"A Venezuelan state agency on Friday ordered the temporary takeover of a factory that produces toilet paper in what it called an effort to ensure consistent supplies after embarrassing shortages earlier this year.
Critics of President Nicolas Maduro say the nagging shortages of products ranging from bathroom tissue to milk are a sign his socialist government's rigid price and currency controls are failing. They have also used the situation to poke fun at his administration on social media networks."
The latter part of that statement is true, as you can see below hehe
@JeffShetler Yeah, shit's getting real serious down there
— One Small Voice (@hosvblog) September 21, 2013
So like the article states, this is a failure of socialistic price controls creating shortages in a desired good. Totally obvious, right? Well, apparently not. A few paragraphs later we get this,
"Government supporters laud efforts by Maduro, the successor to late socialist leader Hugo Chavez, for maintaining tough regulations of private businesses.
They blame unscrupulous merchants for hoarding products to make quick profits, and celebrate the socialist government's legacy of social assistance programs."
<Facepalm> This is what we're dealing with here, are masses who completely fail to see the relationship between government mandated price controls and the shortages they're experiencing. And in this lack of understanding, they think the answer to a government created solution is more government control.
This plays out well for the offending government because they can be seen as "doing something" and acting on behalf of the people against the "wicked capitalists" who are holding the toilet paper hostage as if they're sitting on their gilded thrones having a private little giggle at the thought of tens of thousands of people having to use a banana leaf to wipe their ass or something while they have a whole wall of toilet paper stacked behind them.
Unfortunately, we have a similar situation here in the US. We have tens of millions of people who believe the whole housing bubble and economic crisis from 2008 was caused by the failures of the free market. Ha! It was those wicked capitalists again ruining the economy for their own personal gain. Ok, well this is partially true but what all these people miss is that none of their actions would have been possible were it not for the government aiding, abetting, mandating, and, yes, regulating the Too Big To Fail banks into taking the actions that they did. For a full treatise on this, I highly recommend Tom Woods's book Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse.
And just like they're doing in Venezuela, we have the ignorant masses calling on government, the same government who created the problem, to swoop in and fix the problem and really put the hurt on those evil capitalists. Boy, they sure showed those banks, wrangling up all the execs and throwing them into jail, levying massive fines against businesses like Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan who committed fraud on an epic level, and letting the market punish them for their poor business choices. Oh wait.
Nonetheless, the people still seem to think that the government which aided in the crisis and then failed to punish or prosecute hardly anyone over a situation that affected millions of people can somehow be trusted to all of a sudden do the right thing by them and fix it. 'In Government We Trust' seems to be the thinking of people worldwide.
The sad irony is that in the end, despite (supposedly) good intentions, in both situations more government intervention will just make things worse. It's my hope that through social media, which is allowing information to spread farther and wider than it ever has before, that we can provide the knowledge to the masses so we can maybe, finally start learning from our mistakes instead of making the same ones over and over again.
Perhaps in the future if we keep pushing and educating and networking, people like those in Venezuela will see their toilet paper shortage for what it is, a byproduct of government mandated price controls, and they will cry out for the correct answer which is less government, not more. Until then, things will remain shitty for the poor people of Venezuela.
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