Any jury, given the facts on how Venezuela works, would in seconds, unanimously condemn Mr. Mauro Libi for corruption.

Sir, John Paul Rathbone writes: “As protests and violence engulf Caracas, the country is beset by shortages and endemic corruption. Amid the chaos, Mauro Libi has built a huge food business empire but his critics want to know how.” “Profits from empty shelves” FT, Big Read, Venezuela, July 14.

His critics want to know how? In a country in which a government centralizes 97% of all export revenues, and foreign currency is thereafter allotted not by free market operations but by mechanisms that require the approval of individual government bureaucrats, can there be any doubt that the fortune Libi derives from imports of food to Venezuela, as described by Rathbone, can be anything but the result of corruption?

FT, I am sure you would not dare try to justify any other possibility, and this even if the only consequence you could suffer from it was being laughed at?

Rathbone writes: “Mr Libi’s story, as he tells it, is of a resourceful businessman working against the odds… He even claims to be exporting oatmeal to the US”

Those readers of papers like FT, who can read statements like that, and do not feel like vomiting, prove themselves to be intellectual and immoral accomplices of the death of the many Venezuelans who are suffering from lack of foods and medicines. 

Western civilization world, if something like Venezuela happened in your country, would you like the world to behave as indifferent as you do?

Western civilization, “We did not know” might have worked previously, but is nowadays a completely unacceptable excuse.

@PerKurowski

If we want good governments, for all, we must lighten the politician’s redistribution profits… sorry I meant burdens

Sir, Janan Ganesh makes a very good case for a Universal Basic Income with his “Those who shout loudest are not always the worst-off” November 21.

At the end of it all, what Ganesh really discusses is the politicians’ efforts to maximize their own redistribution profiteering margins… something that skews it all.

Were there a UBI, then that would be an all citizen to all citizens affair, and governments would be elected, not based on who offers the most to some, but on the basis of who offers the best in what should be a governments primary responsibilities to all.

To diminish the redistribution role of governments will be no easy affair. That is not only because redistribution profiteers will naturally fight back; but also because after so many years of being brought up on the need to cry for a larger share of the redistribution pot, voters have become somewhat more genetically disposed to be beggars of favors.

Venezuela is a case in point, there its poor have received from the Chavez/Maduro governments, less than 15% of what should have been their per capita share of last 15 years of oil revenues. That is something probably true of most previous governments too.

But today, the most vociferous clamors against the government, come from a middle class that discovers having been placed on a road that’s heading in the wrong direction… its “the rage of dispossession” Ganesh writes about. The Venezuelan poor, well they have no time for anger, they have barely time to survive.

@PerKurowski

We do not believe that the Venezuelan military can contemplate sending their compatriots to the starvation ovens.

My deceased father arrived on the first train to Auschwitz in 1940 as a Polish prisoner, and had number 245 tattooed on his arm. Freed in 1945 by the Americans, in 1947 he moved to Venezuela where he lived for over 30 years, worshipping that country all his life. And now I find Andres Schipani’s “Venezuela army tightens grip as food riots grow”, July 30, coincidentally published next to an AP brief “Silent pilgrim” and that reports on a visit of Pope Francis to Auschwitz.

And so I just must say the following Sir: My father would never ever have believed, as neither do I believe, that the Venezuelan military are capable of sending their compatriots to the starvation ovens. And, in this respect, we would both firmly believe that something has to happens to put a stop to the runaway craziness of the current Venezuelan realities, more sooner than later.

@PerKurowski ©