Despite holding the world's largest oil reserves, Venezuela has gasoline shortages.

Venezuelan civilians wait in line for gasoline. Reuters. 

Despite holding the world's largest oil reserves, Venezuela has been suffering from gasoline shortages. Reuters. Venezuela has hugely subsidized fuel to the point where one could fill their tank 20,000 times for the price of 2.2 pounds of cheese. But despite the subsidies and the drop in demand due to the failing economy fuel lines have broken out in the larger cities. Logistics have been a problem as well as bottlenecks have formed at refineries, ports and distribution centers. The fuel shortages are due to a collapse in demand for iil and Venezuela's failure to reinvest oil profits into infrastructure. 

My Comment:

Venezuela has completely fallen apart. The idea that a country with the largest oil reserves in the world could ever run out of gasoline is ridiculous, but that seems to have happened. The government is completely incompetent and honestly deserves to be removed from power. 

The lack of gasoline makes things even tougher for citizens of Venezuela. Now they can no longer look for work, food or other resources. Some of them can't even do their jobs due to a lack of fuel. It seems as though the situation has stabilized, but that was likely a rough couple of weeks for everyone. 

It doesn't speak well to Venezuela that even though demand for gasoline has plummeted they are still running out. People haven't been driving as much and commercial demand has decreased as well as the economy collapses. Plus, millions of people have left Venezuela for brighter pastures. 

This is, of course, due to the policies of Venezuela. The collapse of oil prices may have had an effect too but many other countries have had oil based economies but survived. Russia, the Gulf States, even America were all effected by the oil prices being low but they all have managed to survive economically. 

So why didn't Venezuela? They decided that socialism is the answer. Instead of funneling their money back into their oil industry or trying to diversify the economy, they gave it to social programs. This bankrupted Venezuela to the point that even with the social programs the people of Venezuela are now much worse off. 

Picking a fight with the United States was probably a bad idea as well. Sanctions alone can't be blamed for Venezuela's economic woes but it is going to make fixing things a lot harder for Venezuela. Nobody wants to invest in a country that is on America's bad side. 

Venezuela should be a warning for the world against left wing governments and I think they did provide a good example for Brazil who elected a right wing president for the first time in a long time. At this point anyone who votes for something like Venezuela style socialism should know for sure that doing so is a fool's errand...