Liberals and socialist who backed Venezuela's march into extreme poverty are embarrassed into silence

Daniel Hannen:

Where have all the Chavistas gone? Five years ago, every fashion-conscious Western radical was praising Venezuela to the skies. Sean Penn exulted in how Hugo Chávez "did incredible things for the 80 percent of the people that are very poor." Oliver Stone made an obsequious film about South American socialism, whose premiere in Venice was attended by the caudillo himself. Michael Moore hailed Chávez for eliminating 75 percent of extreme poverty. His Canadian equivalent, Naomi Klein, proudly declared her support for the beret-wearing strongman.

Suddenly, they have gone very quiet. In the UK, articles by prominent Leftists have started vanishing from the archive. The leader of Britain's Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, was a passionate defender of Chávez, as were other senior figures in his party. "Venezuela is seriously conquering poverty by emphatically rejecting neo-liberal policies," he wrote in a piece that has now disappeared from his website. "Conquering poverty?" Venezuela is in a state of unprecedented squalor: blackouts are frequent, food and medicines are running out and most state workers are on a two-day week.

Socialist selective amnesia is not new, of course: Rewriting the past was a characteristic of Soviet regimes, brilliantly dramatized in George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four." The reason Leftists make such frequent use of what Orwell called "the memory hole" is that their heroes keep failing them.

The pattern is always the same. Socialists take power somewhere. Comfortable, middle-class Western Leftists rhapsodize about their achievements. Then, the regime leads, as socialist regimes invariably lead, to poverty and tyranny. At which point, without a blush, Western Leftists say that it was never properly socialist, and move on to their next Third World pin-up.
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There is much more and worth reading in full.

Command economies which are the heart and soul of socialism and communism ultimately fail because those in command are not as smart as the marketplace.  That is the ultimate reason why they claim it has never been done right.  It is an impossibility.

It is like trying to calculate the number of eggs and slices of bacon needed in New York City every day.  Because it varies from day to day the market forces deal with it selling off excess on some days and arranging to find replacements for shortfalls other days.

Socialism just cannot handle mundane things like that and they try to do it with everything making it even more complicated and all of a sudden they are out of toilet paper and feminine hygiene products.

Socialism is a fool's errand.  Unfortunately, there are still a lot of fools out there wishing to give it a go.