Aidan

Do some reading. Venezuela and Zimbabwe have been so demonised by the West that even leftists believe a lot of the crap written about them.

Venezuela under Chavez reduced poverty by 40% and even those not lifted out of poverty finally had unprecedented access to free healthcare and education, plus self-determination to organise their own local infrastructure and politics.

The much-hyped Inflation levels are nothing like the stratospheric heights of the pre-Chavez years (well over 100%). But that was OK, because the regime was pro-West and pro-capitalist. It would take a very long essay to outline all the complex the reasons for Venezuela’s economic problems, but they have little to do with government mishandling and almost everything to do with aggressive Western destabilisation of the economy and its regime-change doctrine.

There are several websites that objectively deal with this history, but Global Research and Venezuelanalysis.com are a good place to start.

As for Mugabe, from the time that he gained power in 1980 and, for a time, toe’d the capitalist line (like Mandela in South Africa), he was hailed by the West as a great African hero (he was even knighted by the Queen) ... until he began his ‘socialist’ land reforms in 1996 – big mistake!

From then on, the West froze Zimbabwe’s credit and that’s when its economic troubles began. Again, the issues are complex, but this is mainly what caused Zimbabwe’s runaway inflation and widespread starvation, not Mugabe’s land reforms.

Unfortunately, this tired script that socialist countries have always failed is not only untrue, but even where those countries HAVE faltered economically, the causes lie almost entirely with aggressive Western capitalist interference to destroy the threat of a good example. Few economies, including Australia's, could possibly thrive under that kind of stress.

Killarney,

Do some reading yourself! I'm well aware of the poverty reduction and increased living standards in Venezuela. Some of this would've happened anyway (due to oil revenue) but there is no doubt the socialists improved it much more.

However, that doesn't mean the socialists' failures can be overlooked. The Chávez government was rather hostile to private enterprise, and price controls led to supply shortages. And there s no doubt that some of the money was wasted (including on propping up Zimbabwe).

Now that the oil revenue's no longer so lucrative, the failures of the Socialists are more obvious and the Venezuelans have democratically expressed their dissatisfaction (the Socialists lost control of the legislature in the recent election). What happens next depends on what they and their opponents do, but I expect they'll regain power after developing some more pragmatic policies.

As for Mugabe, he should have been regarded as an enemy since the massacres in Matabeleland in the 1980s, but the West ignored it; not because of a capitalist agenda but because of opposition to apartheid South Africa. The land reforms were initially partly funded by Britain, but Britain withdrew funding after a few years because the land was being given to government cronies (not agricultural college graduates, farm workers or tenants).

Socialist land reforms (taxing the big landowners to help small farmers purchase land) would've been a good idea. But not only were Mugabe's policies not socialist, they were not land reform either; just land grabs. He sided with violent criminals (most of whom knew very little about farming) forcibly seizing land off law abiding farmers. Unsurprisingly this decimated agricultural production at a time when it was already down due to drought.

Zimbabwe's hyperinflation was all Zimbabwe's fault. Their currency value was pegged therefore unable to correct trade imbalances (though they periodically devalued it when it looked like they were running out of money). They consumed a lot of their resources fighting a war. They'd decimated their main export industry. They printed money to service foreign currency debt, and kept printing money to plug up budgetary holes.