Barter has taken over, as the wreckers and kulaks in the Worker’s Paradise of Venezuela are exploring every possible alternative to the train wreck that is that nation’s “official” economy.  Excerpt:

“There is no cash here, only barter,” said Mileidy Lovera, 30, walking along the shore with a cooler of fish that her husband had caught. She hoped to exchange it for food to feed her four children, or medicine to treat her son’s epilepsy.

In the hyperinflationary South American country, where bank notes are as difficult to find as chronically scarce food and medicine, Venezuelans are increasingly relying on to barter for basic transactions.

Payment for even the cheapest of goods and services would require unwieldy piles of banknotes, and there simply are not enough of those in circulation.

But it seems the problem is just that the government is not printing money fast enough:

Economists say the central bank has not printed bills fast enough to keep up with inflation, which according to the opposition-run congress, reached an annual rate of almost 25,000 percent in May.

Once one of Latin America’s wealthiest countries, Venezuela’s economic collapse under President Nicolas Maduro’s government drove nearly one million people – 3 percent of the population – to emigrate between 2015 and 2017.

Maduro, reelected to a fresh six-year term in May in elections condemned by the United States, blames spiraling consumer prices and constant shortages of food and medicine on an “economic war” led by the opposition and Washington.

The economic meltdown in Venezuela is due to one thing:  Socialism.  Socialist systems always end in this kind of a meltdown; even in a country as enormous, as rich in resources as the once and former Soviet Union, was perpetually in the “stand-in-line-for-beets” economic stage. With socialism, it is always steak yesterday and steak tomorrow, but never steak today.

Mark Twain is reputed to have once said “History seldom repeats, but it often rhymes.”  We’re seeing it rhyme now, in the colossal socialist failure that is Venezuela.