The socialist Venezuelan government has seized a closed Kellogg’s factory and decided to make the perfect storm for failure out of their theft. The government has handed control of the factory over to the workers who will attempt to continue to produce Kellogg’s products.
Hold your laughter, because this actually happened. According to the BBC, the move comes as Kellogg’s announced it was pulling out of the dystopian communist country because of the worsening economic situation brought on by the disturbing socialist policies of President Nicolas Maduro.
Maduro, who has previously accused the United States of waging economic war against his government, and called the factory closure “absolutely unconstitutional and illegal,” even though his policies are the ones which caused the closure of the factory to begin with. But in the meantime, Maduro has decided to hand the factory over to workers who he thinks will continue production. Interesting, considering most people won’t work long without being paid, and if Kellogg’s cannot find supplies to produce their infamous cereals, it’s unlikely the workers will be successful. But socialists don’t think much more than one second about any decision anyway.
Venezuela’s battered economy has been hit by falling oil revenue and the plummeting value of its currency, the bolivar. It also has one of the highest rates of inflation in the world. Kellogg is simply the latest multinational company to close or heavily scale back operations in Venezuela, citing strict currency controls, a lack of raw materials and soaring inflation.
Kellogg’s said it hoped to return to Venezuela in the future and warned the Venezuelan government against sales of its brands “without the expressed authorization of the Kellogg Company.” But the company probably doesn’t have to worry much. Worker-run businesses are the biggest recipe for failure in economics that has likely ever existed. Just ask Venezuela how that’s working out…
For example, in 2016, Venezuela’s government took over a plant belonging to US-based hygiene products manufacturer Kimberly-Clark after it announced it was stopping operations because it could not obtain raw materials. The Texas-based firm recently requested the start of arbitration proceedings against Venezuela at the World Bank. The Texas-based company said in a statement: “If the Venezuelan government takes control of Kimberly-Clark facilities and operations, it will be responsible for the well-being of the workers and the physical asset, equipment and machinery in the facilities going forward.”
Responsibility is a word socialists cannot readily define, however. And you would think with all this seizure of private businesses, Venezuela wouldn’t have food and toilet paper shortages if these policies were successful. But that’s the problem. There is little success in Marxist ideals and yet they still insist on blaming capitalism.
“I would rather be subjected to the few failures of capitalism than the few successes of socialism.” -Unknown
