Back in 2015, I mocked Venezuelan socialism because it led to shortages of just about every product. Including toilet paper.
But maybe that doesn’t matter. After all, if people don’t have anything to eat, they probably don’t have much need to visit the bathroom.
The Washington Post reports that farmers are producing less and less food because of government intervention, even though the nation is filled with hungry people.
...Here’s where we get to the economics lesson. When producers aren’t allowed to profit, they don’t produce.
And when we’re looking at the production of food, that means hungry people.
Even the left-wing Guardian in the U.K. has noticed.
Hunger is gnawing at Venezuela, where a government that claims to rule for the poorest has left most of its 31 million people short of food, many desperately so. …Adriana Velásquez gets ready for work, heading out into an uncertain darkness as she has done since hunger forced her into the only job she could find at 14. She was introduced to her brothel madam by a friend more than two years ago after her mother, a single parent, was fired and the two ran out of food. “It was really hard, but we were going to bed without eating,” said the teenager, whose name has been changed to protect her. …Venezuela’s crisis has deepened, the number of women working at the brothel has doubled, and their ages have dropped. “I was the youngest when I started. Now there are girls who are 12 or 13. Almost all of us are there because of the crisis, because of hunger.” She earns 400,000 bolivares a month, around four times the minimum wage, but at a time of hyperinflation that is now worth about $30, barely enough to feed herself, her mother and a new baby brother.
This is truly sad.
Our leftist friends like to concoct far-fetched theories of how prostitution is enabled by everything from low taxes to global warming.
In the real world, however, socialism drives teenage girls (or even younger) to work in brothels.
That’s such a depressing thought that let’s shift the topic back to hunger and toilet paper.
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