Venezuela's economy in complete collapse – and the mother of all human waves outward begins

By Monica Showalter

As Brazilian troops move toward the Venezuelan border to sort that hell out, and Argentina of all places takes Venezuela to the World Court for crimes against humanity, and the U.S. sends out the USNS Comfort to aid thousands of Venezuela's starving, sick refugees desperately huddled in Colombia, there's obviously a whirlwind coming that that socialist regime is overdue to reap.
Economically, they've just committed suicide, with dictator Nicolás Maduro's socialist solution for the country's economic meltdown a simple matter of lopping five zeros off the virtually worthless currency, as if that will fix the five-digit-going-on-a-million-percent inflation, devaluing it 95%, pegging it to a made up crypto-currency that's even skeezier than bitcoin, known as the "petro," and raising the minimum wage 6,000%, a move that will shut down pretty much every private business left in Venezuela, given that businesses cannot raise prices.

We are looking at complete mayhem.  Even the Castro dynasty in Cuba, which rules through collective economic ruin, hasn't achieved anything on the scale of this lunacy.  The Castros only squandered a leading global sugar industry, not the world's largest oil reserves.  It's as if the Maduro regime is at war with economics itself: the regime doesn't like what the economic forces are telling it about its bad socialist decisions, so it shuts down the economy altogether, and that's the solution.
As a direct result, Reuters reports that the Mother of All Human Waves is about to break, with would-be refugees leaving that hellhole even earlier than planned.  Already a new report holds that 4 million out of the country's 30 million have fled, most of them in the past year, and rapidly becoming a refugee crisis even bigger than Syria's.
In the meantime, ordinary Venezuelans have enacted something classical rabid lefties have dreamed about for years, ironically against one of their beloved socialist regimes: an actual general strike.  Get a load of the pictures.  No more colorful moving big avalanche protests in Caracas now; what we see there are the bleak witnesses:

Surely Keynes's law, that anything that can't go on won't, must be operative here.  This analysis and this editorial (retweeted by Vice President Mike Pence) are well worth reading for the perspective.  We've been saying for years that the regime can't last.  As the analyst notes, a Colombian general told him the Maduro regime could last only six months, tops, except that everyone has been saying that for years.  Now we see the entire economy gone, troops on the border, the Mother of All Human Waves rising...and we have a leader in place in the U.S. who does things differently.  Can we possibly be right this time?

As Brazilian troops move toward the Venezuelan border to sort that hell out, and Argentina of all places takes Venezuela to the World Court for crimes against humanity, and the U.S. sends out the USNS Comfort to aid thousands of Venezuela's starving, sick refugees desperately huddled in Colombia, there's obviously a whirlwind coming that that socialist regime is overdue to reap.
Economically, they've just committed suicide, with dictator Nicolás Maduro's socialist solution for the country's economic meltdown a simple matter of lopping five zeros off the virtually worthless currency, as if that will fix the five-digit-going-on-a-million-percent inflation, devaluing it 95%, pegging it to a made up crypto-currency that's even skeezier than bitcoin, known as the "petro," and raising the minimum wage 6,000%, a move that will shut down pretty much every private business left in Venezuela, given that businesses cannot raise prices.

We are looking at complete mayhem.  Even the Castro dynasty in Cuba, which rules through collective economic ruin, hasn't achieved anything on the scale of this lunacy.  The Castros only squandered a leading global sugar industry, not the world's largest oil reserves.  It's as if the Maduro regime is at war with economics itself: the regime doesn't like what the economic forces are telling it about its bad socialist decisions, so it shuts down the economy altogether, and that's the solution.
As a direct result, Reuters reports that the Mother of All Human Waves is about to break, with would-be refugees leaving that hellhole even earlier than planned.  Already a new report holds that 4 million out of the country's 30 million have fled, most of them in the past year, and rapidly becoming a refugee crisis even bigger than Syria's.

In the meantime, ordinary Venezuelans have enacted something classical rabid lefties have dreamed about for years, ironically against one of their beloved socialist regimes: an actual general strike.  Get a load of the pictures.  No more colorful moving big avalanche protests in Caracas now; what we see there are the bleak witnesses:

Surely Keynes's law, that anything that can't go on won't, must be operative here.  This analysis and this editorial (retweeted by Vice President Mike Pence) are well worth reading for the perspective.  We've been saying for years that the regime can't last.  As the analyst notes, a Colombian general told him the Maduro regime could last only six months, tops, except that everyone has been saying that for years.  Now we see the entire economy gone, troops on the border, the Mother of All Human Waves rising...and we have a leader in place in the U.S. who does things differently.  Can we possibly be right this time?

Read more: https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/08/venezuelas_economy_in_complete_collapse__and_the_mother_of_all_human_waves_outward_begins.html#ixzz5OxKPmQ1A
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