Even Venezuela’s president now admits that socialism has been a complete failure.  Via Yahoo:

Under-fire Venezuela President Nicolas Maduro admitted his economic model has “failed” in the wake of food and medicine shortages and public service paralysis, such as Tuesday’s power failure that affected 80 percent of Caracas.

“The production models we’ve tried so far have failed and the responsibility is ours, mine and yours,” Maduro told his ruling PSUV party congress, as Venezuela looks to tackle chronic inflation the International Monetary Fund predicted would reach one million percent this year.

The apologists will come out of the woodwork as per usual to defend socialism at every turn and lecture us about how Venezuela’s model wasn’t real socialism.  (They hope you’ll forget the fact they were praising Venezuela just a few years ago.)

Venezuela has centralized hundreds of industries.  It’s difficult to name even one industry that has ever been better off being run by the government rather than private enterprise.  This, perhaps more than any other reasoning, should be the approach when trying to explain to those championing socialism the inherent dangers therein.  It’s easy to get frustrated (as I often do) at these people, but we also must remember they’ve been under government programming for 12+ years of the educational system.  Sometimes trying to explain things from a financial basis can be too much for some people to understand.