Venezuela: Dictatorship, collapse and consequence

If you want to outline the numerous failures of ideological and economic socialism, just name any socialist nation and you are sure to uncover an endless supply of examples. In fact, many countries where socialism is not total but making considerable inroads often suffer from severe decline — the U.S. being one of them. Whatever socialism touches it destroys, because forced interdependency does not work. It is a broken concept with no large scale successes. Yet, proponents of socialism keep trying again and again claiming that “this time is different.”
So ample have been socialism’s failures in the past several years that socialists have resorted to a classic blame game in order to maintain the delusion. You see, when you bring up nations at the very end of the socialist cycle on the verge of extinction — nations like Venezuela, all you are going to hear is the argument that it was “the evil western capitalists that sabotaged the experiment.”
This is a fascinating journey into cognitive dissonance. Because in order to believe this nonsense, you have to first ignore the cold hard reality that socialist policies and politics have permeated every aspect of most western nations to the point that they can no longer be called free market societies. The fact is, if sabotage of Venezuela can be proven as the cause of its economic ills rather than the inherent downfalls of socialism, it would merely be a group of socialist nations sabotaging another socialist nation. “Capitalism” plays no part in this mess whatsoever.
Venezuela is perhaps the easiest of modern examples of socialist collapse, and maybe it is lazy to pull the Venezuela card when discussing these issues, but consider for a moment that the country is important exactly because it is a cautionary tale. Venezuela as a disaster state is at the end of the path all other socialist nations are traveling down. Venezuela is the future, and the future is bleak.
Here is the problem…