An Inflated Venezuela

This article comes from "The Washington Post"

Three more are dead in the tumult of Venezuela: a university student, a National Guard captain, and a guy painting the front of his house.

First of all, however horrific, violence is nothing new to Venezuela. It has the highest per capita murder rate in the world, with approximately 70 people killed each day (I'm sure that number has increased with the riots). It also has egregious inflation rates. According to both the article above and NPR, Venezuela underwent approximately 56 percent inflation last year.

It may not be prudent to point fingers, but I don't think it's any stretch of the imagination to assign a majority of Venezuela's massive inflation to Maduro's seizure of large portions of Venezuela's private sector. According to NPR, Maduro's primary opposition, Lopez, is "a hard line radical," but I also don't think it is reasonable to give Lopez all of the credit for inflaming the Venezuelan people. 56 percent inflation bites.

The upheaval we are observing now appear to me to be, in a large way, natural. Like we talked about in class, when a leader fosters a cult-like following, the successor will never be able to live up to the people's expectations. It's not Maduro's fault he came second. It is his fault that he seized entire industries and stabilized their prices, but somebody had to mess up eventually.

I don't advocate laissez-faire economics, to be sure. I'm also not sure how I feel about socialism. My point is not to be partisan in my analysis of Venezuela. I actually don't think the actions of any of the many parties involved are wholly correct or wholly incorrect. I mostly just feel like, ultimately, the Venezuelan people are getting stiffed, and it is going to take a while to dig out of this mess.