Rabbit

“Let them eat rabbit,” exhorted the government of Nicolas Maduro in crisis-hit Venezuela. There are faint echoes here of Marie Antoinette’s infamous order to her in-house pastry chef to “let them eat cake” when thousands of starving Frenchmen marched before the royal palace before the Revolution.

That might sound like pure parody. Sadly, it is not. It is a serious government-backed plan to help Venezuelans get fed.

“We are looking for creative solutions in the socialist vision,” said Maduro. One of those “creative solutions” is to urge starving citizens to breed rabbits for meat. It is a dead-serious government program called “Plan Rabbit.”

No doubt, it is consistent with the “socialist vision.” A ranking Venezuelan official said this: “Trump’s attacks against the Venezuelan people is an opportunity to revise and change cultural consumption patterns.” So rabbit it is.

No doubt, too, Venezuelans are starving under a “socialist” government. One poll found out that Venezuelans lost 19 pounds on the average in 2016 alone. Data from the country’s trade partners show that Venezuelan food imports were down 61% during the first five months of this year compared to 2015 levels.

The food crisis gripping Venezuela takes on the scale of a humanitarian crisis. While the government blames “American imperialism” for this, economists see as culprit the government’s move to nationalize the farms. Combined with government fixing of prices, this program produced farm bankruptcies and forced out labor from the farms.

The effort to bureaucratically fix the prices of farm produce did not, however, have any effect on mitigating rampaging inflation. This year, the IMF forecasts an inflation rate of 720%.

That inflation rate could rise sharply. Last week, after Venezuela’s state-run oil company shelled out $1.1 billion in debt repayment, Maduro declared this would be the last payout. His country had no more money to yield. On the next payment schedule, his country will therefore be officially in default. That could result in savage speculation against Venezuela’s currency and debt papers.

The worst hit by the crisis gripping Venezuela are the children. Most of them are now suffering severe malnutrition. The next generation of Venezuelans will suffer from all the handicaps malnutrition causes.

Things were not like this in Venezuela before Hugo Chavez and his clone Nicolas Maduro took over. The country sits on one of the world’s largest proven oil reserves. It had one of the highest per capita incomes in Central and South America.

The “socialist” government took over the oil refineries and used the proceeds to subsidize everything from housing to fuel. Soon enough the money dried up with little new economic activity to show for it. Chavez died and left Maduro holding the bag.

The dip in oil prices over the past few months pushed Venezuela over the brink. Grocery shelves emptied. Not enough foreign exchange could be found to meet domestic needs.

What Chavez called “socialism” is actually plain populism disguised in red flags and wild costume parties. The “socialists” merely plundered a natural resource without building an economy that worked.

In a properly functioning democracy, the clowns of “Chavismo” would have simply been thrown out and market reforms quickly instituted to minimize the damage inflicted. But since the “Chavismo” horde maintains an apparatus of wholesale repression, this will not happen. Even the opposition dominated congress has been supplanted by some pro-Chavismo legislative assembly mandated to rewrite the constitution to institutionalize the “socialist vision.”

Where peaceful change is foreclosed, violent upheavals become unavoidable.

Kadamay

Think about it this way: Chavismo is pretty much like putting the horde called Kadamay in power.

Kadamay broke into the national consciousness when they forcibly occupied a socialized housing project intended for soldiers and policemen. The houses had been awarded out to their intended beneficiaries but remained unoccupied because they were located too far away from work and transport.

Rep. Albee Benitez explained to me this predicament plaguing socialized housing. If they were located closer to the city, the cost will exceed the unit cost government prescribes for socialized housing because of the price of the land. Therefore socialized housing contractors build their projects where land is cheap – therefore close to the wilderness.

At any rate, Kadamay thinks that just because they were homeless they had the right to forcibly occupy homes. The equivalent of that is to allow anyone who was hungry to freely steal food. Anyone who was ill could freely avail of medical attention. To each according to his need.

This is toxic attitude, but one that inspired intellectuals and movements for generations, is arguably at the heart of the “socialist vision.” In practice, whether in Greece or Venezuela, it produces only bankrupt states and moribund economies. The re-ordering of societies required to maintain power in the face of economic failure in turn requires a massive apparatus of repression.

Nevertheless, the idea of boundless subsidies dished out by a patrimonial state is a powerful opiate. It is particularly powerful among the ranks of the marginalized, for whom the economy is a hostile entity and state power the only recourse.

Last week, a community of informal settlers saw their homes demolished so the land might be more productively used by the legal owner. Those settlers, squatting on someone else’s land, promptly declared themselves members of Kadamay and demanded President Duterte provide them with free housing. They were entertained by the presence of Liza Masa, the last leftist on the President’s team.

We have a housing backlog of about four million units. Those houses can only be built if beneficiaries pay.