LOL, the US gives far less of a shit about Venezuela than you think I would guess. Maduro needs the idea the US is out to get him far more than Joe Biden needs anything he's got.
And if those are the big lessons you are taking away from the train wreck going on there maybe you should stop worrying so much about "US conservatives", which really have next to nothing to do with Venezuela's problems, and capitalize on what should be a great learning opportunity. It's not often you get to see a country so badly run it completely fucks itself and its people over. I think there is near unanimity among economists right, left and center at this point that Maduro's policies are disastrous, and predictably disastrous in just the ways basic economics would predict. Only a few bitter clingers like Unter, the anarchist who loves intrusive government, will refuse to acknowledge it.
It's even hard to imagine how Joe Biden could screw up Venezuela any worse than Maduro's policies if he wanted to. A good conspiracy theorist might even argue the US sent Maduro in there to fuck up the country as much as possible.
Perhaps I was too subtle.
I am not defending Venezuela or Chavez. Their original goals were reasonable, to lift more people out of poverty instead of continue to further enriching the oligarchy. But the way that they went about it was, as you pointed out, doomed to failure like all of the socialist experiments have been in the past. Simply put any system based on ideology and not reality is going to fail
But this also true for conservatives' favorite economic system, the fantasy of the self-regulating, self-organizing free market. An economy that can operate without regulations and a government to write and to enforce them. A system that is suppose to be the so-called natural state of the economy but which has never occurred. This is even more irrational than the idea that the government can decide everything in the economy.
The post I responded to asked why the comparison between Venezuela to the US. I answered, that American conservatives see a parallel between the Chavez policies in Venezuela and the attempts to achieve some larger degree of social justice here in the US. This is idiotic. There is no reason for the US to resort to socialism to achieve this goal of reducing poverty for example.
If we have learned nothing else over the forty years, it is that capitalism is a very robust economic system that can be tweaked to obtain nearly any reasonable income distribution that we want or need. We learned this when we changed policies forty years ago to increase the amount of that goes to the already wealthy in order to achieve the yet unrealized goal of more investment in the physical, real economy. We simply must slowly reverse the policies that has redistributed so much income to the already wealthy.
We have also learned what we had forgotten forty years ago, that conservatives are terrible at governing and that we must, again, re-learn the simple truth that they should be ignored. That "just say no" is not going to solve our problems or help us face the changes that are coming.
This is especially true when conservatives take that all too short of a step to the right to full blown reactionary, as the so-called movement conservatism has in the US. A step that has them wanting to rollback one hundred years of social progress.
