This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, May 2, 2016. I'm Cabo Brown. The Economic

Collapse and authoritarian Lurch in Venezuela has been a humanitarian disaster for some time,

but it's not clear that anything will improve now or in the near future.

Ian Vasquez, director of the Cato Institute's Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity

comments.

The situation in Venezuela seems to be one of the same situation, different day, a little

worse, just as time goes by, but what is the situation

there now?

Well, I mean, Venezuela is proven to be a country that just when you think things can't get any worse, it does. I mean even before

this year, and the situation is dire, the situation and Venezuela was in crisis.

I mean, their political economic social crisis,

they had the world's highest inflation rate,

scarcity of all sorts of goods, violations of economic, political, and civil liberties, the government

long ago turned authoritarian.

And this year it's just gotten worse.

There's scarcity of electricity now to such a degree that its blackouts are common and frequent throughout the country.

The government has decreed that public sector workers, which make up about 30% of the workforce,

should only work two days out of the week in order to save electricity.

Schools are closing early as a result.

There's riots and looting across the country.

There's a humanitarian crisis. The pharmaceutical industry has found that about 80% of medicines are scarce there. You can't find them.

So people are dying of easily preventable diseases or ailments, babies are dying and so on.

...