The New York Times had the temerity to actually blame free markets for Venezuela’s descent down the economic cesspool under socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro.
Who in their right mind would actually consider Venezuela a beacon of capitalism in South America? Apparently The Times. The newspaper claimed in a July 28 news item that “in recent years, the socialist model has given way to brutal capitalism, economists say, with a small state-connected minority controlling much of the nation’s wealth.”
The newspaper, whose report was addressing the dubious presidential election results in the socialist country, cited no specific cohort of "economists" who made the asinine claim that capitalism, as opposed to socialism, was at fault for Venezuela’s economic upheaval. The leftist rag apparently also didn’t realize the contradiction in railing against a “state-connected minority controlling much of the wealth,” like that has anything to do with capitalism in the first place.
Perhaps The Times should have read its own columnist Bret Stephens’s 2019 piece headlined, “Yes, Venezuela Is a Socialist Catastrophe.” Oof.
Independent Institute Senior Fellow Phillip Magness blasted The Times’s “bizarre interpretation of these events” in a Tuesday op-ed for the Catalyst. He noted that the newspaper's Orwellian revisionism “continues a long line of left-wing apologia around the repressive Chavez and Maduro regimes that have ruled Venezuela for a quarter century.” Magness concluded that “the newspaper ignores the obvious. Nicolas Maduro is an avowed Marxist,” not exactly indicative of capitalist bona fides.
A 2021 video cited by Magness shows Maduro extolling Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s infamous Communist Manifesto as “the most important political declaration in 200 years.” The Times didn’t bother mentioning that inconvenient little factoid.
The Times even went so far as to praise Maduro and his oppressive dictatorial predecessor Hugo Chavez’s socialist Chavismo movement, claiming that “initially promised to lift millions out of poverty. For a time it did.”
What the newspaper left out, of course, was the Marxist policies that Chavez implemented that plunged the Venezuelan economy into a death spiral in the first place. Wall Street Journal Chief Economics Commentator Greg Ip wrote in 2019, “Soaring oil revenue in the 2000s enabled Mr. Chávez to embark on a sweeping nationalization of the economy.” He continued, “When oil revenue fell because of mismanagement and falling prices, the government forced the central bank to print money to finance its spending, resulting in hyperinflation and the current economic collapse.”
Quaint concepts such as facts and accuracy “have long ceased to concern the editors at New York’s self-designated ‘paper of record,’” Magness rebuked. He’s right on target. In 2020, MRC Business analyzed that in a 1,583-word essay on the Venezuelan oil crash that left behind a “destroyed economy,” it didn’t even bother mentioning the word “socialism” once.
Conservatives are under attack. Contact The New York Times at 800-698-4637 and demand it stop falsely blaming capitalism for Venezuela’s socialist catastrophe.
