Merry Christmas, from Comrade Papá Noel:
Venezuelan authorities have arrested two toy company executives and seized almost four million toys, which they say they will distribute to the poor. Officials accused the company of hoarding toys and hiking prices in the run-up to Christmas. Last week, the government issued an order to retailers to reduce prices on a range of goods by 30%.
Business owners say the order is a populist political move, and pushing them towards bankruptcy. Venezuela’s consumer protection agency, Sundde, said toy distributor Kreisel had stockpiled the goods and was reselling them at a margin of up to 50,000%.
“Our children are sacred, we will not let them rob you of Christmas,” it said in a tweet, along with photos and video of thousands of boxes of toys. In total, 3,821,926 toys were seized from two warehouses, and would be sold at low prices, it said.
William Contreras, head of Sundde, said Kreisel had claimed the toys were old or discontinued. The agency also posted photos of the two executives being marched from the premises by a squad of heavily armed soldiers.
This is communism wrapped in a Latin American banana peel — increasing scarcity, increasing misery, increasing authoritarianism until either the wretched place collapses (the Soviet Union) or continues as a state-run prison, in which the penalty for just about everything is death. Soft-headed layabouts like Bernie Sanders, who’s never held an honest job in his life, can extol the virtues of “socialism” all he wants to an audience of gullible youngsters, but until you’ve experienced it for yourself — as I have, in the US.S.R, East Germany and elsewhere in eastern Europe — you simply have no idea what a monstrous lie it is, and how evil the people who advocate it really are.
When the nation finally expires, as it inevitably will, we shouldn’t give the starving people a dime until they storm the presidential palace and hang all their leaders. After all, they voted them in. Otherwise, the cycle will simply repeat itself.
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