Beer Is Freedom: Pry It from My Cold Dead Hands (Venezuela)

Source: Conservative Review | May 2, 2016 | Matt Kibbe

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As it turns out, you can’t be a socialist country and still produce your own beer. I’m not joking.  And, for me, all of the theoretical critiques regarding the failures of rational economic calculation under central socialist planning just got personal. Very personal.

Why? Because, “due to the growing shortage of ingredients, Cervecería Polar, Venezuela’s largest brewery, announced that it will suspend its production of beer and other malt beverages.” Polar produces 80 percent of the nation’s beer.

If you want to understand the practical disaster that is socialism, pay attention to the economic meltdown happening right now in Caracas, Venezuela. Hugo Chavez, once the celebrated wonder boy of Socialism’s second coming, has left, in his post-mortem wake, an economic hellhole. “The people” – the men-and-women-on-the-street masses that socialists claim to care so very much about – can’t buy food and they can’t buy diapers for their children. In fact, they can’t even go to the local shopping mall anymore to peruse the empty shelves, because Venezuela is running out of electricity. Many Venezuelans go to the mall to escape crime in the streets, even knowing there will be nothing on the shelves to buy:

Security concerns make the well-lit, guarded malls — with their restaurants, cinemas and theaters — a preferred leisure option for Venezuelans. The country’s homicide rate is among the world’s highest at 58 deaths per 100,000 people.

All of this really sucks, and if it happened in the United States, there would be revolution in the streets.

But no more beer? It turns out that a cold one, or a cold six-pack, is the best way to ride out the economic chaos that is socialism in practice. Beer is freedom. Or, at least, beer is a way to take the sharp edges off the inevitable mass poverty that results from the ostensible good intentions of socialist planners.

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