And So it Begins

Food rationing is coming to Venezuela:

A Venezuelan state is testing a system to limit purchases of food and other staples, local media reported on Tuesday, in a move that officials defended as necessary to stop contraband trade but opposition critics slammed as Cuban-style rationing.

The OPEC nation’s consumers have for months had to endure long lines or visit several stores to find basic products that run the gamut from toilet paper to butter, driven in part by a lack of hard currency to ensure imports.

The state of Zulia in western Venezuela said it will launch a pilot program next week that uses a digital system to block shoppers from buying the same staple products at different stores on the same day.

Well, Venezuela has been practicing Cuban-style progressivism, so of course the result will be Cuban-style rationing.

But there’s more — er, less:

“Considering the average size of a family, one person should only buy 20 staple products during the period that we establish, which we think will be one week,” Blagdimir Labrador, an official with the Zulia state government, told the newspaper Panorama in an interview published on Tuesday.

As I said on Trifecta a week or two ago, tyranny is nothing more than someone else making your life’s decisions for you. And here we have a petty official of a petty Venezuelan state deciding the contents of people’s stomachs.