Friday, May 3, 2019

Venezuela New Normal


With a $150 billion debt and no cash to restore Venezuela’s oil industry, the once wealthy country may be in for decades of economic recovery. They need to re-privatize their oil industry.  But first they need to restore the rule of law with guaranteed property rights and restrict government spending to minimum levels to build cash reserves.

Socialist programs will need to be scrapped and cash-flow returned. They will also need to kill their currency and began to use a currency with guaranteed value. They should then be able to begin to restore a private sector, free market economy.

They will need food, water, electricity and medicine. They should install a new constitution that bans socialism and severely limits government powers. Families will need to form family businesses to get to work and take care of their own.

There are lessons to be learned from the Venezuelan Saga. The first is to ban socialism and guarantee private property ownership to prohibit government from taking over private sector industries. Finally, don’t let your sleazy government run out of cash.

Venezuela went broke adopting socialism. They printed money and hyperinflation hit 10 million percent in 2019.

Zimbabwe went broke funding war. They printed money and hyperinflation hit 179.6 billion percent in 2008

Zimbabwe replaced their currency with the US dollar and began to recover. Their GDP has grown from $4.4 billion in 2008 to $16 billion in 2019. The 2019 Per Capita GDP in Zimbabwe is $908 per year and they import twice as much as they export.

Venezuela should have known about the Zimbabwe failure, but their socialist government probably went broke on purpose to give Russia and China a foothold in South America to prop up Cuba. Corruption breeds corruption and South America already had the drug cartels.

South America needs to know that socialism, crime and communism will not attract the long term investment needed to improve the standard of living for their countries.

Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader

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