Dr. Rashawn Ray is Associate Professor of Sociology and Executive Director of the Lab for Applied Social Science Research (LASSR) at the University of Maryland, College Park.

He’s a coauthor of the book How Families Matter: Simply Complicated Intersections of Race, Gender, and Work.

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I’ve talked about Venezuela before, it’s a country that has one of the largest oil reserves in the world, but still suffers from huge poverty and inequality because of a series of terrible governments.

Up to a decade ago the right were embarrassed to talk about Venezuela because, because it was governed by a democratically-elected left-wing government that had take power from hugely corrupt predecessors who had kept the oil wealth for a tiny elite, leaving most of the country impoverished.

Venezuela became a socialist country where the media was free enough to not be called censored, the corruption was modest enough to be ignored, and the oil was flowing fast enough not to notice the economic incompetence. But the oil business and the largesse that it allowed the government to dole out basically wiped out the rest of the economy.

When the oil prices fell, more and more blatant election-fixing, and the closing down of more opposition-supporting TV stations was required to keep the government in power, and it began to be the left that was embarrassed about Venezuela. And there are plenty of reasons to be embarrassed.

The left wing government, led first by the charismatic Hugo Chávez, later the decidedly uncharismatic Nicolás Maduro have handled the economic difficulties with a spectacular level of incompetence, making things far worse with idiotic policies.

When the price of sugar shot up because of shortages, the government introduced a law mandating a maximum price at which sugar could be sold. Predictably, people just stopped producing and selling sugar,  to such an extent that Coca-Cola had to pull out of the country because ...