Memo To Venezuela: The Soviets Nationalized Food Distribution And Guess What? It Didn't Work

There is a point to the study of history. For as George Santayana said, those who fail to study it are doomed to repeat it. The point therefore being to find out which things people tried in the past, which of those things didn’t work and then not do them. It’s this part of the process that President Maduro and his merry band in Venezuela seem to have missed. For they’ve just decided to start down, or perhaps continue down the path given their past actions, of one of the greatest mistakes made by the Soviet Union. That is, the nationalization of the food distribution system. It’s entirely true that markets do not solve every problem: they’re unlikely to make Mom’s apple pie taste any better or worse for example. But one area where they really do work very well is in that distribution of food from the farmer to the consumer. And there’s absolutely no non-market method ever tried, or at least none that’s survived into recorded history, that has been successful. More…