Posted on 12/17/2017 2:08:49 PM PST by EdnaMode
Kenyerber Aquino Merchán was 17 months old when he starved to death.
His father left before dawn to bring him home from the hospital morgue. He carried Kenyerber’s skeletal frame into the kitchen and handed it to a mortuary worker who makes house calls for Venezuelan families with no money for funerals.
Kenyerber’s spine and rib cage protruded as the embalming chemicals were injected. Aunts shooed away curious young cousins, mourners arrived with wildflowers from the hills, and relatives cut out a pair of cardboard wings from one of the empty white ration boxes that families increasingly depend on amid the food shortages and soaring food prices throttling the nation. They gently placed the tiny wings on top of Kenyerber’s coffin to help his soul reach heaven — a tradition when a baby dies in Venezuela.
When Kenyerber’s body was finally ready for viewing, his father, Carlos Aquino, a 37-year-old construction worker, began to weep uncontrollably. “How can this be?” he cried, hugging the coffin and speaking softly, as if to comfort his son in death. “Your papá will never see you again.”
Hunger has stalked Venezuela for years. Now, it is killing the nation’s children at an alarming rate, doctors in the country’s public hospitals say.
Venezuela has been shuddering since its economy began to collapse in 2014. Riots and protests over the lack of affordable food, excruciating long lines for basic provisions, soldiers posted outside bakeries and angry crowds ransacking grocery stores have rattled cities, providing a telling, public display of the depths of the crisis.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
The people deserve to get what they want.
And they deserve to get it good and hard.
——HL Mencken
Lack of English proficiency. In time, they will do better but they aren't afraid to work manual jobs in the meantime...
I have had friends who came from other war torn countries or emigrated from other countries, who have been professionals.
They all had difficulty finding professional positions. The Drs had to go back to school. The lawyers, well they had to start at the bottom, find a job and go to law school or find another endeavor, and teachers, well teaching is pretty country specific.
Chavez nationalized the American, foreign oil companies assets and drove out the foreign engineers that knew what they were doing.
Been downhill ever since.
As heavily Hispanic as the US is now, maybe a greater problem is location?
I had friends who emigrated from communist Hungary and did just fine. They had friends who emigrated, stayed a while, then WENT BACK to a communist country. They had such a fear of being unemployed, they gave up the western life for guaranteed employment.
It was a hundred years ago that 30% of new immigrants returned to the old country. Couldn’t hack it. Still we had so many we cut it off in the 1920’s.
And don't pretend that it can't happen here. One bad election and the Berniebots will implement as many of Chavez's economic policies as they can.
We cut immigration off in the 1920s not because there were too many, but because of the Red Scare, with mail bombs and bolsheviks. The IWW union was trying to shut down industries.
Wilson’s AG even rounded up leftists and send them home.
A true example of a country gone Galt.
I, Pencil is an article written in 1958 by Leonard E. Read. The burden of the article is how diffuse are the inputs to make a simple item like a pencil. Of course a particular company - Eberhard Faber, in the example instance - made the pencil. But Mr. Eberhard and Mr. Faber did not simply speak the pencil into existence; the company has to have buildings housing machinery, and workers to operate the machines. But beyond that, the Eberhard Faber workers have to have food, shelter, and normal amenities - including those required by their families.And the same is true of the vendors who supply Eberhard Faber with the machinery they require, and all the obvious materials - wood, graphite, rubber, and the ferrule material and the enamel. All those vendors have their own equipment, workers, and supply chain. And in all cases the workers need food, shelter, and normal amenities. So although the pencil certainly does not exist without Eberhard Faber, society works together to make pencils - and everything else.
So, “You didn't build that? Somebody else made that happen?” Yes - but that “somebody else” was not government. The “somebody” was more like everybody - mostly very indirectly. It is not the government but society - as Thomas Paine points out in Common Sense, a very different thing - which makes the pencil.
Government planning is merely interference in society’s subtle workings by people who have nowhere near the competence needed to make such large decisions and be responsible for them. It is nothing more than the irresponsible separation of responsibility from authority, in violation of the first principle of good management.
Improvement in efficiency via government “planning” is a paper tiger.
Trump’s fault, of course.
...just be thankful you were born here!
(((
Amen! Thanks for the reminder.
Good point.
Venezuela’s oil has a high Vanadium content, for which a refinery process must be prepared. The oil is more viscous than most crude, though not nearly as much as bitumen from sands. Also, anyone buying oil and receiving a cut of water within the shipment, will not be satisfied.
Yes. I must admit that after a few paragraphs the only act left was to just scan the rest to see if the word “socialism” was there.
All Venezuela needs is a couple hundred thousand of our super smart, tolerant, equality loving University Students to go over there and show them how great socialism is
Socialism kills again. It’s tempting to say that the Venezuelans deserved this, but they DID vote for Chavez and the current a-hole.
May the rest of the world take their problem as a cautionary tale...SSZ
A BILL AND HILLARY UPTOPIA
Venz crude is “heavy sour.”
So is the oil we’ve been using from Western Canada.
Lots of asphalt included...
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