Takeout food? Yeah! That's just the ticket! It's about as good excuse as consumerism to explain the economic woes of Venezuela.
A few weeks ago reporter Nicholas Casey of the New York Times almost completely avoided any mention of socialism and placed the blame for Venezuela's economic woes on a vague "consumerism" during an interview on National Public Radio's Fresh Air as chronicled in Newsbusters by Clay Waters. Since that "consumerism" excuse seems to have been widely mocked, Casey went to bat with an even more laughable excuse, comparing Venezuela's economic woes to someone who has been ordering takeout food for years and suddenly needs to cook. I kid you not. Here is the money quote from Casey avoiding the very obvious while being interviewed on PBS Newshour:
But the bigger question, though, Hari, is that if there is a referendum, if there’s a new government in power, will they be able to put more food on people’s plates? And that’s not entirely clear, because for so many years, Venezuela was dependent on oil to bring in almost everything they needed.
This country had become, you know, you could say, like a rich guy that had forgotten how to cook and had been ordering takeout for years. And suddenly, when the money disappeared, there was no money to buy some of the basics anymore. That model doesn’t change whether the opposition or the Chavistas are in power, whether the left is power or not. That remains the same.
Got that? The system of government in Venezuela is irrelevant. According to Casey, no matter who was in power would have been like that rich guy ordering takeout food who forgot how to cook. Hey, if you work at the New York Times where massive layoffs are rumored for later this summer, it is much better for your job security to be mocked for the lame takeout food excuse than mentioning the all too obvious reason for the lack of food and other commodities in Venezuela. Of course, Casey's reluctance to point out the screaming elephant in the room was noticed by many of the readers:
The cause? They are socialist. I'm amazed this is puzzling to people. Despite having the world's largest reserves of oil there are shortages of basic necessities.
I'll tell you the reason behind the collapse.... Wait for it... SOCIALISM/COMMUNISM. Take out food? The socialist relies on others to produce for them because they are incapable of producing. And why should they produce? It's merely confiscated by the government.
How like PBS to sidestep the fact that Venezuela is Socialist. Every Socialist regime ends in this way, they run out of other people's money, or in this case oil money. Price controls and hostile regulation of business only produced shortages of every commodity produced in country which is why they had to import everything.
My homework assignment for Nicholas Casey would be to put down that takeout food and ask Hugo Chavez's daughter how she ended up as the richest Venezuelan worth $4.2 billion dollars (not nearly worthless Bolivares).
