Venezuela
was my home, and socialism destroyed it. Slowly, it will destroy America, too,
by Daniel Di Martino, 2/18/19. While
neither 'Medicare for All' nor a wealth tax will turn America into Venezuela
overnight, all it would take is a series of catastrophic policies.
A rich country, wasted resources - The excuses for these shortages were hollow: In reality, Venezuela has the largest proven oil reserves in the world to use for electricity, and three times more fresh water resources per person than the United States. The real reason my family went without water and electricity was the socialist economy instituted by dictators Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro.
American liberals embrace same failed policies Though so many of us Venezuelans fled to the USA to escape from the destructive consequences of socialism, liberal politicians like Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Rep. José Serrano, D-N.Y., have praised the same kind of policies that produced famine, mass exodus and soaring inflation in Venezuela.
A rich country, wasted resources - The excuses for these shortages were hollow: In reality, Venezuela has the largest proven oil reserves in the world to use for electricity, and three times more fresh water resources per person than the United States. The real reason my family went without water and electricity was the socialist economy instituted by dictators Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro.
American liberals embrace same failed policies Though so many of us Venezuelans fled to the USA to escape from the destructive consequences of socialism, liberal politicians like Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Rep. José Serrano, D-N.Y., have praised the same kind of policies that produced famine, mass exodus and soaring inflation in Venezuela.
The first time I couldn’t buy food at
the grocery store, I was 15 years old. It was 2014 in Caracas, Venezuela, and I
had spent more than an hour in line waiting. When I got to the register, I
noticed I had forgotten my ID that day. Without the ID, the government
rationing system would not let the supermarket sell my family the full
quota of food we needed. It was four days until the government allowed me
to buy more.
This was fairly normal for me. All my
life, I lived under socialism in Venezuela until I left and came to the United
States as a student in 2016. Because the regime in charge
imposed price controls and nationalized the most important private
industries, production plummeted. No wonder I had to wait hours in lines
to buy simple products such as toothpaste or flour.
And the shortages went far beyond the
supermarket.
My family and I suffered from blackouts
and lack of water. The regime nationalized electricity in 2007 in an effort to make
electricity “free.” Unsurprisingly, this resulted in underinvestment in the electrical grid. By 2016, my home
lost power roughly once a week.
Our water situation was even worse.
Initially, my family didn’t have running water for only about one day per
month, but as the years passed we sometimes went several weeks straight without
it. For all these problems, the regime has blamed an iguana, right-wing sabotage and even the weather.
The welfare programs, many
minimum-wage hikes and nationalizations implemented by
their regimes resulted in a colossal government deficit that the central
bank covered by simply printing more money — leading to rampant inflation. Now,
prices double every few weeks, and the standard of
living continues to plummet. I watched what was once one of the richest countries in Latin America gradually
fall apart under the weight of big government.
I didn’t need to look at statistics to
see this but rather at my own family. When Chavez took office in
1999, my parents were earning several thousand dollars a month between the
two of them. By 2016, due to inflation, they earned less than $2 a day. If
my parents hadn’t fled the country for Spain in 2017, they’d now be earning
less than $1 a day, the international definition of extreme poverty. Even now, the
inflation rate in Venezuela is expected to reach 10 million percent this year.
Venezuela has become a country where a
woeful number of children suffer from malnutrition, and where working two
full-time jobs will pay for only 6 pounds of chicken a month.
Even worse, in recent weeks, Democratic
Reps. Ilhan Omar, Ro Khanna and Tulsi Gabbard have mischaracterized the protests
against Maduro and condemned President Donald Trump’s widely supported moves to help end Maduro’s dictatorship.
Additionally, many congressional
Democrats support Medicare for All and the Green New Deal, proposals
that would nationalize the health insurance industry, guarantee everyone who wants it a job and
massively raise taxes, increasing government
intervention in the economy like few countries except Cuba and Venezuela have
seen before.
Proponents think that they can give all
Americans quality health care, housing and everything for free and that
somehow, politicians can do a better job at running a business than the
business owners themselves.
These proposals would skyrocket the
budget deficit and national debt, which just reached a record $22 trillion. If that is not enough, Rep. Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez endorsed paying for the proposal by asking the Federal
Reserve to print money. This is exactly what produced
Venezuela’s nightmare.
Even so, liberal economist Paul
Krugman recently argued in a column that “whenever you see
someone invoking Venezuela as a reason not to consider progressive policy ideas,
you know right away that the person in question is uninformed, dishonest, or
both.”
I can assure Mr. Krugman that I’m
neither uninformed nor dishonest. Of course, it’s true that neither Medicare
for All nor a wealth tax alone would turn the United States into Venezuela
overnight. No single radical proposal would do that. However, if all or most of
these measures are implemented, they could have the same catastrophic
consequences for the American people that they had for Venezuela.
In his recent State of the Union
address, President Trump said: “America will never be a socialist country.” I sincerely
hope that the president is right, and that every American can resist the lure
of false promises — so this great country can always shine above the dark cloud
of socialism, and avoid Venezuela’s fate.
Daniel Di Martino is a Venezuelan
expatriate and Young Voices contributor studying economics at Indiana
University-Purdue University Indianapolis. Follow him on Twitter @DanielDiMartino.
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