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While Americans are subjected to a political circus in our nations capital, riots, shortages, and repression are rocking the streets of Venezuela as their citizenry is finally fed up with Socialist President Nicolas Maduros rule.

Thousands have been arrested as inflation spirals into Weimar territory and Venezuelans are even losing large amounts of weight en masse from food shortages in one of the worlds most oil-rich nations. The Socialist experiment has neared the end of its natural and inevitable course in Venezuela.

When Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez died in 2013, there briefly was a glimmer of hope that the socialist state apparatus he had built over the prior decade would start on the road towards reform and freedom. However Nicolas Maduro has continued many of Chavezs socialist policies, both economically and politically.

Almost two decades of strongman socialist rule in Venezuela has led not to more prosperity for the people, but, according to the Economist, to 82% of households living in poverty compared to 48% prior to Chavez. Amid rhetoric championing redistribution and struggle against wealthy elites, Venezuelans now have neither liberty nor prosperity and must watch as their nation collapses around them.

Venezuelas socialist system is the same rehashed model of left-wing redistribution and repression that has existed in many other nations over the course of the 20th century. In many such nations, people give their rights to soothsayers who promise to solve all their problems. After securing its power, the states ruling class reigns supreme, enriching themselves at the expense of the citizenry and with all liberties and human rights existing only in accordance with their desires.

Skip several thousand miles to the United States and we come to a nation where almost half of millennials have a favorable opinion of socialism, according to a recent Harvard University survey, and a Democratic Socialist nearly won the nomination for one of our countrys major political parties.

Countries like North Korea are so distant and twisted that it may be difficult for Americans to draw lessons from their situation. Cuba is right off our shore, but lacks immediate events that thrust it into our public consciousness. Venezuela thus ought to serve as a timely and relevant reminder for us to avoid a similar and too often-repeated cycle.

Venezuela was not always a repressive socialist state, but rather was once an emerging democracy and a developing economy. While wrangling with the challenges inevitably such modern liberal democracies face as they grow, it nonetheless had the foundation for a free press, free markets, and a constitutional system of representation and rights.

However in such a system, even without a revolution or military conflict, a mass vote by enough people can wipe it all away. And thats precisely what happened in Venezuela, where strongmen like Chavez played to the passions of the poor, enraged them against the wealthy private sector businesspeople and elites, used the name of America as an ethereal scapegoat, and sold them a system that bled their supposed enemies a little but resulted in a smaller pie for everyone.

Here in America we face a similar challenge. Many Americans are reeling from some of the unique economic challenges the 21st century is presenting us with. In response, already many are singing a sirens song that threatens to repeat Venezuelas situation here, inciting hatred against elites supposedly at fault and advocating for socialist redistribution as the solution to our new woes.

These redistributionists do this all while ignoring that their proposals will leave the people they purport to be helping more poor and deprived than ever before. Furthermore, proper policy responses to these new developments in technology and our economy have the potential to bring us incredible levels of prosperity and an even faster rising tide for everyone.

The people of Venezuela have found themselves in a situation that is difficult to escape. Their struggle to restore their republic and liberty will be a long one, and hopefully will succeed.

In the meantime, we Americans ought to look closely at what has transpired in Venezuela and ensure it is not repeated in our country. We must always be vigilant in standing for free markets and God-given constitutional liberties, which have led to and will continue to lead to more prosperity and liberty than any other ideas throughout history.

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Venezuela's Disaster Demonstrates Socialism's Failure - The Daily Caller

It appears that Jim Larson is the one doing the wool pulling. His column should be labeled "Democrats and RINOs."

Anytime Democrats want more socialism and more wasting of the taxpayers' dollars, why he's all for it. Sadly, so many socialist programs are in place and so many voters are clamoring for more freebies, it matters not who is elected. We continue to march down the road of big socialist government at varying speeds.

As Margaret Thatcher said, socialism works fine until you run out of other people's money. Remember now, the chairman of the Communist Party USA, when asked about the future of his party way back in the 1950s, replied that there was no longer a need for the Communist Party, as the Democrats had adopted 70 percent of their agenda.

So, let's all go vote for the politician who offers us the most freebies.

As for creating jobs, it is private enterprise, free of government constraints, that has created jobs. The only jobs government creates are government jobs and the taxpayers get taken to the cleaners.

It was a good empire while it lasted.

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Democrats advocating for more socialism - The Missoulian

Few things frustrate a historian or political scientist more than to witness reprisals of debates that have been settled for decades, or even centuries. So anyone with a legitimate claim to those labels could only throw up his hands upon reading a recent Vox article endeavoring to explain the pro-Trump movements seemingly bizarre embrace of socialist platforms.

The alt-right and its fellow nationalists, marvels author Dylan Matthews, love single-payer health care. Theyre also proponents of a universal basic income, increased welfare spending, and pro-labor controls on the economy.

This presents Matthews with a conundrum. To him and much of the political left, socialism is good and nationalism bad. That binary is hard to maintain when prominent nationalists are supporting economic policies that would make Bernie Sanders blush, so Matthews is left to conclude that nationalists social welfare rhetoric amounts to mere strategy. Its not so much that socialists and nationalists share a common ideology; its that nationalists adopt popular socialist stances to attract more followers.

But as anyone familiar with political history could attest, the embrace of social statism isnt some strategy intended to serve a separate and external goal of nationalism. It is the goal.

To be sure, nationalism is a dynamic concept that doesnt lend itself to universal definition. Orwell influentially described it as identifying with a single nation or unit and recognizing no duty except the nations advancement, whereas some modern writers have conceived nationalism (at least of the American variety) more restrictively as a benign, democratic ethos defined primarily by loyalty to ones country above all else.

Despite any descriptive variation, though, the irreducible minimum in any conception of nationalism is abrogation of the individual as the relevant unit of political power. Absent that feature, the term is incoherent. The sine qua non of nationalism is the idea that the nation is supreme, and national supremacy doesnt admit exceptions in the name of individual liberty. So to endorse nationalism, even for purportedly benevolent purposes, is to accept the idea that the citizen exists to serve the nation rather than the reverse.

The same goes for socialism. The two doctrines employ distinct language and imagery in expressing their respective missions broadly, public before self versus country before self but the basic feature of both is the use of centralized power at the expense of individual freedom to achieve an ill-defined and necessarily pliable common good. Both are, in other words, just rudimentary variants of authoritarianism.

Its not a coincidence, then, that leaders in both camps inveigh against conspiratorial elites and make utopian promises of universal prosperity. Those tactics are central to how any authoritarian movement coalesces enough support to achieve its ultimate end, which is to take over the instruments of social control.

Socialists dont like to imagine themselves as ideological bedfellows of Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen, so they look outside their shared authoritarian core to find where they and nationalists ostensibly differ. True, they say, we want more power in the hands of government. But we want to use it in the name of everyones well-being, whereas the nationalists are just a bunch of jingoistic racists obsessed with putting country above all else.

In reality, the differences socialists imagine are superficial and usually complementary. The socialist tax on the rich to fund wealth redistribution in the name of social equality is not meaningfully different from the nationalist use of economic controls on business and trade to promote national welfare. It doesnt matter to the individual whether hes forced to hand over the product of his labor in taxes or to channel that product according to a centralized directive. It matters only that he is forced.

What these superficial differences accomplish above all is to obscure the crucial truth that socialism cant exist without nationalism (or vice versa). A $15 minimum wage, for example, would be meaningless in the long term without simultaneous controls to prevent U.S. businesses from hiring cheap foreign labor, or from importing the cheap products that foreign labor makes possible. Redistributive social programs would quickly collapse without immigration restrictions to limit the number of people who could claim their benefits. And so on.

An ideology based on force doesnt countenance half-measures. No matter the particular policy, the realities of economics doom any socialist effort that doesnt have a nationalist companion to stamp out individual freedom across borders.

Sadly, as the Vox article shows only too clearly, the modern left has let sideshows like the alt-right obscure this symbiosis. Yes, there are racist nationalists, of which the alt-right is the most prominent representative in the United States. But contrary to fashionable lore, racism isnt an integral part of nationalism. It is, at most, a convenient adjunct. What defines nationalism, like socialism, is the subordination of individual freedom to an amorphous higher good. Socialists cant coherently fault nationalists for racism while championing an ideology that uses a different social construct (i.e., class) to accomplish the same destruction of the individual in the name of an alternatively phrased higher good.

Its critical that anti-authoritarians at all points along the political spectrum, but especially those who call themselves liberals, figure this out. The Republican Party has finally completed its devolution into the party of American nationalism. Any movement that wants to oppose that creed has to fashion itself not as the party of socialism, but as the party of individual freedom. And it cant be shy about reaching out to erstwhile political opponents to unite around that common issue. Otherwise well be left with a national political order in which the American left and right are just two sides of the same rotten authoritarian coin.

In the midst of World War II, Austrian theorist Friedrich Hayek explained how accepting the structure and premise of socialism leads necessarily to fascism, as he watched happen in his home country with the ascendancy of the eras most prominent socialist party. More than 70 years have passed since, and we still havent learned that lesson.

Until we recognize authoritarianism, in whatever form it takes, as the ultimate evil to be averted, our march down the road to serfdom will continue. And self-professed liberals like our friends at Vox will be leading the parade.

Matthew Pritchard is a former federal public defender and now works as a litigator in the San Francisco Bay area. He writes about law and government from a classical liberal perspective.

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Nationalism Is Just Socialism Draped In A Flag - The Federalist - The Federalist

General election 2017: Alliance for Green Socialism policies BBC News A party that wants to stop global warming, invest in renewable energy and sustainable infrastructure, abandon "endless economic growth", and replace the monarchy with an elected presidency is putting up three candidates on 8 June. Alliance for Green ...

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General election 2017: Alliance for Green Socialism policies - BBC News

As Venezuela continues to implode, with riots and looting and increasing reports of starvation, lets take a moment to note that it was once the richest nation in Latin America, with vast oil reserves and an educated, productive workforce.

Venezuela is a country in crisis. Protesters that are opposed to the socialist government are being killed, and Venezuelan citizens are starving to death, reports Forbes magazine. A humanitarian disaster is unfolding that has been in the making for years. The current crisis can be traced to the historical management of the country's oil industry.

Its all about how the oil wealth has been managed.

Venezuelas highest-ever oil production occurred in 1998 at 3.5 million barrels per day (BPD), the magazine explains. That also happened to be the year that Hugo Chvez was elected president of Venezuela. During the Venezuelan general strike of 20022003, Chvez fired 19,000 employees of the state oil company Petrleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA) and replaced them with employees loyal to his government.

That gutted his most experienced and effective workers. This exacerbated a problem Venezuela already faced - its oil was a particularly heavy variety, which required special refining techniques.

Because this oil is particularly challenging to produce, Venezuela invited international oil companies into the country to participate in the development of these reserves, Forbes says. Companies like ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron, Total and ConocoPhillips invested billions of dollars in technology and infrastructure to turn the extra-heavy oil into crude oil exports.

Perhaps they should have read up a little on the history of socialism.

In 2007 oil prices were on the rise, and the Chvez government sought more revenue as the investments made by the international oil companies began to pay off, Forbes recounts. Venezuela demanded changes to the agreements made by the international oil companies that would give PDVSA majority control of the projects. Total, Chevron, Statoil and BP agreed and retained minority interests in their Venezuelan projects. ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips refused, and as a result, their assets were expropriated.

And lets not discount the cost of the social programs Chvez promised to his citizens.

When oil prices were high, Chvez saw billions of dollars that could be siphoned to fund the country's social programs, and thats exactly what he did, Forbes adds. But he failed to reinvest adequately in this capital-intensive industry.

The result has been that while oil production has soared everywhere else (particularly in the U.S., due to the fracking revolution), it has declined in Venezuela.

Since 2007 oil production there has been on a steep decline, despite oil prices that were regularly above $100 per barrel, Forbes says. In 2015 Venezuelas oil production had fallen to 2.6 million barrels per day, a decrease of more than 20 percent below 2006 levels. By comparison, the U.S. has oil reserves of less than 20 percent of Venezuelas, yet U.S. oil production rose by 86 percent from 2006 to 2015.

Its clear why Venezuela is starving. Socialism fails - everywhere it is tried, every time.

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Editorial: Socialism drained Venezeula of its vast oil wealth - Tyler Morning Telegraph