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Bernie Sanders stands at the podium on stage during a walk through before the start of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on July 25, 2016. (Photo: SS)

Back in June, Iwrote about the bizarre allure of socialismand said that advocates (who generally dont even know what socialism really means) were some of the most anti-empirical people in the world.

even though the real-world evidence against big government is so strong, its rather baffling thatmany young peopleare drawn to thatcoercive ideologyand disturbing thata non-trivial number of votersfavor this failed form of statism.Socialism hasa technical definitioninvolving government ownership of the means of production and central planning of the economy. But most people today think socialism is big government, with business still privately owned but with lots of redistribution and intervention (Ive argued, for instance, that evenBernie Sanders isnt a real socialist, and that there arebig differencesbetween countries like Sweden, China, and North Korea). For what its worth, thats actually closer to thetechnical definition of fascism.

Now lets update that column.

It seems that the cancer of socialism is spreading, at least ifthis storyinThe Weekis any indication.

Things are looking up for the Democratic Socialists of America. With a membership of 25,000, it is now the largest socialist group in America since the Second World War. And last weekend in Chicago, it held its largest convention, by a considerable margin, in its history. Membership has more than tripled in a year, gaining a large boost from the candidacy of Bernie Sanders That sharp surge in new recruits most of whom are fairly young has created a fairly stark age bifurcation among members. Somewhat akin to Sanders campaign, there is an old guard of people who have been carrying the left-wing torch for years, and a recent surge of new membersmost of the major proposals were adopted with large majorities. Among other things, delegates voted toendorse the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement (directed at ending the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza), and to endorse Medicare for all as a major priority.

Im guessing that the bifurcated conference meant a handful of old people who are genuine socialists and a bunch of young people who think socialism is just a bunch of government-coerced redistribution and intervention.

Both groups, however, deserve scorn for favoring a system that elevates the state over individuals. That approach is grossly immoral.

Not to mention that its never worked. Nobody has ever provided a good answer tomy two-part challenge.

There is no example of a successful socialist nation anywhere in the world. Cuba?No. North Korea?No. The Soviet Empire?Dont make me laugh. Venezuela?You must be joking.

Denmark or Sweden? Umm, theyrenot socialist, though their economies have beenhurt by excessive redistribution. Greece?Give me a break.

I could continue, but no sense beating a dead horse.

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The Bizarre Allure of Socialism, Part II | People's Pundit Daily - People's Pundit Daily

Venezuelas self-destruction has embarrassed more celebrities than hasNational Enquirer. Our glitteratis favorite socialist paradise has, like so many similar experiments, become a murderous den of oppression and privation, and none will speak on its behalf. However, Venezuelas collapse has dashed fantasies far older and more sincere than Sean Penns.

Hugo Chvezs election in Venezuela realized a dream that festered in left-wing hearts for decades: a revolutionary socialist regime, with the sovereignty and resources to fulfill decades worth of pledges from left-wing populist leaders in Latin America. During the Cold War, dictators who gained and maintained power through coup dtat and state terror, often abetted by the U.S. government, frequently thwarted such movements. The depth of evil these dictators reached and the misery they created are not to be understated. They undermined the case for capitalism and American power as positive forces in the world, giving defenders of socialism the world over something to point at and say, But what about?

Men like Chvez were cast as the antidote. His triumph was a rebuke not only of Venezuelas own ancien rgime, but also of Pinochet, Rios Montt, and the rest of the Latin American tinpot rogues gallery. He was to avenge the sufferings of Oscar Romero and Rigoberta Mench, fulfill the stolen potential of Jacobo rbenz and Salvador Allende, and improve on the flawed, illiberal experiments of Fidel Castro and the Sandinistas. The constraints on civil liberties that undergirded his power were necessary evils to ward off the authoritarian specter.

We were told Central and South American nations would never choose to adopt free markets to the same extent as their individualistic northern counterpart. With communitarian traditions rooted in its Catholicism and indigenous heritage, Latin America would embrace democratic socialism. I remember sitting in college classes and learning about how Chvez and similar, though less violent populists such as Ecuadors Rafael Correa, Bolivias Evo Morales, and Brazils Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff were forging hope by harnessing popular energy into governments that would direct economies toward social justice.

Fissures are forming for each of these regimes. Morales, in defiance of the constitution and a popular referendum, is moving to abrogate term limits for his office; Correas successors are locked in a battle over corruption that has left the government in chaos; da Silva is entering his sixth corruption trial; and Rousseff has been impeached. But it is Venezuela, the nation Chvez and his successor Nicols Maduro have led into fire and ruin, which fully captures just how fatal are the conceits of democratic socialism in Latin America.

The terror and repression Chavismo swore to deposit in the dustbin of history have reemerged in its defense, with hit squads intimidating and massacring dissidents while Maduro swats down checks on his power. The equality it promised exists only in the cruelest of terms: equality of want, equality of desperation, equality of misery. A country endowed with bountiful resources has spent and collectivized its way into such abject poverty that it cannot provide its people with food and toilet paper.

Chvezs personal legacy retains some of its man-of-the-people sheen in some circles, since his Bolivarian regime reached its tipping point under his less inspiring successor and his erstwhile defenders are still ready to make idiots of themselves for him. Nevertheless, his countrys collapse is the fruit of the state-led development path he set out on.

Endowed with massive oil reserves, Venezuela had periodically suffered from Dutch disease since it nationalized petroleum production in the 1970s, with its state-run enterprises engaging in corruption on a massive scale and becoming symbols of injustice as other sectors crumbled around them. Chvez promised to direct these companies profits toward social and political revolution, funding public works and alleviating poverty. He would be the anti-Pinochet, ending Venezuelas existence as a fount of resources for the West and directing its economy toward the common good.

Hugo Chvez, however, proved himself far less interested in the collective than in Hugo Chvez. His management of the oil industry quickly became geared toward preserving his power, as he dismissed vital and experienced workers for political reasons and diverted resources away from innovation to fund image-burnishing social programs. At the height of oil price spikes in the mid-to-late 2000s, this worked for Chvez, and even as his governing style became more and more oppressive his sympathizers saw him as a hero. The curtain started pulling back when oil prices fell, and now bureaucratic mismanagement has run the Venezuelan oil industry into the ground, and the dependence they fostered has brought the entire economy down with it.

Today, the government that swore to empower its people tortures artists and activists. Quality of life evaporates as mortality rates rise, jobs disappear, and basic utilities like power and water become unavailable. Initiatives to provide everyday necessities for poor neighbors get people jailed for hoarding. Basic governance becomes impossible as a carousel of suspected rivalsmost recently attorney general Luisa Ortega, who was removed last weekendare purged, leaving Maduro a gaggle of sycophants for him to fiddle with as the country burns.

For advocates of freer markets and smaller governments, this failure was predictable: even an economic culture with communitarian impulses is more likely to flourish within a framework of liberty, and there is no man or group of men smart enough to build a healthy economy on the management of a single resource. Despite this, Venezuelas death spiral has blindsided the Left and, tragically, its own people, who were sold one of the oldest lies in history: hand awesome power to one man and he will in turn empower all.

A funny thing about that man Pinochet: while his terroristic rule earned him a much-deserved reputation as a monster, the free-market policies he implemented became the undoing of his tyranny. Chile became wealthy enough for its people to organize a political opposition that ousted him, and it has since become a stable, functioning democracy.

Capitalism helped Chile go from a poor dictatorship to a prosperous democracy; socialism has turned Venezuela from a prosperous democracy to a poor dictatorship. Democratic socialism in Venezuela, and throughout Latin America, promised to bring an end to oppression and poverty, but now the falseness of that promise has been laid bare for the world to see.

Matt Boomer is a technology and business analytics consultant living in Dallas, Texas. He studied political science, history, and business economics at the University of Notre Dame.

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Venezuela's Descent Into Chaos Buries The Left's Hopes Of 'Good Socialism' - The Federalist

Robert Robb, The Arizona Republic Opinion Published 6:00 a.m. ET Aug. 11, 2017 | Updated 7:55 a.m. ET Aug. 11, 2017

In Caracas, Venezuela(Photo: Ronaldo Schemidt)

Venezuela offers an excellent illustration of how the U.S. compulsion tointervene in all the worlds trouble spotsoften strategically backfires.

The country is providing a timely lesson about how socialism wrecks an economy and how true socialism has a tendency to suffocate democracy as well.

These truths were masked during Hugo Chvezs time by sky-high oil prices. The state-owned oil company Petrleos de Venezuela or PDVSA spun off sufficient revenue to pay for his domestic infrastructure and welfare programs.

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But politicization of PDVSAs management has resulted in a sharp reduction in oil production. And the deep drop in oil prices has robbed his successor, Nicols Maduro, of the lucre to maintain the mask.

Under Maduro, the state has taken over increasing portions of the economy. Today, the army has become the nations grocer.

The country has suffered hyperinflation, currently estimated at 700%annually, for several years now.

The government has racked up sovereign debt it cannot repay. A default is imminent.

The people of Venezuela have clearly had enough. An opposition Congress was elected. But a regime-controlled court emasculated it. Maduroorchestrated a facade of an electionfor a Constituent Assembly to usurp it. The Constituent Assembly is looking like the worst of the French Revolution, without the beheadings.

But there are jailings and shootings of political opponents. The Constituent Assembly dutifully voted to sack the countrys attorney general, a devoutchavistawho couldnt stomach Maduros debauching of the countrys democratic processes. She escaped a hostile cordon on the back of a motorbike.

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POLICING THE USA: A look atrace, justice, media

The claim by Maduro and the security forces of thechavistaregime is that all the countrys woes are the result of sabotage by the United States.

That, of course, is preposterous. Yet the United States keeps doing things that give the claim some semblance of credibility.

In 2014, Congress passed a bill permitting sanctions to be imposed, supposedly in defense of Venezuelan human rights and civil society. In 2015, the Obama administration imposed sanctions on a handful of government officials. Their U.S. assets, to the extent they had any, were frozen. They were forbidden from traveling to the United States, and U.S. persons were forbidden to do business with them.

The Trump administrationextended the sanctionsto another handful, including Maduro himself.Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has muttered about the desirability of regime change, which plays directly into Maduros domestic playbook.

And, in the usual neoconservative circles, there are calls for the U.S. to do even more to put pressure on the Maduro government. The big gun supposedly would be banning PDVSAs oil imports into the United States. The Trump administration is reportedly mulling the big gun.

Roughly 40%of PDVSAs exports are to the United States. While other buyers could probably be found, the disruption would be, it is claimed, a staggering blow that might topple the Maduro government and neuter thechavistasecurity forces that prop it up.

Now, Venezuela isof little direct security interestto the United States. Other than having to endure bombastic speeches by Chvez at the United Nations, the turmoil in Venezuela hasnt significantly affected us. Nor will it.

What happens next in Venezuela is impossible to project. But the notion that the United States can steer events in a productive direction by high-minded pronouncements or carefully calibrated sanctions is hubris.

All we can do for sure is get in the way and blur the lessons for the people of Venezuela and around the world. If the United States tries to punish or topple the Maduro government, then it cannot cleanly be proclaimed that it failed of its own accord. The inability of true socialism to produce economic wellbeing, and the threat it poses to democratic governance, will not be as transparently illustrated.

The United States does have a general strategic interest in the establishment and maintenance of democratic capitalism in Latin America. And the American people have a heart for the suffering of the people of Venezuela.

Individuals can act on that heart bycontributing to relief efforts. The United States government, however, serves best by trying to stay out of the story.

Robert Robb is a columnist for The Arizona Republic, where this piece wasfirst published.

You can read diverse opinions from ourBoard of Contributorsand other writers on theOpinion front page, on Twitter@USATOpinionand in our dailyOpinion newsletter. To respond to a column, submit a comment to letters@usatoday.com.

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What the US government should do about Venezuela: Nothing - USA TODAY

Conservative pundits fail to identify non-socialistic contributors to the catastrophe.

Now that Venezuela has descended into such chaos and misery that wars become a very real possibility, right-leaning pundits are saying, I told you so. To them, the current 700 percent inflation rate and dearth of basic necessities is the inevitable denouement to the same old socialist story that always starts off so full of hope of prosperity shared by all. Venezuelans are so hungry they're hunting dogs in the streets of Caracas and eating out of dumpsters, all because of Marxism. You can read countless articles on the topic, but too many of them are generic. They read as if a software program generated them.

Barton Hinkle, writingfor last Sundays Richmond Times-Dispatch, offers a prime example of this clich. Venezuela, he writes, provides... a stark warning for socialist sympathisers on the left. Then he explains that the current emergency state of that nation is the inevitable outcome of the Venezuelan government's policies. What he fails to address is that far more than merely socialist policies has contributed to this economic catastrophe.

Building your nations economy around an abundant, valuable commodity isn't a socialist principle, but that's exactly what Venezuela did when Hugo Chavez was in charge. It was a critical mistake, as one of the key reasons the nation can't escape from its economic death spiral is its lack of economic diversity. Now that oil prices have tanked, the petrodollars have dried up just like the food supply. Hinkle writes that socialism apologists blame low oil prices on the crisis, but that many nations depend on oil revenue and havent sunk to such depths as Venezuela. Maybe the problem lies elsewhere, he says.

The problem is multi-faceted, but Hinkle only mentions the ones that fit his storyline. While he makes valid points about socialisms role in wrecking the Venezuelan economy, and calls out useful Hollywood idiots like Sean Penn and Michael Moore for mooning over the Venezuelan socialist paradise, there's much more to the story than hes letting on. The economy of what was not long ago the wealthiest nation in South America hasn't crashed and burned simply because of socialism. If it did, then why aren't the citizens of Bernie Sanders beloved Sweden losing 19 poundsper year like Venezuelans? Some might argue that Sweden isn't really a socialist country because the state hasn't nationalized the means of production. It provides all the free stuff that the same people go on about when attacking socialism. They can't then turn around and say Swedens not a socialist country because they're eager to prove another point.

Scandinavian democratic socialism is one form of socialism, and Venezuela has another. Chavezs, in many ways looks more like Bonapartism than socialism. Bonapartism (a term birthed in 19th-century French politics) describes a situation in which the upper classes are exploiting the have-nots, and a military, police, and state bureaucracy intervenes to establish balance. Under such a regime, there's a new sheriff in town whos going to crack down on the elites and make sure the common people are provided for. The proleteriat make a bargain to sacrifice their agency in exchange for economic security. Chavez, nicknamed "el Comandante, was a former military officer with a strong authoritarian streak that was tempered by populist rhetoric. He was right out of Bonapartist central casting.

Chavez, obsessed with power, curtailed media freedom and put his opponents in prison. He supported gangs that disseminated propaganda and physically intimidated poor communities. Any person or institution he wanted to get was an agent of American imperialism. Chavez built his power base around a cult of personality, and kept his ties with the military as insurance. Dictatorial wielding of power is not inherent to socialism, but it's been a major factor in dooming Venezuela's failed experiment in 21st Century Socialism.

Hinkle, by way of explaining why socialism alone has wrecked a once-thriving nation, quotes three paragraphs verbatim, written by Dario Pays, former Chilean ambassador to the Organization of American States. In short, socialists want to spread wealth so they print cash because that's easy. This weakens the currency, prices spike, so they impose price controls, which disincentivizes businesses to produce things for sale. Then the government takes over the business and runs them poorly, and when there's unrest, the government responds tyrannically.

The above scenario has, in fact, played out in Venezuela, but that still doesn't mean that socialism itself has produced hyperinflation and all those empty shelves in Venezuela grocery stores. Why has Sweden averaged only 3.58 percent inflation from 1980 to 2017 with all the free stuff it's handing out? Nicols Maduro is now President of Venezuela, but he inherited Chavez mess. It was Chavezs socialism/Bonapartism hybrid that sucked the life out of Venezuelan democracy and weakened its institutions to the point where the nations not strong enoughto pull itself out of an abyss. When a cult of personality, rather than just an ideological set of ideas, brings on a political disaster, you can't blame it all on the ideas.

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Venezuela's Not Simply a Failure Of Socialism - Splice Today

I am increasingly of the opinion that the basis for the inflamed, visceral hatred of President Donald Trump in some quarters is neither his occasional vulgarity, nor his propensity to toss out un-presidential insults, nor the misogyny and sexism that the left pretends to see in his every word.

Rather, its that his presidency has torn the veil off of the lefts inexorable and until recently largely obscured march toward a socialist America. Trump has exposed and discredited many of the institutions and mechanisms the left uses to execute its fundamental transformation: the media, the entertainment industry and academia.

Furthermore, he is an unabashed capitalist, a walking manifestation of American achievement through commerce.

And for this, they despise him.

Health care is a pristine example of the battle being waged. Obamacare is collapsing. The GOP is too terrified to repeal it. Democrats know that its failure, particularly in the absence of legitimate free market alternatives, will virtually ensure the single-payer system theyre now openly pushing.

Single-payer is a recipe for failure and abuse. (Exhibits 1 and 2: the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Indian Health Services.) Except in relatively small, largely homogenous populations, collectivism fails because in the absence of financial incentives, more people want to receive things than want to make or provide them. The government must therefore insert itself into every transaction: You must make X. You can only charge $Y. You only get so much of Z.

Thus does single-payer health care morph from being a provision system to a rationing system. And those who control the rations control the people.

There is plenty historical evidence of socialisms disasters, most recently in Venezuela. Detractors will no doubt scoff: The Venezuelan government took over most private enterprise; theres no indication that such a thing would ever happen here.

However, socialist and communist regimes tend expand not because they succeed, but because they fail.

Those who espouse the glories of collectivism in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary are ideologues. And ideologues never accept defeat. Instead of admitting the collapse of a failing business model, the lefts impulse is to take it larger: We just need more money. We need higher taxes. We need the government to take control of more.

This produces larger, systemic failure, and more widespread misery. Then cometh the political oppression. To preserve the regime, it becomes necessary to silence anyone who complains or dares to point out the painfully obvious truth that these ideas destroy whatever systems they infect. Ordinary citizens starve. If they are entrepreneurs or industrialists, their businesses are stolen. Members of government are removed in fraudulent elections, run out of town or arrested on trumped-up charges and imprisoned.

When no one in power will face reality, there are few options left, and they are almost always catastrophic: civil war, revolution, anarchy.

Failed policies. Collapsed economies. Political repression. The examples are so numerous as to strain credulity: Venezuela, Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, North Korea, China, Cambodia, East Germany, Angola, Somalia, the former Soviet Union. Hellholes created under siren promises that government would provide everything for free.

So much suffering, and so avoidable.

But were not supposed to know any of that. Our educational system is supposed to be indoctrinating children to think that capitalism is greed and collectivism is compassion. The media willingly conspires to keep us ignorant. (The New York Times is running a series that The Federalist author Robert Tracinski rightly decries as an effort to rehabilitate Communism. Lenin and the Bolsheviks were well-intentioned people trying to build a better world out of a crisis? Little has changed since the days of Walter Duranty, apparently.) Millionaire entertainers dutifully spout politburo propaganda in exchange for escaping the accusations of hypocrisy that should accompany their sky-high incomes and royal lifestyles.

As middle-class voters are realizing, Democrats have been pushing their party in this direction for decades. Republicans (at least at the Congressional level) suck their thumbs and pretend it isnt happening, whilst falling for the bipartisanship ploy that makes them ineffectual fools even when as now they hold political power.

Donald Trump may not have intended to be the man who pulled down the curtain, but pull it he did. He has become the face of the opposition to the plans of the cultural elite. For that he must be destroyed.

Ultimately, however, the lefts war isnt with Trump. It is with those of us who see socialisms failures, and who refuse to sit back and watch while our freedoms are dismantled and our country is destroyed.

Laura Hollis is a nationally syndicated conservative columnist.

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Hollis: Socialism's Failures and the War Against Trump - Casper Star-Tribune Online