Ever been to Caracas?

Here's how you get to Caracas.

Citing a local outlet, CBD at Ace of Spades reports:

The D.C. cops do nothing when stores are looting, emboldening thieves who recently stripped a CVS pharmacy practically bare. And lo and behold! It looks like those goods are being sold right across the street...probably by the same people who stole them.

DC decriminalized illegal street vending, this is the result!
[Hat Tip: dhmosquito]

             It turns out that Washington DC City just decriminalized illegal street vending!

It is called the Street Vendor Advancement Amendment Act of 2023, which went into effect on July 1st, 2023.

The act decriminalized illegal street vending. It granted an amnesty for unpaid fines and unpaid sales tax. It banned background checks for people seeking permits and licenses. The act also created the "Columbia Heights-Mount Pleasant Sidewalk Vending Zone."

Read into it a bit and you will discover that there is also graft involved. Yes...I know...that is shocking in our nation's capital.

Decriminalizing theft, then decriminalizing once-illegal street vending seems too convenient to be unintended. Driving out the retail businesses in these neighborhoods is the The Cloward-Piven strategy, nothing more.

CBD discusses the obvious problem of de facto legalized theft which is stripping the shelves of stores bare, combined with the ease with which thieves can convert that stolen merchandise into money through lawless street sales. First they legalized theft, by not enforcing theft laws, claiming the amounts stolen were too small to bother about. Then they cheered the defunding of police, putting cops on notice that their best course of action is to retire at their desks because they became the bad guys. Decriminalizing drugs and hookers came along with it, and now no one even needs to get a get a permit in order to have a "safe" state-sponsored place with which to monetize and dispose of one's stolen merchandise.

Of course, as CBD notes, there's graft involved here, too, no surprise. 

Besides the horrible message this sends to merchants, that maybe it's time to close up and get an Amazon store instead since stealing is consequence-free and reselling the loot is easier than ever, it also penalizes merchants in the area who do buy permits and pay taxes -- and even the merchants who sell on the streets who have paid for permits, too. Why pay for a permit when others make more money by not buying a permit and nobody gets busted?

And besides being a thieves' paradise, it's also an illegals' paradise, given that nobody needs to be here legally to sell goods without a permit. What better than an unregulated, unpermitted street market where nobody asks questions? It's as good as work permit for them. At a time when illegals are flooding the zone with a large influx headed to Washington, D.C., what could go wrong? 

It doesn't take long for other illegality to follow from this, such as child labor. Get ready for the child Chiclet sellers.

It's all so very ... Caracas, very third world, in the worst possible way. 

I visited Caracas in late 2005, well before the complete collapse of Venezuela's economy, and I was amazed at the chaos and shambles of Venezuela's unregulated street vendors filling the streets with cheap imports from China and a host of suspiciously fenced-looking merchandise. Many were in the country illegally, from places like Haiti, Dominican Republic, Colombia, the victims of past oil booms gone bust. The blare of reggaeton music was all over, rats moved between stalls, and visitors were warned never to visit such places alone. Stealing, after all, was nearly legal in that country, as Venezuela's late dictator openly encouraged it on the grounds that the poor had the right to take from 'the rich' as a matter of "social justice" and a "preferential option for the poor," as Chavez's liberation theology fans put it. That led to a lot of armored cars on the streets, a lack of anyone wearing jewelry, a lot of barred-up, boarded-up shops, illegal street selling wherever it could be done, and eventually ... the flight we see now.

Sound like maybe Washington should take note?

It was chaos. It was a free for all. I even did this painting about it from a photo I took, acrylic on two sheets of tin, for that junkyard look, as the memory was so vivid:

Image: Monica Showalter, Instagram

Places like Caracas and lots of other third world hellholes always have something in common with what is going on with this foolishness in Washington, D.C., it's what social scientists call "the informal economy." Informality is what makes the third world the third world more than any other factor. Third worlders, after all, have cellphones, they have fax machines, they have remittances and bank setups like anyone else. But what they don't have is rule of law, a government that governs. That's why they're an odd mix of satellite dishes, Louis Vuitton purses, unpaved streets and dirty running water.

Without rule of law, you get rule of the jungle, with gangs eventually calling the shots and making the rules and extracting the taxes, or rather, 'vacunas' or 'mordidas' or any of the other colorful terms used for gang extortion in Latin America's shantytowns. Sociologist Hernando de Soto, in his "Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else" and "The Other Path: The Economic Answer to Terrorism," looked very closely at how informal economies hold third world countries back because there is no "invisible architecture" of title deed for property, and above all, no presence of rule of law.

Nations went to great ends to enact these things after these books were published in the early aughts, if they were serious about climbing out of the third world, or at least improving their economic prospects. Chile, Brazil and Mexico spring to mind.

But in Washington, D.C., we see the astounding phenomenon of the capital of the free world that did have rule of law, did have title deed, did have all the trappings of a developed country, choosing to become a place without rule of law, with an informal economy, entirely ideal for thieves and illegal immigrants. Instead of choosing progress, they chose to adopt the economics of the shantytown. It's rank lunacy and as idiotic as anything one might see coming out of South America under various leftist rulers -- exchanging a first world economy for a third world economy as a matter of preference.

Other than Venezuela's decision to self-colonize itself as a vassal state of Cuba, I don't think we have ever seen anything quite as stupid and damaging as this. Turns out you don't need to go to Caracas anymore to see Caracas: Just watch these D.C. ruling leftists in action.

Image: Monica Showalter, Instagram