Here’s an experiment: write down everything you’ll need for the next year. Everything: the simple stuff like how many boxes of oatmeal or toilet-paper rolls, and the hard stuff: how many new cell phones you’ll need because one broke or one was lost. How many times will the plumber need to come out to the house to handle an emergency? How many times will you need to take a car into the garage because of some unexpected problem?

Tough to get right.

Now, do the same thing for the folks across the street.

Meanwhile, if you haven’t been keeping up with news in Latin America, there are a few countries where things aren’t going smoothly. Consider Venezuela: a country of 31 million people, covering about 350,000 square miles (about 1/10th the size of the US in both population and land area). Venezuela is a country blessed with a host of natural resources, to include some of the world’s largest oil deposits, excellent grazing lands and huge rain forests. And a literate and energetic people, with a literacy rate of 97%.

Venezuela’s oil reserves are nominally the largest on earth, approximately 300 billion barrels (US shale oil and Canadian tar sands reserves are substantially larger but are not reflected in regular oil reserves estimates). Venezuelan oil is heavy and costly to refine, and that does affect profits, but 2.5 million barrels per day this represent a considerable economic benefit.

In addition, Venezuela has almost 6 trillion cubic meters of natural gas – 8th in the world, and produces more than 27 billion cubic meters per year. In short, lots of natural resources.

So, why is Venezuela suffering from dramatic shortages of nearly everything, inflation near 800% in 2017 and currently over 8,000%, with a world-class case of “brain drain?” Because since the 1990s the government of Venezuela has pursued a series of programs that have bankrupted the country. While the programs nominally reduced poverty from about 25% of the population to 15%, it was done by borrowing huge amounts of money and committing it to a series of programs that in many cases have not endured. The current government budget is more than twice annual revenues, while the price of oil and gas has fluctuated up and down, as commodities will do. The result has been short periods of boom, increasingly long periods of bust, the confiscation of personal property by the government, and the fleeing of the county by anyone who can find a way into the US or Canada (more than 1 million left the country since 1999).

Now Venezuela teeters on the edge of collapse and there are literally tens of thousands trying to leave the country right now, trying to cross the border into Brazil.

The root cause of this is government control and government ownership of the oil and gas industry and virtually any other industry, the wholesale confiscation of personal property as well as personal services (to include telling doctors and nurses what they will do and what they won’t), which is why they leave and come to the US or Canada).
In short, Venezuela is failing right before our eyes.

So what, you say. That’s Venezuela…
This past week a number of folks got together to, among other things, decide on a course for the future. They appear to have endorsed a nationalized health care system (though they don’t call it that), free school for all up through and including college, and perhaps even a guaranteed wage for all. All part of the benefits of centralized planning. Where they’ll get the money to pay for all this, never mind the more important question of how they’ll effectively manage these huge issues, was not (and is never) explained.

But that wasn’t Venezuela, or Nicaragua (another demonstration of the mess that is socialism), the meeting was in Atlanta, where Democratic Party Leadership met with major donors; interesting that their plan for our nation’s future seems to be taking a page from Venezuela.

So, go back to our starting question. And multiply that by 100 million. And then consider the folks “making the lists,” the people determining the “who, what, when and where” of the economy, are bureaucrats sitting hundreds of miles away. That starts to get at the problem of centrally controlled economies, of the central tenet of socialism. Good luck getting the list right.