It's easy to google up the quotes from Sanders, Corbyn and perhaps your local socialist firebrand.

I live in Miami and have so many Venezuelan neighbors escaping that country because of socialism.

Here's a very interesting first-hand account of what it's like to live in a socialist country like Venezuela: https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/7l5n7n/i_live_i...

>My food situation... well, i used to eat 3 times a day, pizza, nutella Grilled meat idk anything that i wanted to eat, now sometimes i eat twice or once a day, and sometimes i have the bad luck of having nothing to eat for the whole day ;( it gives headache...

>i used to work in a office editing videos in sony vegas, making around 2-4 videos per day.

>Everytime i steps the streets, i see starving people with not too bad clothes, makes me think about how people that used to be like me is now looking for food at gargabe... sometimes i am afraid of end up there too....

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I can imagine myself in his shoes so easily! I used to live in Bolivia and lived the same way he used to live. Churrasco, pizza, shopping whenever - now Venezuela is in a really bad place.

I think the critical difference is that Bolivarian socialism believes something that European socialism does not. It's something like "all profitable companies are stealing from their workers" or "companies don't deserve profits" or something in that neighborhood. Therefore Bolivarian socialism regarded it as justice to expropriate profitable companies, so that the profits would go to the people via social programs. But they didn't know how to run those companies that they took over. And even for the companies that they didn't take over, the expropriations that they did destroyed incentive to invest any further in Venezuela. The net result was that there wasn't enough money coming in to fund the social programs.

European socialism, in contrast, merely taxed profitable companies, and only taxed a fraction of their profits - something around a third is typical, I think. This left employment, profits, and tax income operating normally.

The lesson seems to be that if you go into socialism with too much of a victim mentality, placing too much of the blame on "them", then you take so much that you destroy the economy.

Its a common misconception. Europe does Social Democracy but most governments do not exercise the sort of direct control you see in purely Socialist governments.

The state run oil company makes up about half of their GDP, which is why the economy collapsed when oil prices fell.

People are pointing to socialism and saying that it caused this hardship, but the same would have happened under a privately run oil company as well. It's the danger any economy heavily dependent on a single commodity faces.

Venezuela is a larger example of what happens to a company town when the company shuts down or moves the factory somewhere else.

The oil industry is the majority chunk of our economy. In other industries, the government has expropiated most of the main players (and subsequently driven them to bankrupcy). Forex is banned and most goods are price controlled, from vegetables to healthcare. These controls do not reflect reality.

Source: I live here