably expensive.
Even for the middle class, most of it sliding into poverty, hamburgers and hotels are out-of-reach excesses.
“Everybody is knocked low,” Michael Leal, a 34-year-old manager of an eyewear store in Caracas, told AFP. “We can’t breathe.”
Of course you can’t – the richest nation in South America has been laid low by decades of market-crushing, socialist policies. And there as here, when socialist policies inevitably fail, the response from the political Left has two parts:
- We just need the right Top Men in charge, then it will work.
- We just need to socialism harder.
I would almost be supportive of an initiative requiring anyone who is feeling the Bern to go spend a month in Venezuela, so they can see what they are really voting for.
On the burger tangent: The CEO of Carl’s Jr gets it. He is advertising his burgers with bikini-clad supermodels, and he doesn’t give two shits about who may be offended by it. Good for him.
Interestingly, the music in the background is a cover of Ted Nugent’s Stranglehold. Also, I’m suddenly hungry.
