Hunger is a powerful force. It’s been said many times in many ways:

Any society is only three square meals away from revolution.

Venezuela is proving that point, although it’s taken a lot more than three meals…

I continue to be impressed / dismayed by just how bad people will let things get before they’ll actually start to break the rules and do what’s right, rather than what they’re told. We’ve seen this before, in man-made famines such as the Holodomor or the purges of Nazi Germany or Maoist China… people will let things get very very bad before they’ll stop lying to themselves that it will get better, and actually take matters into their own hands.

I’m pleased to see that the border guards didn’t start a massacre. I’m not sure that the same would be true if people had been this defiant in the capital of Caracas where the Chavistas have the weapons and are known to be very intolerant of dissent when they think they can get away with murder (literally).

But ask yourself this… when was the last time people fled a capitalist country in search of food in a socialist one? Sure, the prices in Colombia were 10 times what they were supposed to be in Venezuela… but ‘Supposed to be’ are the key words there… you can’t put a price on products you don’t have!

When my wife and I were in Caracas in April last year it was already very clear that government price controls were failing miserably. Bottled water could be very hard to find, toilet paper impossible… the family hosting the wedding we were attending had been stockpiling for 6 months, just to be sure they’d have the flour, butter, soap, toilet paper… so they could feed and host their guests. They would line up from 4am in the hope that when the store opened at 9am they would have the items they needed… on any given trip they felt themselves lucky if they found more than 4 useful items in stock.

That’s all a consequence of the governments price controls, intended to make essential items ‘affordable’, which naturally made them impossible to find, as anyone with even the most basic understanding of economics could have foretold.

The scary thing is this… there’s absolutely no reason Venezuela should be poor… starving even. None whatsoever. They have every reason to be wealthy, except for socialism. This matters to me for so many reasons, not least of all because I’ve seen it there with my own eyes, the suffering, the hunger, the hopelessness, but also because it could happen here. No really. Especially with the way our governments are just spend-spend-spending, and there’s no change in sight… if you follow this trajectory for long enough then eventually you run out of money, and there’s a lot of people looking forward to that day so they can use it as an excuse to say the ‘Capitalism has failed’ and introduce socialism here. Sure that’s a ‘long way off’, but can you really see us changing direction between now and then?

We either need to learn from Venezuela, or we’ll be doomed to repeat it. How do you feel about hunger? How far will you allow things to go before you’ll actually get active and do anything to change the countries direction? If you wait till you’re hungry, like the Venezuelans did, like so many others have before us, then behold your future.

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