Socialist Venezuela Was an ‘Economic Miracle’ to Leftists Before It Became 'Not Real Socialism'

"Since the Chávez government got control over the national oil industry, poverty has been cut by half, and extreme poverty by 70 percent," the NYT gushed in 2012.

A humanitarian crisis continues to unfold in Venezuela. Inflation is rampant and there is not enough food to feed the nation’s 28 million mouths. Capital investment has plunged. (In world struggling with inflation, Venezuela remains #1.)

One of the reasons the crisis in Venezuela is so tragic is that it was so predictable.

The irony is that I’m old enough to remember when many were citing Venezuela as one of the great triumphs of socialism. In a 2012 New York Times op-ed, Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research gushed about the gains Venezuela had experienced under Chavez after the strongman seized the assets of oil contractors in 2009:    

Since the Chávez government got control over the national oil industry, poverty has been cut by half, and extreme poverty by 70 percent. College enrollment has more than doubled, millions of people have access to health care for the first time and the number of people eligible for public pensions has quadrupled.

In 2013, left-leaning Salon (citing Weisbrot in the New York Times) claimed that Chávez had performed an “economic miracle.” Writer David Sirota even chided those who refused to acknowledge Venezuela’s economic “success”:

Chavez became the bugaboo of American politics because his full-throated advocacy of socialism and redistributionism at once represented a fundamental critique of neoliberal economics, and also delivered some indisputably positive results. Indeed, as shown by some of the most significant indicators, Chavez racked up an economic record that a legacy-obsessed American president could only dream of achieving….

When a country goes socialist and it craters, it is laughed off as a harmless and forgettable cautionary tale about the perils of command economics. When, by contrast, a country goes socialist and its economy does what Venezuela’s did, it is not perceived to be a laughing matter – and it is not so easy to write off or to ignore. It suddenly looks like a threat to the corporate capitalism, especially when said country has valuable oil resources that global powerhouses like the United States rely on.

How Venezuela arrived here is no mystery.

“All that was privatized, let it be nationalized,” Chavez famously declared in 2007.

That is precisely what the Venezuelan strong man did. After being elected as a “democratic socialist,” Chavez began nationalizing industry after industry—steel, agriculture, banking, mining, and more.

For this, Chavez was lauded as an “inspiration” by Sean Penn and “one of the most important forces on the planet.” Other socialists similarly gushed over Chavez.

Now that Venezuela’s economy is a trainwreck, it is shunned by leftists and considered “not real socialism.”

We’ve seen this kind of intellectual dishonesty over and over again. Is it too much to ask that the failures of socialism are recognized as such? Apparently so.