With 35,000 hungry, desperate Venezuelans pouring over the Colombian border every day now, Venezuela has morphed from a socialist nuisance state with a big-mouthed dictator into to a very real foreign aid issue.

The Los Angeles Times has a new report from the ground:

The huge increase in Venezuelan migrants fleeing their country's economic crisis, failing healthcare system and repressive government is affecting the Cucuta metropolitan area more than any other in Colombia.  It's where 80% of all exiting Venezuelans headed for Colombia enter as foreigners.

...and...

Many arrive broke, hungry and in need of immediate medical attention.  Over the last two years, North Santander province, where Cucuta is located, has vaccinated 58,000 Venezuelans for measles, diphtheria and other infectious diseases because only half of the arriving children have had the shots, said Nohora Barreto, a nurse with the provincial health department.

...and...

The hospital's red ink is rising along with its caseload.  The facility has run up debts of $5 million over the last three years to accommodate Venezuelans because the Colombian government is unable to reimburse it, said Juan Agustin Ramirez, director of the 500-bed hospital.

"The government has ordered us to attend to Venezuelan patients but is not giving us the resources to pay for them," Ramirez said.  "The truth is, we feel abandoned.  The moment could arrive when we will collapse."

Foreign aid, indeed.  Most of us do pity them.  And there is foreign aid flowing – some $18.5 million from the U.S. – to clean up after this socialist dictatorship's mess.  It's quite an irony to consider that as much as Venezuela's dictators – both Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro – screamed about the hated yánqui imperialistas, and touted their commitment to free health care, quite unlike dreadful us, the actual cost of saving their desperate people is being paid by the American taxpayer.  Meanwhile, the international community, which coddled this socialist dictatorship, praised their socialist ideas, and giggled when Chávez "smelled the sulfur," has now gone strangely silent as Americans and the hemisphere's frontier states pay the costs of all that fun.

I have no problem with the U.S. giving aid to the desperate Venezuelans, particularly if it diverts U.S. resources from nation-building in Middle Eastern hellholes.  But there's a problem with this. Look at what the State Department has had to say about it (emphasis mine):

Colombia's president has appealed to the international community for help. The U.S. government recently stepped up: The State Department announced Tuesday it was contributing $18.5 million "to support displaced Venezuelans in Colombia who have fled the crisis in their country."

Crisis?  What crisis?  A crisis is when a volcano explodes down your street.  What happened in Venezuela is the natural outcome of socialism and its unyielding grip on power, all to the useful idiots' chorus of a Better World.  It's the outcome of lies, false promises, and the natural corruption of a monopoly on power, which is socialism in a nutshell.  Given the numerous examples of socialism in all its horrors, from the Soviet Union to Ceaușescu's Romania to Pol Pot's Cambodia to Mugabe's Zimbabwe to all the boat people of Vietnam and Cuba, this man-made disaster could be seen coming from a thousand miles away.  This is what socialism does.

So why does the State Department refer to this as "a crisis"?  It's not a crisis; it's late-stage socialism.  So if we are going to be paying for the clean-up of this socialist outcome, maybe we should be saying something about the problem itself.  Calling it a crisis, as if it were something that just blew in from out of the blue, is covering up the problem and deprives us of an opportunity to stomp the idea dead before it recrudesces again.  After all, many young people here are enthralled with the idea of socialism.

Might these Venezuelans flooding Colombia just be a population from a country where socialized health care was free and everyone was supposed to be cared for?  Why can't the State Department say something about these false promises of socialism, as the U.S. aid gets doled?

Unlike Nazism, this variety of socialism has never had a reckoning, a point where the entire public comes to realize that the idea itself stinks and no one other than the most fringe pariah would endorse such an idea.  Socialism is still considered a perfectly respectable alternative system of government, despite the mess and clean-up that inevitably follow.  Bernie Sanders is continuing to make political hay from the fraud, and young people here are eating it up.

With America stuck with the bill for this (and don't think it's not going to get bigger), it's imperative that the cause of the problem be stated plainly, if for nothing else than that we don't have to constantly keep mopping up after it abroad and fighting it off over here.  The public needs to know, the aid recipients most certainly need to know, the youth here need to know, and the sniggering world needs to know that this so-called crisis is really the natural outcome of socialism.  There is no better place to underline it than through our aid to those suffering from such socialism's logical conclusion.