Venezuela Inches Closer To Full K

Getting really bad down there:

A humanitarian crisis, the likes of which have never been seen in the Western Hemisphere, is brewing in Venezuela and it will be inevitable in a few weeks…

The fact is that Venezuela, while still pumping oil, no longer has a functioning economy…

Ninety percent of confiscated and nationalized companies and farms no longer produce anything. SIVENSA, a private steel company formerly with over USD $1 billion in sales, mostly for export, now has negligible production. A country that during the 1980s boasted about having Latin America’s highest levels of production of cement, which it exported to the USA, now has a shortage of cement, even with insignificant construction levels. For most of the 20th century, Venezuela was among the world’s largest coffee producers. Now, the coffee that Venezuelans drink, if they can find any, comes from Nicaragua.

In addition, a draconian system of price controls that forces most local businesses to sell their wares at a loss has halted any attempts by local entrepreneurs to keep their businesses alive. Thousands of businesses have been closing every week.

While the government intentionally tried to substitute private operators with government companies, which were almost always run by corrupt army officers who know nothing of the industries they were entering, shortages of every kind, not just of food and medicine, began to occur. Currently, there are no tires, no car batteries, no auto parts to be found, except through good connections with the military or in the black market.

The distribution fleets of Venezuela’s largest companies have been depleted to the point of no longer being worthy of the word “fleet.”

In 2004, Hugo Chávez dismantled the old 10,000 strong Caracas Metropolitan Police and other police forces in the country. Since then, crime has skyrocketed, but now it has reached a level unthinkable in civilized societies…

This week, after days of widespread looting around the country by desperate citizens going hungry, trucks have been assaulted by organized mobs waiting at the edge of roads for any sign of a delivery carrying anything edible. This has further disturbed the already precarious distribution system for basic goods as truckers prefer not to work rather than risk losing the main asset for their livelihood.

The shift to K is a collapse. All of the complex systems that fostered the ascension of r are precariously poised by the time K has arrived. All it takes is one system to fail, and they all go down at once, like dominoes. Production, distribution, security, finance, currency, consumption, even common civility will all give way at once. Nothing will be consumed, nor will it be produced, nor could it be transported if it were, and nobody would have the money to purchase any of it even if any of that were going on.

Still, everyone must eat, and they will do whatever they have to in order to make that happen. Once you reach the point that what little was being delivered gets stolen, then the system will really go downhill fast, because all impetus to produce and deliver disappears.

The longer and farther you have pushed into r, the more you have overloaded the carrying capacity of the environment, the more useless dead weight all of those systems will be laden with, the more precariously all of those systems will be poised, and the deeper the plunge into K will be, once all of those r-fostering systems go away at once.

We have gone awfully far into r – perhaps farther than any civilization to date. When the collapse happens, it will likely be as bad as Venezuela, if not worse.

The only difference is, we will all be armed to the teeth.