Venezuela held legislative elections last weekend and the results are heartening for anyone who believes in freedom.
Not since the late Hugo Chavez took power in 1999 had his United Socialist Party of Venezuela lost an election. This time, though, the opposition party won a two-thirds majority in the congress, and will have the ability to challenge the rule of Nicolas Maduro, Chavez’s successor as president.
This was a result Maduro and his socialist government feared. In the run-up to the election, he jailed opposition leaders on flimsy pretexts, and banned others from running for office. His allies put a sham third party on the ballot with a similar name to that of the opposition in hope of confusing voters and winning by splitting the vote. Maduro rejected international monitoring of the election, raising fears that he would steal it. Even now, it’s hard to say for sure he didn’t try.
But despite all of this chicanery, and perhaps partly because of it, Maduro’s United Socialist Party was buried in an electoral landslide. The reasons for the public’s discontent with Chavism are plain enough, and rooted in the nature of socialism, a system that always and everywhere attempts to govern by thwarting human nature through state control of economic life.
Chavism survived so long because Venezuala has oil riches. The country’s governmental system was nicknamed “petro-socialism.” One of Chavez’s first acts in power was to expropriate oil companies’ operations. For a time this allowed Chavez to buy the votes of the poor with with a massive program of food aid and health care. But those programs, the basis of Chavez’s and then Maduro’s popularity, had only mixed results for the health and nutrition of Venezuelans.
Then government mismanagement gradually stanched oil production, and more recently oil prices plunged. The government suddenly found itself unable to provide basic services such as public safety (crime has skyrocketed), and the health care system was thrown into crisis, too.
The regime printed money to cover expenses, triggering triple-digit inflation, to which it responded by imposing price controls. These in turn caused massive shortages that made it impossible to find basic items in stores, even after queueing for hours.
In short, Venezuela was a textbook example of socialist mismagement. Maduro, however, borrowed Soviet propaganda and blamed an elaborate conspiracy of sabotage by business interests. He began arresting store-owners for the long lines that his own policies had created.
Shortages and crime created popular unrest and widespread protests that exploded in spring 2014. The government responded with violent repression, deputizing red-shirted street gangs to beat up and shoot protestors. This fall, even former Spanish prime minister Felipe Gonzalez (a member of his own nation’s socialist party) felt moved to state frankly that Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile had been more respectful of human rights than had the Maduro regime.
It is heartening to see any nation’s voters turn back socialism in a free vote. But the failure of yet another socialist state brings with it a timely lesson.
Today in the United States, in the Occupy protests and the presidential candidacy of Bernie Sanders, one sees undiminished vigor in the belief that the free exchange of goods and services as the enemy of prosperity. The past 100 years is replete with examples of the folly expecting state-imposed egalitarianism to produce prosperity.
It is a poisonous idea with an uninterrupted track record of failure.
