Gaines’s comparisons expose socialism’s failures

Riley Gaines posted on X on Oct. 15, 2026, challenging socialism through three country comparisons¹.

She described Venezuela’s fall from “richest in Latin America” to a 75% GDP collapse, hyperinflation and millions fleeing. Cuba went from pre-revolution prosperity to “decades of rationing and poverty.” North and South Korea, she wrote, shared the “same starting point” before an income gap of about 30 times¹.

“was once a prosperous middle-income economy.”

The GDP collapse Gaines cited is documented by the International Monetary Fund². Economists Marco Arena, Emilio Fernandez Corugedo, Jaime Guajardo and Juan Francisco Yepez estimated in 2022 that Venezuela’s GDP decline exceeded the figure in her post between 2013 and 2021. They described it as the largest decline for a country not at war in 50 years.

The authors reported that more than 7 million Venezuelans had fled since 2015, with 6 million settling elsewhere in Latin America². In 2020, more than 95 percent of Venezuelans lived below the poverty line.

Marianne Ward and John Devereux, writing in The Journal of Economic History, found that Cuba “was once a prosperous middle-income economy.” On the eve of the revolution, incomes were among Latin America’s highest, at about 30 percent of U.S. levels³. After the revolution, Cuba “slipped down the world income distribution,” they wrote.

Devereux’s 2021 follow-up placed pre-revolution Cuban income per capita “on a par with Ireland or Finland.” GDP per capita grew just 40 percent from 1957 to 2017, averaging 0.6 percent annually—“among the lowest anywhere”⁴. He acknowledged improvements in education and health but concluded that broader welfare measures did not change his finding: the revolution “impoverished Cuba relative to any plausible counter factual”.

Family Brief judges economic policy by whether it helps families form and afford children. Venezuela’s mass flight and pervasive poverty fail that test: parents need a country where they can build a household, not an economy whose collapse sends them abroad in search of a livelihood.

Sources

1. @Riley_Gaines_ on X, 2026-10-15: A few examples of how well socialism works: - Venezuela: richest in Latin America → 75% GDP collapse, hyperinflation, millions fled - Cuba: pre-revolution prosperity → decades of rationing and poverty - North Korea vs South Korea: same starting point, ~30x, 2026-10-15
2. Venezuela’s Migrants Bring Economic Opportunity to Latin America
3. The Road Not Taken: Pre-Revolutionary Cuban Living Standards in Comparative Perspective | The Journal of Economic History | Cambridge Core
4. The Absolution of History: Cuban Living Standards After 60 Years of Revolutionary Rule