The Endless “Riches” of Socialism

One vignette among several:

Standing at the door of his day job as a security guard at a pharmacy, Jonathan Marquez, 40, is tired. He has not slept well in two months, since taking a second job, driving a taxi on weekends. He said on Saturdays he used to spend time with his family, but “since I took the second job I barely see them.”

Even with both salaries, he still struggles to feed his family. Marquez’s weekly paycheck of 250,000 bolívars is only enough to buy food. A bar of soap, for example, costs 200,000 bolívars.  “Either we clean properly or we eat,” he said. He always picks food and ends up mixing shampoo left over with water and uses the liquid as soap.

Well, the one thing that we’ve learned from progressives is that socialism can definitely provide an adequate amount of health-care goods and services.  Ooops:

Francisco de Castro, 75, is also facing a dilemma: buy one or two boxes of the medicine he needs to treat his high blood pressure. With medicine growing scarce, De Castro, a retired salesman, hunts daily to find it. If he does, a box of 10 pills can cost more than his monthly pension.

He stopped taking a whole pill daily months ago, and instead has been splitting each pill into four chunks. “That way, I feel I take the treatment every day,” he said.

Amazing to find these accounts on an obscure corner of NBC. But of course they provide few details on what is causing the shortages and none on what is causing the hyperinflation.

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5:58 pm on March 12, 2018