My latest piece for Commentator looks at Jeremy Corbyn’s hankering after witchcraft:

Collectivist socialism takes it for granted that the fuel of disciplined individual creativity which creates society is like the milk from a cow that can be milked without limit. It assumes witchcraft. When the cow finally keels over, exhausted and dying, the ensuing starvation is never the fault of the witches who flogged it to death.

Take, for example, Venezuela. A large country with terrific natural resources, smart people and a sassy sense of style. Thanks to successive governments’ socialist policies, it has reached the dizzy state of affairs where a jar of Nescafe costs $232 dollars by the official exchange-rate.Everything is in decline:

Venezuela is the only member of OPEC that suffers from shortages of staples such as flour, milk, and sugar. Crime and violence skyrocketed during Chávez’s years. On an average weekend, more people are killed in Caracas than in Baghdad and Kabul combined. (In 2009, there were 19,133 murders in Venezuela, more than four times the number of a decade earlier.) When the grisly statistics failed to improve, the Venezuelan government simply stopped publishing the figures.

How has this amazingly awful situation come to pass? Not because anyone actually wanted this outcome. Rather because successive governments have kept meddling with real things for the sake of advancing abstract things, such as ‘social justice’. A nationalisation here combined with more controls and regulations there creates outcomes that require ever-more improbable economic contortions:

In addition, Maduro enacted the Fair Price Law, which set maximum profit margins at 30 percent for companies and requires them to obtain “fair price certificates” to access dollars. The law carries prison sentences for those convicted of hoarding or “destabilizing the economy.”

Similarly, last year, the government took over an electronics retailer accused of overpricing its products. Maduro promised the effort would reduce consumer prices by 5 percent. Instead, prices rose 4.8 percent.

It’s horribly like Atlas Shrugged. Once a false premise is the basis for literally everything, one bad decision prompts another, then another, and another, until the ruling elite runs out of sane options and resorts to insane ones: importing Cuban communist goons to beat back Venezuelans demanding change.

Conclusion?

If the Labour Party chooses Corbyn as leader, it will be a power-play by the worst collectivists in our society to poison the well of intelligent public thought in favour of witchcraft.

Corbyn’s success will shift public debate towards anti-semitic populist collectivism, with an implied menace of fascist street violence and trades union bullying.

What in fact stands between one of the world’s leading economies and a brisk slump to Venezuelaisation? Maybe not much.