Nailed it
http://www.investors.com/politics/co...-its-supplies/
ocialism has found in Venezuela the bottom that socialism always finds. The country is now running out of toilet paper. And food. And medicine. All this want in an extraordinarily oil-rich nation with eight times the crude reserves found in the U.S. and maybe the most in the world.
Venezuela is Bernie Sanders' kind of country. The semi-Democrat likes to say that the version of socialism he advocates is the sort found in Scandinavia, where everyone is taken care of. But the fact is those countries tried welfare statism and found that it didn't work.
Unlike unrepentant cranks such as Sanders -- blame George Orwell, not us, for tagging socialists with the "crank" label -- these countries repented of their evil economic ways. Sweden has reformed its system, while Denmark has told Sanders to stop smearing its market economy as a socialist program in which "it is very hard to become very, very rich, but it's pretty hard to be very, very poor."
Neither one is fully a capitalist nation -- no country, not even the U.S., is -- but they have moved on from their socialist mistakes.
So Sanders is stuck with Venezuela. He's even been named by the country's president Nicolas Maduro as "our revolutionary friend."
But he's tried to create some distance between its failure and his never-ending high-school fixation with government-mandated fairness. When asked about the country's socialist crash, he avoided answering a hard but highly relevant question by saying, "I am very interested, but right now I'm running for president of the United States."
Earlier in the campaign Sanders said he was "not looking at Venezuela ... not looking at Cuba" when endorsing "democratic socialism." But that's the new Bernie Sanders who's running for president and can't afford to appear to be the radical he is. The truth is, Paul Sperry writes, Sanders has a "radical pro-communist past" and even took "goodwill" trips to the U.S.S.R., Cuba and Sandinista Nicaragua. He has also recommended Castro and the Daniel Ortega regime in Managua.
Socialism is actually just another name for misery. Everywhere it's been genuinely tried, the people it's supposed to have benefited have suffered: Venezuela, Cuba, Red China, the Soviet Union. Maybe Sanders' rabid supporters would be willing to help the deprived of Venezuela by sending them toilet paper, which capitalist nations have in abundance. They could even send deodorant, too -- but it would have to be a single brand.
Remember, Sanders is the bossy nabob who has gone on record as saying Americans "don't necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants." Yes, that's socialism -- and someone who's never outgrown his teen fling with the myth of a worker's paradise -- talking.