Poland’s government has passed a law, upheld by its constitutional court, “that significantly limits the rights of people whose property in Warsaw was seized during or after World War II, and their descendants, to apply for restitution,” according to the New York Times. The law sets up hurdles virtually impossible to clear. Most important, the government has included a self-serving provision the denies the right of ex-owners to seek the return of property “used by the government.” Anyone who did not file a timely claim under complicated and expensive procedures is deemed to “have agreed that the ownership of a given property should be passed onto the city of Warsaw.” No Holocaust survivors whose buildings were confiscated by the Nazis or the Communists have been found who agreed to make such generous gifts of their buildings and other property to the city of Warsaw.

Venezuela’s government, in the person of President Nicolas Maduro, has proclaimed a Spanish Marxist economics professor, Alfredo Serrano “the Jesus Christ of Economics … who’s building new concepts for a new economy of the 21^st century.” Venezuela’s food shortages, runaway inflation and currency collapse, says Serrano, can be explained by studying Karl Marx. They are due to speculative capitalism, the class war, and reforms that reduced the role of government. So Maduro has ordered the military to take over the distribution of food, which is so scarce that tens of thousands of Venezuelans storm supermarkets, raid delivery trucks, or trudge across the border to Colombia to avoid starvation. It seems that although Marxism might show “how to overcome the fragmentation of modern social thought…”, as Columbia University history professor Mark Mazower recently wrote, it has little to offer the hungry proletariat, who are, literally, withering away while the state’s military has access to whatever food is available.