Venezuela to Fingerprint Supermarket Shoppers

When artificial price controls fail to bring food to the poor
and instead lead to catastrophic shortages for everyone, what do
you do? If you are Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, you don’t
admit that the socialist policy you inherited from the late Hugo
Chavez is a failure, you double-down by ordering all supermarket
shoppers to be fingerprinted as a means of preventing “fraud.”

From the BBC: 

President Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela has announced a mandatory
fingerprinting system in supermarkets to combat food shortages and
smuggling.

He said the system would stop people from buying too much of a
single item.

But the opposition in Venezuela rejected the plan, saying the
policy treated all Venezuelans as thieves.

Critics said fingerprinting consumers of staple products was
tantamount to rationing and constituted a breach of privacy.

Fingerprinting follows only four months after Marduro mandated
all Venezuelans to use a “Secure Food Supply” card, which according
to
The Guardian:

will limit Venezuelans to once-a-week shopping and will set off
an alarm to halt any transaction if a purchaser breaks the rules.
The government wants to prevent individual shoppers from
“over-buying” in a country hit by acute shortages of basic items
including milk, sugar and toilet paper. Critics say it is an
admission of failure of economic policy in one of the world’s big
oil-producing nations.

Venezuela continues to be plagued by staggering murder rates,
inflation and scarcity of many basic cooking staples. Anger over
empty supermarket shelves in a country with
the world’s largest oil reserves was a primary cause of the
massive protests from earlier this year, which were violently
suppressed by government forces. 

Even one-time “revolutionaries” of Chavez’s
Bolivarian Revolution, which was supported by most of
Venezuela’s poor, are growing weary with failed top-down
economic policies. Also from
The Guardian:

For some, the recent move is nothing short of a Cuban-style
rationing card that will sooner or later hamper citizens’ economic
freedoms.

“I don’t want to be told what I can buy and when I can buy it.
That’s what I work for. I am a revolutionary but I didn’t go into
this wanting it to become Cuba,” says Mercedes Azuaje as she exits
a corner shop with an almost empty bag of groceries.