Steven Hayward writing on the Powerline Blog says the passage below fits the Venezuela story of failed socialism perfectly and comments that “Venezuela reached this point quite a while ago now.”
In fact Socialism is not in the least what it pretends to be. It is not the pioneer of a better and finer world, but the spoiler of what thousands of years of civilization have created. It does not build; it destroys. For destruction is the essence of it. It produces nothing, it only consumes what the social order based on private ownership of the means of production has created. Since a socialist order of society cannot exist, unless it be as a fragment of Socialism within an economic order resting otherwise in private property, each step leading towards Socialism must exhaust itself in the destruction of what already exists.
Ludwig von Mises’ 1922 classic, Socialism
Via MJP