Thread: Venezuela – An Economic Catastrophe In Images The Final Stage of a Crack-Up Boom

Venezuelans turn to breast milk donations as baby formula price soars...

Nation calls for massive march against USA...



As the price of baby formula in Venezuela soars, moms turn to each other for help

By Gustavo Ocando Alex
Special to the Miami Herald September 10, 2018 12:31 PM
video and photos at the page link

MARACAIBO, Venezuela Viviana Vargas was worried after her son Mathias was born in April last year. The 30-year-old Venezuelan mother wasn’t able to breastfeed him sufficiently due to stress and other problems, so the 6-pound baby was on the verge of malnutrition.
She and her husband began to look for infant formula, which is pricey and scarce in Venezuela. They found out that a 14-ounce can of powdered formula, good for a week at most, would cost about twice the monthly minimum wage at the time — about 6 million bolívares or $3 on foreign currency black markets.
“We started to go into crisis,” Vargas said. “We had to travel to Maicao [a Colombian town next to the Venezuelan border] to find the right baby formula for Mathias.”

They were lucky. They were able to scrape together the money to buy about $200 worth in several cans, enough to feed the baby at night for six months.

But Vargas wanted to give her baby the healthiest start possible without ruining the family budget. And she found it in an unexpected way. Her boss at an online food delivery company where she works as a sales executive had a sister, the mother of a 6-month-old baby, who volunteered to give Vargas breast milk.
She received frozen breast milk every 15 days, preserved in little plastic bags with the date marked in pen. “Mathias gained the proper weight in just weeks. It was incredible,” Vargas said, holding her baby, now 16 months old, in her arms.
In Venezuela, baby formula has become so expensive for families that some mothers have begun turning to other women for breast milk donations or even to nurse the babies directly.
President Nicolás Maduro’s government eliminated five zeros from the national currency in an attempt to combat wild inflation in Venezuela, but now a medium-size can of imported baby formula costs even more — 3,300 bolívares or about $33 at the black market exchange rate.
And finding formula to buy isn’t easy. It means going to a resale market because it is almost impossible to find in regular supermarkets or pharmacies.
When Luis Daniel Zavarse was a newborn, his mother in Venezuela obtained breast milk from a relative to feed him when he was hospitalized. With baby formula prices out of reach for many in Venezuela, women are turning to other women for help feeding their babies.
Photo courtesy of Zavarse family

Marianella Herrera Cuenca, a sociologist from Central University of Venezuela, heard during her visits to poor and middle-class homes about informal networks of women who were helping other mothers by supplying their children with breast milk when they couldn’t afford to purchase enough formula.
A study by Herrera Cuenca and others at the university into the lives of poor mothers in Venezuela — the results have not yet been released publicly — found that as many as three in 20 mothers are being helped to feed their babies by relatives or friends who supply breast milk.
Herrera Cuenca called it “an increasingly common practice. ... These are survival skills that have been practiced for a thousand years.”
Herrera Cuenca, who is in charge of the nutrition section of an annual life conditions survey, said many low-income families can’t afford baby formula. The latest survey found that 89 percent of Venezuelans don’t even have enough money to buy sufficient food for their families.
Venezuela is caught in a spiral of inflation so catastrophic that the International Monetary Fund predicts the rate will hit 1 million percent by the end of the year.
“We’re living in a hyperinflationary context where monthly incomes are worthless,” Herrera Cuenca said.
That translates into poor nutrition for many. She said 39 percent of Venezuelan kids in underprivileged neighborhoods are not breastfed all the way to the six-month mark — and many are then fed with the water used to cook rice or spaghetti, or with corn flour mixed with cow or goat milk, diets that could make them even more undernourished.
“Those kids have size deficiencies and develop chronic malnutrition. We’re talking about at least 500,000 children with a chronic deficit as soon as they start their lives,” she said.
Elainy Ávila, a 32-year-old architect, has donated her breast milk to six babies while being part of a support group for mothers called Lactaluz. She’s also part of an informal network in recent years that has stretched to cities like Caracas and Maracaibo, where dozens of women have been offering free-of-charge breast milk to mothers to help them feed their malnourished or sick children.
Along with helping the health of babies, the participants also know they are saving the family finances.
“To donate breast milk is to donate life by drops. In the case of Venezuela, it is a matter of life or death,” said Ávila.
Keily Quintini, 37, had fed her first daughter with formula but couldn’t pay today’s costs for the supplement when she had a second baby girl. Her neighbor helped her this time.
“Years ago, we fed Sarah, my oldest, with baby formula, but now to buy only one can is impossible. We can’t afford it,” she said.
Mervin Chávez, a pediatrician and head of the breastfeeding program at the University of Zulia, says that breast milk donors help an average of two to four infants per week at the Children’s Hospital in Maracaibo.
“Most of those kids come from poor families. They’re malnourished. All we need is just one call through our support group and we’ll have breast milk donations within the hour,” the doctor said.
Dr. Mervin Chávez, a pediatrician and head of the breastfeeding program at the University of Zulia, says that breast milk donors help an average of two to four infants per week at the Children’s Hospital in Maracaibo.
Gustavo Ocando Alex Special to the Miami Herald

Only healthy women, without diseases such as HIV and hepatitis, can donate, but there are generally at least 25 mothers willing to donate breast milk from Lactaluz alone, members of the group said.
Nelson Faría, a pediatrician who works with newborns at the Policlinica Maracaibo, said he has received recent calls from middle-class patients in despair because they can no longer afford baby formulas.
“Breast milk is necessary in Venezuela, especially in this severe crisis. It has all the greatest benefits for babies and the best thing is that it is free,” he said.
At 33, Ninette Noetzlin, a Venezuelan kindergarten teacher with a 1-year-old son, has nurtured dozens of babies she has never known.
“I have helped five babies near to my family and friends, but also every 15 days I give my pediatrician 5-pound sacks filled with little breast milk bags so he can choose the most needy of his patients so they can use it,” she said.
Mothers can be temporarily or permanently unable to breastfeed their children due to physical incapacity, health complications, diseases or drug use.
Patricia Zavarse, 38, got desperate last May when she could not breastfeed her baby, Luis Daniel, while he spent days at the Intensive Care Unit.
She couldn’t feed him because she was receiving daily doses of a drug to treat her high blood pressure. Doctors advised the parents to feed the baby with a specialized formula that was expensive and rarely on store shelves.
“We could not find it anywhere. The doctors even recommended that I and my husband say goodbye to our baby,” Zavarse said.
The solution came through a relative who was breastfeeding her 11-month-old baby. For two weeks, doctors fed the baby with milk from the relative, using a digestive tube.
“That milk helped save our baby’s life,” she said.
Luis Daniel is now a healthy 3-month-old, she said: “It was a miracle.”

When Luis Daniel Zavarse was a newborn, his mother in Venezuela obtained breast milk from a relative to feed him when he was hospitalized. With baby formula prices out of reach for many in Venezuela, women are turning to other women for help feeding their babies. Photo courtesy of Zavarse family


https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nat...217586870.html

Why do they continue to BREED while they live in poverty and have no money?

Get on birth control!

Lady Liberty: Nikki Haley thrills Venezuela's battered democrats in the streets of New York

President Trump's United Nations ambassador picked up a megaphone and jumped down into the Venezuelan crowd protesting the odious Maduro regime to show them just whose side America stands on.

September 28, 2018
By Monica Showalter

Jumping down into the streets of New York with the crowds of protesters, U.S. United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley seized the moment with a megaphone, calling for democracy in Venezuela, just as Russia's Boris Yeltsin once did in the 1991 coup that overturned the Soviet Union.



Youtube Video https://youtu.be/Lj4zFksuclo

Don't think Venezuelans weren't thrilled. These are Venezuela's beleaguered democrats, the ones who have been beaten, jailed, starved, and murdered as their elections were stolen from them in front of their faces. They were utterly, utterly thrilled, and not just in the streets of New York, but across the continent and deep inside Venezuela itself.

Pedro Mario Burelli @pburelli

Thanks Amb. @nikkihaley. Whether as a diplomat, as a politician, as a freedom loving and caring woman, you have proven to be a firm voice, a constant ally. Millions of Venezuelans, in and out of our beleaguered country, THANK YOU!
Nikki Haley ✔ @nikkihaley

RT @USUN: Socialism and corruption have taken freedom away from the people of Venezuela. Proud to join these great people protesting the Maduro dictatorship.



10:35 PM - Sep 27, 2018

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Roberto Negretti Chalbaud @RNegrettiCh

We love you Nikky Haley, thanks fpr being a voice of freedom for Venezuela! God Bless you!
Nikki Haley ✔ @nikkihaley

RT @USUN: Socialism and corruption have taken freedom away from the people of Venezuela. Proud to join these great people protesting the Maduro dictatorship.



2:05 AM - Sep 28, 2018

• 6
• See Roberto Negretti Chalbaud's other Tweets

Betsy__VENZ @Betsy_VENZ

Replying to @nikkihaley and 3 others
Miss Haley, I take this opportunity to say “THANKS”! to you from my people from Venezuela ! For your bravery to defend us! For raising your voice to alleviate our pain, and hunger.. Justice for Vzla! for a FREE Venezuela! SOS !!!Thanks
11:27 PM - Sep 27, 2018

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Sonia Simmons @soniasimmons18

Replying to @nikkihaley and 2 others
Thank you Ms Nikki Haley for your words and support to my country Venezuela. Hope you and all the people assisting the United Nations keep on supporting us. May God bless you, your family and the United States.
9:53 PM - Sep 27, 2018

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Andres Cuellar @Sou_Andres

· 22h

Ver a esta mujer hablar tan comprometida con la causa Venezolana hizo que se ganara mi estima por siempre. Vídeo sin editar. @nikkihaley @leonline2000 @DonCorneliano2 @Neoadolfo pic.twitter.com/zIAN42Jote

Henry González @meteoro252002

Video at the tweet and page link

@nikkihaley Thank you for your commitmen with a just, urgent and necessary cause... Helping to bring freedom and justice upon Venezuela. God bless you Nikki Haley, God bless Donald Trump and his entire administration.
6:13 AM - Sep 28, 2018

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Thrilled is an understatement; hog-wild is more like it. Nicaraguans and Cuban-Americans were thrilled, too.
What an amazing irony this is. For decades, nitpickers, even on the Venezuelan side, have criticized American officials, such as then-secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, who have spoke out on the Venezuelan hellhole, saying they were engaging in "megaphone" diplomacy, and sniffing that it was unhelpful.
Well, here's some megaphone diplomacy, and it's being received by Venezuelans in the same way the great Ronald Reagan's speech on the Evil Empire was received by the prisoners within the walls of the Gulag, as Natan Sharansky wrote of: With unrestrained joy.
Someone is finally listening to them. Someone is finally there on the ramparts with them, cheering them and giving them encouragement they're lapping up like a thirsty man in the desert. And she looks like Lady Liberty.
No wonder they are shedding tears of joy.

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https://www.americanthinker.com/blog..._new_york.html

Giving Thanks - A Collapse Update From Venezuela: Corruption, Hunger, & Crime

Thu, 11/22/2018 - 22:00
46 SHARES

Authored by JG Martinez D via Daisy Luther's Organic Prepper blog,

In this update, Jose talks about the worsening corruption, hunger, and crime in Venezuela. It’s hard to imagine, but things are still getting worse there. As we get together to feast with our families this week, please remember the people of Venezuela, where 80% of the population does not have enough food. ~ Daisy



I have been trying to solve a couple of issues this past week, mainly related to my parents’ health. Dad just had an event with his equilibrium (he is almost 80 so it is perfectly understandable), and he hardly could come back home in his old car. Amazingly, he did not crash or got injured in the way back. In the pictures, I have seen he is alarmingly thinner. I will send him some nutritional additions as soon as I can. I have been going through some personal and familial issues that demanded lots of attention and care and had to leave the city for some days up to work a few days in a place without any kind of coverage, not even landline, in the middle of nowhere. I survived though.
Let’s begin.
Why the collapse is still going on.

Well, it is a known fact that a slow, painful collapse is definitely the worst possible scenario. Its effects are long term, the suffering it inflicts has effects on too many people, and last too much time. It affects other countries’ economies and societies, on time.
In our example, this is exactly what is happening. I read the report of a Venezuelan journalist, much smarter than me, where he explains the exact reason with very clever words, of why the mafia is still in power. His analysis is that the regime is not a vertical structure. Otherwise, it would have been much easier to overcome with conventional methodologies. The reason is that the structure is not like, for example, the Iraq government where Saddam controlled everything.
In Venezuela, the power is exerted by small, powerful because they are armed and have support from traitors as internal sources) gangs that are scattered all over the country. These can be with or without uniforms. It is very likely there are foreigners with them too, not openly but in the torture/imprisonment facilities. This kind of division offers new perspectives to know where exactly the combat should start. I would dare to say that, once we understood how they operate, it should be much easier to remove them.
Local warlords should have local interests…and local thugs to “attend” such interests, too. With some basic surveillance and taking care of the local snitches, enough information could be collected for some groups to start cooking something decent.
Yes, I am a libertarian. This kind of love for freedom is beyond nationality. That is why the communist world fears it that much and wants to eliminate it so badly.
But I would not like to analyze too much the political aspects this time. It is effectively covered, at least in its main aspects, in other articles.
An update from my wife’s family

I hadn’t written some other articles because I was waiting for my wife’s family to arrive, so I could include personal information they collected from their conversations with other travelers.
They made the trip, and the information is outstanding. They confirmed the 18 dead by freezing story in the mountains of Colombia. Being a large family with small children, they received assistance in some of the parts of the trip, even being hosted without charge in a hotel room.
To summarize, this is the general situation: people have to get into a large truck (regular buses are out of the game, there are no tires or spare parts) just to buy some basic staples, at incredible prices that increase every single day. The power grid is working just 4/5 hours a day in most of the country. Sending money is now increasingly difficult. The price of food is such that, even in a foreign currency like dollars, the numbers just don´t match: a dozen eggs is 9$, and one kilo of meat about 13$ depending on the area. Corn flour for our arepas is just found by the 12 kilos package. Rice and pasta, the same. If someone can live with those prices…
Law “enforcement” is completely corrupt.

It is quite interesting to hear what they have to say about the role of the law “enforcement” corps. They kidnapped people, asking for ransoms in foreign currency. The situation in the imprisonment facilities was…apocalyptical. Once they have collected enough money from the ransoms and what not, almost the technical stuff LEOs all of that city flee the country for good, and they are now in some place in Latin America (Colombia, perhaps?)…or even planning how to sneak up to the USA.

Go figure.
One of the most interesting investigators of this kind of stuff I have read these last few days analyzed very thoroughly about how the atomization and redistribution of power schemes are what has allowed the mafia to be in relative control so much time. With many small bands of thugs operating at the same time all over the country, and the LEO corps obeying just their own rules (presidential convoy was stopped recently by an armed group of intelligence corps, with the consequent aggressive attitude of the bodyguards, and this impasse conducted to the removal of their director, Gustavo Gonzalez L. from the chair. (You can google it). There is a lot of stuff happening under the sheets.
It is quite likely that we will see lots of nasty things in the near future, as the power structures diminishes and more and more members are “purged”. Losing control for this structure means that the ruling party in the rest of the country will be those with the uniform, the badge, and the gun or the AK. And without a legal system working, that is bad. VERY bad. As it can be supposed, this will not be a happy ending for those involved. They know that the entire world is against them. They are considered (as it should be) delinquents for good people all over the world. They have stolen our gold and destroyed our capacity to generate wealth via oil production.
Stealth mode is essential to survive in Venezuela right now.

This said, I have suggested to my fellows to activate their stealth mode. Old clothing and shoes, avoid too clean cars, use the vehicles as little as possible…Jeez, even using dark bags in case they found some food is wise. There are plenty of stories about thugs grabbing grocery bags, sometimes even stabbing the holder, if some resistance was found. Parking the car ready to leave the place is a need. A lot of assaults are carried on when people are getting into the vehicle. In my case, with my SUV busted, I had a backpack and perhaps my wife or one of the kids with another smaller backpack, and we got to the bike quickly. (How I miss my old motorbike!).
I have a lot of stuff that I was going to move from our house to my parent´s place, mainly equipment like electrical tools and similar productive, useful devices that a prepper usually has in place. But nowadays, roads are so lonely and LEOs are so…predaceous, that it is not a good idea any longer. A truck loaded with stuff will be a gold mine for those thugs. That is, provided that the gangs roaming in the desert interstate roads can be avoided, which is highly unlikely.
Rules have changed, and the very weak empire of law that once existed (the middle 70s to 90s?) is no longer present. It is not a countrywide situation, though. But now the Southern states, Amazonas and Apure are the kingdoms of the Colombian guerrilla. Thanks, Uncle Hugo!. You f—ed us well.
There have been reports on the roads to the East of the country (Cumana city for example) where 20 or 25 people gangs stop the cars and take whatever they want. LEOs will take whatever food you happen to carry, without bothering in giving you something else than a warning that you are lucky to not be going to jail. This is something to be expected in such a situation, and it can´t be more dangerous. However, it will not develop itself from one day to another; once things start to get bad and dope starts to be scarce…the hunger will make the beast leave out. The predators will go after the easier preys first. Or whatever they believe these preys are.
It is a hard compromise, but you can´t look helpless and unable to defend. There are a lot of psychos here that will shoot innocent people in the head just because they can, and they know that no one is going to come after them. If you could see some of the videos that have been uploaded about what the gangs are able to do…you would understand why I am so freaked out. Hands chopped. Picks used to drill someone´s head while a woman laughs as she is recording the footage. Jeez.
If you carry, and the situation goes the wrong direction, people under such a dangerous situation, should not draw without being ready to use their piece. Once someone knows you are armed, you will become a target: a good piece is a survival tool for the thugs, a very coveted element, and finally, a prestige symbol.
And that is the update.

This is the updating, people. I will write some more articles, as I can interview and gather everything that my family that just arrived a couple of weeks ago is able to transmit everything while it is fresh in their memories.
Thanks for your much-needed assistance, and your moral support! I won’t disappear again.

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-...n-hunger-crime

Venezuela’s Lessons for American Socialists

Noah Smith


January 03 2019, 6:30 AM
January 03 2019, 8:32 AM

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- It’s hard to overstate how disastrous the reign of Hugo Chavez and his successor Nicolas Maduro has been for Venezuela. A recent series of Bloomberg articles vividly depicts the hellish, never-ending struggle for survival in Caracas, the country’s capital. Hungry children roam the streets, people are fleeing the country, health care is almost nonexistent, violence is endemic, even water is scarce. Chavez’s so-called Bolivarian revolution took a peaceful, middle-income country and transformed it into a nightmare that puts the ruinous Soviet Union of the 1980s to shame.

It’s important for other countries — including wealthy ones like the U.S. — not to ignore Venezuela, but to use it as a cautionary tale. Politicians like Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have embraced socialism, as have many young Americans. But what are the lessons of Venezuela? Why did the country become such a basket case?

The Bolivarian revolution’s defenders often make excuses for the Chavez-Maduro regime by claiming that the country’s penury is the result of outside forces. For example, some argue that it was the fall in oil prices in late 2014 and 2015 that sunk the country. Venezuela is a petrostate — petroleum products constituted about 95 percent of the country’s exports in 2014, so the price decline was naturally a blow.

But although lower oil prices undoubtedly made things harder for Venezuela, they can’t be the primary culprit in the collapse. Venezuela stopped releasing many of its economic numbers in 2014. But other petrostates — Saudi Arabia, Russia, Nigeria, Angola and Kuwait — saw their incomes stagnate or even fall after 2014, but they didn’t experience anything remotely like the devastation that has hit Venezuela:


Nor did the country come under attack by capitalist powers. Under President Barack Obama, the U.S. did impose sanctions against a few of the country’s officials in 2015, and President George W. Bush refused to sell arms to Venezuela, but these weren’t broad sanctions that had the power to seriously affect the country’s economy. No reactionary armies or bombers devastated Venezuela’s cities; the country’s impoverishment is all of its own making.

Venezuela’s critics can also be too sloppy. It’s easy to wave one’s hands and declare that socialism always fails. But Bolivia, another resource-dependent Latin American country, elected a socialist president, Evo Morales, in 2006. And Bolivia has been doing great. The country’s living standards, which had stagnated for 30 years, have grown rapidly and steadily since Morales took power:



And at the same time, Bolivia has managed to reduce inequality dramatically:


Despite ominous signs that Morales is becoming more authoritarian, Bolivia has not yet experienced anything like the devastation that has afflicted its ideological fellow-traveler to the north.

So if it wasn’t oil prices, external pressures, or the inevitable tendencies of socialism, what did sink Venezuela? It’s hard to identify the exact policy mistakes that Chavez and Maduro made, but three failures loom large — macroeconomic mismanagement, nationalization of industry and interference in the state-owned oil company.

The worst scourge of Venezuela’s economy has been hyperinflation:



This level of price increases makes it impossible to save money. Even though incomes tend to go up along with prices, the sheer unpredictability when prices are rising by 20- or 40-fold a year makes it very difficult to plan consumption. You may think tomorrow’s meal will only cost 10 million bolivars, but instead it might cost 20 million, meaning you go might hungry if you don’t buy immediately. It’s also very hard for companies, even state-owned ones, to plan their investments when the price of those investments is highly uncertain.

Meanwhile, hyperinflation has led the government — predictably — to impose price controls. Those created shortages of basic necessities, and made people turn to the much less-efficient and corrupt black market.

It’s not clear how hyperinflation gets started — price controls, currency depreciation and fiscal deficits can help kick it off, but once it gets started it’s very difficult to stop. Venezuela should have seen this menace coming, as its inflation rate steadily crept up year after year, but its leaders just made the problem worse. Bolivia, meanwhile, has managed to keep inflation very low.

Another big mistake was large-scale nationalization of industry and expropriation of private property. Chavez was very fond of nationalizing both foreign- and domestically-owned businesses of all kinds. This is a sure way to wreck the private sector — if local business owners and foreign investors don’t think their property is secure, they won’t invest, and output will languish. This can cause a spiral, where the government is forced to nationalize ever more of the economy as the private sector pulls back.

Morales, in contrast, has been much more careful with nationalizations in Bolivia, mostly limiting them to the oil and gas industry and the electric grid — centralized, stable industries where government ownership is common around the world.

Finally, Venezuela’s leaders interfered with the smooth operation of an industry that was already government-run — Petroleos de Venezuela SA, or PDVSA, the state-owned oil company. The company once operated relatively independently, but Chavez meddled in its affairs, firing employees and replacing them with apparatchiks, starving the company of investment in order to extract money for his own purposes, and driving away or expropriating the holdings of foreign partners who helped PDVSA keep up production. The unsurprising result is that Venezuelan petroleum investment has collapsed, oil infrastructure is falling apart, and production is in free fall— all this in the country with the world’s largest proven crude oil reserves.

Socialists in the U.S. should take note — if there’s a right way to do socialism, this isn’t it. Instead of cautious policies like those of Bolivia, Venezuela’s leaders chose to ignore the menace of hyperinflation, nationalize private businesses across the economy, and muck up the smooth operations of PDVSA. The result was predictable — one of the worst self-inflicted economic catastrophes of the century so far.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Noah Smith is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He was an assistant professor of finance at Stony Brook University, and he blogs at Noahpinion.

©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
Bloomberg

https://www.bloombergquint.com/view/...a-s-socialists

VENEZUELA UPRISING: Forces clash with protesters after reported mutiny...

National Guard sergeant demands Maduro removal...

Venezuela already ran out of other people's money; which happens to be the only way Socialism functions in the first place.

Bernie Sanders Might Learn Something From Venezuela's Minimum Wage Experiment



Socialism isn’t like the free market which progresses peacefully. Socialism requires a bureaucratic boot on the neck of business...

Wed, 09/26/2018 - 13:30
29 SHARES
Authored by Doug French via The Mises Institute,

There are labor shortages all over the country. There are not enough truck drivers, plumbers, food waitresses, construction workers, and so on. The official unemployment rate is below 4 percent. It was just reported private sector wages popped 2.9 percent.



However, Bernie Sanders and other “progressive” candidates are endorsing the idea of a federal living wage. On his website, Bernie starts with,

Millions of Americans are working for totally inadequate wages. We must ensure that no full-time worker lives in poverty. The current federal minimum wage is starvation pay and must become a living wage. We must increase it to $15 an hour over the next several years.

His latest big idea is to

tax companies with 500 or more employees an amount equal to federal benefits received by their low-wage workers. The bill is designed to discourage large companies from paying their workers so little that they end up relying on federal benefits, such as food stamps, to make ends meet.

If Bernie were paying attention, there is a minimum wage experiment going on in real time in Venezuela right now. Sure, there’s some serious money printing going on there and plenty of socialist schemes to keep the shelves empty. However, the fact there’s nothing to buy hasn’t kept Venezuelan president Maduro from hiking that country’s minimum wage 24 times since 2013 when he took office.
The latest hike went into effect on September 17, and it was huuuge — 3,000 percent. Fabiola Zerpa writes forBloomberg,

7 million employees are guaranteed 1,800 bolivars a month — worth about $20 at the black-market rate. President Nicolas Maduro intended the mandate as political boost, but it’s having the opposite effect as companies, already hit by Venezuela’s epic economic contraction, tell workers they can’t afford to keep them.

No one should be stunned if employees are told to go home if the government by way of brute force increases pay by 30 times.

“I already told my four employees to go find other jobs,” Caracas garage owner Marcos Vizcaino told Bloomberg. “I’ve decided to close. There’s no need for me to keep to losing money for a third year in a row.”

Zerpa writes,

The higher minimum wage, which Maduro announced last month, was among several bids to steady the rapidly failing state’s economy and stanch hyperinflation. The socialist autocrat also devalued the currency and lopped five zeroes off denominations of the bolivar bill, which has been rendered almost valueless.

Lopping zeros off a currency has never worked and how on earth would raising the minimum wage by 30 times “stanch hyperinflation?” By the way, the zero lopping just happened a few weeks ago and price inflation is 100 percent for the new money.
Maduro’s policies only serve to drive the Venezuelan economy further into a Marxian hellhole. Venezuelan business owners must keep quiet because if they decide to “simply dismiss people. Much of the action happens secretively as companies try to avoid punishment by the government, which has been jailing those it believes are flouting the rules.”
Socialism isn’t like the free market which progresses peacefully. Socialism requires a bureaucratic boot on the neck of business. “Apart from the astronomical rise in wages, companies have limited ability to adapt, thanks to restrictive controls.” Zerpa writes. “Food operations are closely monitored as the government provides them imported raw materials. More than 500 supermarkets and stores have been fined and 200 managers and workers detained since Maduro’s announcements, according to Cedice, a private-property watchdog group.”
Maduro seized a cardboard plant and a pharmaceutical company for not toeing the government’s line. Even businesses with steady payrolls like banks, education, and construction are expected to be hammered by the new edict, because “large firms have collective-bargaining agreements subject to government scrutiny.”
Aurelio Concheso, a labor expert at Fedecamaras told Bloomberg, “The impact can be devastating; it can consume a whole company’s capital.”
Murray Rothbard wrote in The Free Market in 1988,

It is conventional among economists to be polite, to assume that economic fallacy is solely the result of intellectual error. But there are times when decorousness is seriously misleading, or, as Oscar Wilde once wrote, "when speaking one's mind becomes more than a duty; it becomes a positive pleasure." For if proponents of the higher minimum wage were simply wrongheaded people of good will, they would not stop at $3 or $4 an hour, but indeed would pursue their dimwit logic into the stratosphere.

Maduro is indeed pursuing his “dimwit logic into the stratosphere.” His country has no food or necessities and soon it will have no jobs.

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-...age-experiment