If you're into schadenfreude, this article reads like a comedy. President Chavez seems to be effectively demolishing the Venezuelan economy and replacing it with a system where the only thing being produced in Venezuela is going to be the oil, most of which will be exported abroad, and all the other goods are going to be imported and distributed to citizens based on a voucher principle. With oil prices now around their all-time highs, he needs them still to grow in order to fund his government's deficit. The deficit is incurred because he's massively importing basic consumer goods from abroad, and the reason he's doing that is because he's already crippled the local economy to the extent that it cannot any more provide all of its citizens with the most basic local goods.

By the time he's done, Venezuela will have been sent back to the stone age economically. It seems like the nation is going to rely entirely on its oil revenues as the only means of its survival. But when eventually oil prices fall, so will the entire "economy". This will be fun to observe.

It is a comedy, of course, as long as you don't consider or identify with the plight of Chavez's hapless economic subjects. Once you begin to identify with a person stranded in this arising caricature of a state, it becomes more of a tragicomedy. And the way it seems to be going, it's on a good path to turn into a tragedy pretty soon. The saddest part is, even when the nation is completely ruined, Chavez will likely manage to stay in power - just like his friends Robert Mugabe (who sent Zimbabwe into the stone age over the past few decades), Kim Yong-Il and Fidel Castro (who are keeping their respective countries in the economic stone age as well).

Fun, fun, fun.

To the extent that misery is funny.