ANALYSIS: TRUE. In Venezuela, It’s not a ‘Humanitarian’ Crisis. It’s a Socialist Crisis.

The disaster unfolding in Venezuela is entirely the fault of the Venezuelans who elected first Hugo Chavez and then Nicolas Maduro. But check out the way CNN Money frames what’s happening. . . .

Read the whole thing and notice the one word you don’t see in the article. Go ahead, I dare you.

I bet you can guess. Related: It’s The Marxism, Stupid!

The allegedly-eerie similarities between the bombastic Republican presidential nominee and our late galactic Comandante are the gift that just keeps on giving. In a recent, especially auto-mojoneado little screed, Quico tried to convince us that the reason Trump won’t be as destructive as Chávez was is that he won’t be as disciplined and effective at destroying America’s democratic institutions as Chávez was at destroying ours.

This is a dangerous self-deception from a leftie in denial about what it was that made Chávez so uniquely destructive: as though leftist ideology was an “accident” that accounted for no part of the damage Chávez did, as though institutional-destruction was the beginning and the end of the story. Quico should really know better: this isn’t about who had better etiquette (though God knows this is the first time Chávez has done better at that!) The damage Chávez did is the damage only a communist will do once in power.

Let’s not fool ourselves: it’s not any old autocrat who can create the kind of chaos Venezuela’s been experiencing. It’s a very specific kind of autocrat, one burning with principled opposition to property as a right. That’s the only kind of autocrat who’ll push for policies that lead to acute shortages of basic food staples and medicines, the collapse of public services, the three-digit inflation, the destruction of the national manufacturing industry.

Those outcomes stem not from his rhetoric, nor from his illiberal tendencies (Fujimori was as illiberal as Chávez and ran a similarly sized economy) but by his ties to the old-school left in Venezuela that had been left out of power in 1958 and still supported many of the main Marxist axioms as late as in the 1990’.

Leftism impoverishes and kills, again and again. But politicians like it because it offers them control, and opportunities for graft. Voters like it because, well, it’s a con game designed to take advantage of greed and envy. Remember, under free markets the rich become powerful. But under socialism, the powerful become rich.

Entirely unrelated: Candidate Who Said There Were Too Many Kinds Of Deodorant Buys His Third House.