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Venezuela's socialists to the public: Since there's no food, you should all breed (and eat) rabbits



Well you know they do breed like . . . eh, too obvious, isn't it? This is what it's come to with socialism, is it? I'm sort of surprised the Soviets and their eastern European regimes never thought of this. They had rabbits back then! Where are the North Koreans on this?
Ah, but those poor, dumb, sentimental Venezuelans can't quite bring themselves to throw Bugs into the rabbit stew, can they? Elmer Fudd would be appalled. Back in the real world, every decent person should be appalled by what's happening in Venezuela. Socialist criminals have hijacked an economy that was rich with natural resources and turned it into something less than a Third World country, where people are battling starvation, fleeing persecution and helpless to stop the regime from throwing out the nation's constitution in order to consolidate its own grip on power. But be thankful, you clods. Your president has come up with a plan to keep you from starving:
President Maduro revealed the idea on state television, saying that "for animal protein, which is such an important issue, a 'rabbit plan' has been approved because rabbits also breed like rabbits". The leader did say that the "rabbit plan" had not got off to a good start and the minister of urban agriculture, Freddy Bernal, said there had been a "cultural problem". President Maduro said rabbit kittens had been handed to 15 communities as part of a pilot project by Mr Bernal.

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"When he came back, to his surprise he found people had put little bows on their rabbits and were keeping them as pets, it was an early setback to Plan Rabbit." "A lot of people gave names to the rabbits, they took them to bed," Mr Bernal said. The minister urged Venezuelans to start seeing rabbits "from the point of view of the economic war". Amid laughter from fellow ministers at a cabinet meeting, he said that "we need a publicity campaign on radio, TV, in newspapers, in cartoons, everywhere, so that the people understand that rabbits aren't pets but two and a half kilos of meat".
I was once in public relations and few things amused me more than the "public education campaign," which was designed to persuade entire cultures of people to believe something they were not already inclined to believe. I never saw a single one make even the slightest dent in public thinking, but lots of luck explaining the people of Venezuela that "rabbits aren't pets but two and a half kilos of meat." You get enough celebrities on board, and who knows? I don't think Miguel Cabrera is inclined to help but I suppose they could ask.

Let's review again, because we can never do so enough, the basics here: One of the major moves of the socialist regime was to impose price controls on goods, and to heavily regulate who could sell what and how much. This was sold to the public as a way to prevent greedy business owners from charging them unfairly high prices for the goods they needed. People who don't know much about economics tend to cheer moves like this because they'd always rather pay less instead of more, and they don't really have any idea why things are priced as they are. Those who understand economics, of course, know that price controls result in shortages of goods because manufacturers and retailers can't make enough money selling the goods to keep the shelves stocked. Liberals always deny this and insist that the business owners are sitting on piles of money, but anyone with experience in business understands that companies like this usually operate on very thin margins, and if they could really make money selling at government-controlled prices, then they wouldn't stop producing, distributing and selling. Yet that's what happened in Venezuela because you simply can't produce to any level of volume when the government has taken away your margins. I go through this because the economic assumptions that drove the Chavistas are the same ones that drive the Democratic Party. They haven't taken it as far because it hasn't been politically possible for them - yet. But the leftists who vote for people like Hillary, Obama and Kerry are just as resentful of capitalist businessmen as the Chavistas, and they're convinced they need the government to control what they do and limit their profits. This is what you get if you take that as far as these people would really like to take it: The government is telling you to breed rabbits for human consumption because there's no other food left.


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Dan Calabrese -- Bio and Archives

Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain

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