That's so weird!

The government of Venezuela being boldly progressive has, over the past several years, taken greater and greater control over various economic sectors, among these the energy sector.

They have used all of their progressive skill & acumen, all of their socially-just compassion to provide low-cost power so the poor could finally enjoy a decent standard of living.

What was the result of these nobly-envisioned price controls?

Rampant shortages.(fn1)

If only there had been some way of foreseeing the possibility of this outcome. But, alas, this must be chalked up as an odd aberration, the root causes of which may never be fully known. At any rate, the solution is clearly more direct involvement by the government in energy production and, increasingly, consumption.

Because when the government sets out to provide something good for the people and, inevitably, destroys what was already there, the blame is never on the good-hearted, hard-working progressive overlords, but on the venal people greedily using too much. Thus Chavez has taken to berating his citizens for taking showers over 3 minutes and getting fat.

Don't worry, there are no lessons here for our own impending government takeover of health care. As I say, this is a weird, totally unpredictable one-off kind of event with no generalizable lessons. When our own well-intentioned, very smart & compassionate progressive overlords redesign a massive chunk of our economy for the betterment of the poor & everyone else it will be smooth sailing with no unintended consequences or highly predictable economic ill-effects. None.

fn1: I'd add that the NY Times is, predictably, completely flummoxed by this odd appearance of shortages in the wake of price controls. I'd point out this might be their ideology once again blinding them to reality but pointing out their manifold failings gets tiresome even for me at times.