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The trucks and wagons of waiting farmers started trickling blindly down the roads, with no maps, no gas, no feed for the horses -- moving south, south toward the vision of flour mills awaiting them somewhere, with no knowledge of the distances ahead, but with the knowledge of death behind them -- moving, to collapse on the roads, in the gullies, in the breaks of rotted bridges. One farmer was found, half a mile south of the wreck of his truck, lying dead in a ditch, face down, still clutching a sack of wheat on his shoulders.

...

Brother, you asked for it!
Francisco Domingo Carlos Andres Sebastian d'Anconia

Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, Part III (A is A), Chapter V (Their Brothers' Keepers)

I hate this crap. Hate it. It makes me angry.

It isn’t as if this could not have been foreseen. Real life examples exist. Books have been written. A turnip can figure this stuff out.

Socialism. is a perpetual motion machine sold over and over again by snake oil salesmen.

And like Charlie Brown trying to kick the football Lucy puts down, humankind keeps trying to kick that ball.

It is all so needless. Needless. It is so discouraging and depressing.

No food, no foreign currency, nowhere to get another loan, no credibility, no economy, no hope. All that is left is a plethora of excuses. And in the western media the band plays on.

This deliberate and cold-hearted defense of the follies of socialism is a crime as great as Walter Duranty's or I.F. Stone's with respect to, as Martin Amis put it bitterly, "Laughter and the Twenty Million" in the Ukraine. We are informed here that the culprit is "recession". It isn't. It's rampant corruption, hyper-inflation, greed, ideological blindness, and pure evil.

...with no knowledge of the distances ahead, but with the knowledge of death behind them -- moving, to collapse on the roads, in the gullies, in the breaks of rotted bridges.

This, of course, is it in a nutshell. Which I see as a bit of a challenge. We read the book to the end and it comes to an anticlimax, the warnings unheeded bring them to this desperate state but it isn't the end. Just as in the novel the producers and the wealth have expatriated, the engine has stopped and the millions of the Eddie Willers' remain in the ruins, to what end for them?

We have some recent history, witnessing the collapse of the Soviet republics and how many of them have returned to prosperity in our lifetimes, and it seems to me Venezuela is near that stage in its "evolution" where it is time to start thinking about how it is going to come back.

Or am I overthinking it? Is there a role for the outside, for the greater, more prosperous of modern civilization to play in a future re-emergence of a state like Venezuela? I don't know, I have to confess I'm not as well versed in how the old Soviet republics (among others) came back from the brink.

What do you guys see in the yet to be written chapters of this saga?