The wonders of socialism

Hugo's taking his country further down the road to socialist utopia. This from Publius Pundit:

Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez has signalled his true intentions with more clarity than ever today, announcing that he would expropriate:

1. All the phone lines
2. All the electricity

As this happened, a provincial governor from Bolivar state down south let it all hang out, simply saying he wanted to confiscate the entire media, forcing it all under state control. Just ‘nationalization’ don’t you know...

This clearly is an effort to Cubanize the nation, turning its free media into a state monopoly to disempower the opposition, and end all free inquiry or accountability. It’s something that is a mighty curious step for Chavez to take, given his claims he won the December election by an overwhelming majority. Something already doesn’t sound right.

This isn’t all the thug is up to, by the way. He’s also stealing the entire central bank, by ending autonomy for it. He’s turning that into an instrument for money-printing, now that he’s badly mismanaged the entire oil bonanza, wrecked the oil fields, fired all of the talent who could clean up this situation, and wasted hundreds of billions of dollars of oil earnings on stealing, corruption and socialist mismanagement.

In short, Chavez is turning Venezuela into the wasteland of nothingness that is communist Cuba.

We've all seen this dreary movie before, and we all know how it's gonna end. Colby Cosh knew as much back in December of '05:

One may be certain that other essential institutions--disguised paddywagons, vast windowless buildings of unstated function, great fenced and guarded areas in inaccessible rural regions--will eventually appear as needed.