Posted on 07/04/2016 4:39:40 PM PDT by PJ-Comix
Takeout food? Yeah! That's just the ticket! It's about as good excuse as consumerism to explain the economic woes of Venezuela.
A few weeks ago reporter Nicholas Casey of the New York Times almost completely avoided any mention of socialism and placed the blame for Venezuela's economic woes on a vague "consumerism" during an interview on National Public Radio's Fresh Air as chronicled in Newsbusters by Clay Waters. Since that "consumerism" excuse seems to have been widely mocked, Casey went to bat with an even more laughable excuse, comparing Venezuela's economic woes to someone who has been ordering takeout food for years and suddenly needs to cook. I kid you not. Here is the money quote from Casey avoiding the very obvious while being interviewed on PBS Newshour:
(Excerpt) Read more at newsbusters.org ...
where the fortune cookie opens to a piece of paper saying
“This IS your toilet paper ration citizen”!
Could there be a small point here, though? A learned helplessness?
I would have blamed racism and George Bush if I had been this reporter.
Enough with the obnoxious clickbait. Here is the freaking quote:
This country had become, you know, you could say, like a rich guy that had forgotten how to cook and had been ordering takeout for years. And suddenly, when the money disappeared, there was no money to buy some of the basics anymore. That model doesn’t change whether the opposition or the Chavistas are in power, whether the left is power or not. That remains the same.
I don’t think they say a literal McDonalds do they?
Um, I could cavil at this one. The leftists have made it worse. In fact maybe we could liken the leftists to the takeout palace, which has suddenly gone broke. We have the perfect storm of a people with learned helplessness and their only accustomed help gone away.
Leftism should be very careful with this excuse, in other words. In pointing a finger at the people, it manages to leave three others pointing back at it.
And if it were a rightist situation run into a famine? 5 would get you 10, that the country could deal with that a lot better, with some scantiness and privations but not the huge cluster assault that it has now, as markets lurched into adjustment.
Lmao+!
Cooking anything at home in Venezuela is almost impossible when store shelves are bare of even rice, milk, beans and toilet paper. The problem is the result of a command economy where the state dictates not only what will be produced, but also what price should be charged. State set prices that do not cover the cost of production or importation causes producers not to produce and importers not to import. The result...bare shelves. The Austrian economist Ludwig Von Mises described the effect of wage and price controls as having a large city with no traffic lights... utter chaos.
I use Cuba to explain Venezuela.
Author does have a point. Becoming dependent on the govt teat results in a lazy helpless population. Hunger is a great stimulant, OTOH.
There’s an old saying in Venezuela: “There are no good governments or bad governments . Only governments when the price of oil is high and governments when the price of oil is low.”
LOL!
Yeah... I posit that we oughtn’t so much pan the metaphor, as be careful about its use. Don’t take its misuse lying down.
That and too many types of underarm deodorant...
Leftism served up a whole bunch of stuff that rode on high oil revenues. Where are all the “sustainability” gurus when it comes to the political world? All it took was Saudi Arabia selling at sacrifice prices (probably with no more malice than the wish to starve out their enemy Iran) to bring Venezuela’s world crashing down, when it didn’t have to.
The “cooking lessons” are those of establishing a free (”rightist”) government. If there was anyone competent in the USA now, they would be in talks with Venezuela about this. The US wouldn’t have to take over anything, simply advise.
Feel the Bern.
Right Casey?
5.56mm
The stupidity, it Berns.
And it never had to.
And there’s still a better way now.
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