Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro is desperate to put the brakes on a mass protest movement that threatens his absolutist rule. As a woke socialist, Maduro did what every armchair liberal economist has advocated for: He raised minimum wage.
“On his regular television show, ‘Sundays with Maduro,’ the president ordered a 60 percent increase in the country’s minimum wage starting Monday,” reports the Associated Press. “It was the third pay increase the socialist leader has ordered this year and the 15th since he became president in 2013.”
Taking the country’s skyrocketing inflation into account, a 60% increase only puts the minimum wage at $3 a day.
“With the latest wage increase and mandatory food subsidies, the minimum take home pay for millions of Venezuelans now stands at 200,000 bolivars a month — or less than $50 at the widely used black market rate,” explains AP.
But wait, there’s more! Maduro handed out hundreds of homes, yes, homes, in an effort to placate his increasingly empowered opposition.
Built with Chinese funding, these homes only add to the over one and half million public housing units constructed since the rise of socialist dictator Hugo Chavez.
At this point, however, there’s very little the socialist president could do to stabilize Venezuela’s economy. He could raise the minimum wage by 100% and hand out thousands of homes, and still, Venezuela, would plunge further into the pits of hell.
Without a fundamental transformation to the economy (in other words replacing the socialist system with a free market capitalist system), Venezuela’s starving people will continue to devour dog carcasses for sustenance.
Deprived of medicine, food, and clean water, Venezuelans have taken to the streets in the last few weeks, demanding that Maduro step down from power. Since the protests began, 29 people have been killed and thousands of others have been injured. Add that to the 1,300 arrests and Maduro begins resembling dictator Bashar al-Assad in the early days of the Syrian uprising. If things continue going the way they’ve been going in the last month, expect an absolute bloodbath in the last true bastion of Chavismo socialism.
With denialism and delusion informing nearly every public address, Maduro appears hell-bent on occupying the presidential palace indefinitely. When he’s not sending riot police to beat and detain his own people, the socialist president is peddling conspiracy theories about CIA coups and covert US economic sabotage.
As the AP notes, “In addition to the pay hike, [Maduro] announced a special ‘economic war’ bonus to retirees to make up for what he says are attempts by the opposition to sabotage the economy.”
Comfortably ensconced in Venezuela’s Versailles, Maduro is attempting to buy his people off with worthless bolivars. But whether he wants to see the writing on the wall or not, Venezuela’s people are desperate for change. Some would rather die than live one more day in Chavez’s failed dystopian Marxist experiment. The tens of thousands of protesters flooding the streets of Caracas have had enough.
Make no mistake, history will repeat itself. And the corrupt oligarch telling his people to eat cake will face the same fate as his despotic predecessors before him. It may take months or even years, but liberty has a way of shining bright even in the darkest of places.
