Get sophisticated and smart and care about people, and you are soon a socialism fan, aren’t you? I mean, after all, socialists serve the poor, and big government gets big things done, while capitalism — shudder, shudder — just makes the rich richer through endless exploitation. Right?

Well, no, not exactly. In fact, nowhere close. The history of socialism is one of trampling the poor. We’ve seen it repeatedly, over and over, and now we are seeing it in Venezuela, although, good heavens, didn’t such celebrities as Michael Moore, Sean Penn and Oliver Stone say a socialist president there was a hero? Didn’t they see him as the way of the future for anyone wanting a just future?

We’re talking about Hugo Chavez, whose policies not so heroically fostered ever more inflation, debt, unemployment and crime. To get there required such unjust acts as price controls putting businesses out of business, government appropriation of private property, unaffordable subsidies and takeover threats keeping foreign investors from investing. There were other forms of despotism: the strangling of free speech and winning debates with political opponents through the non-rhetorical device of locking them up in prisons, for instance.

In 2013, Chavez died and was succeeded by a near-worshipper, Nicolas Maduro, whose failure to reverse tragic policies has led to such catastrophes as near starvation, mob violence, inflation estimated by some as being at 808 percent, prison deaths in the hundreds and reported shortages of everything from medications to toilet paper. Fortunately, there’s no shortage of oil in Venezuela. Unfortunately, socialism zonked even that resource by replacing technical competence with ideological idiocy.

What celebrity celebrators of Chavez shenanigans needed was a session with the brilliant, now-deceased libertarian economist Milton Friedman. As recounted in a Wall Street Journal feature, Phil Donahue got just that. Donahue asked him if he ever doubted capitalism’s “maldistribution of wealth” and the greed of the powerful. Friedman answered that there’s greed in every kind of society, that it’s individuals, not government bureaus, that are responsible for the “great achievements of civilizations” and only free enterprise that lifts the masses from “grinding poverty.”

The proof? It’s all around us. Because of free markets, blustering global trade and the technology that emerges from them, researchers say we’re seeing a world in which people in poor countries are now on average living two decades longer than they did a half century ago. Nutrition is far better. Deaths of children are far fewer. Incomes are higher. Basic products are cheaper. Education is more widespread, health care more widely available. None of this is the doing of socialism, but of economic ventures in the opposite direction.

It’s not just unlettered actors or the producers of dumb documentaries who need to take heed, of course, but the politicians in our midst such as the self-proclaimed democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders. He is out there wanting tougher corporate punching, increased central planning, additional interventions of varied kinds, greater spending, new regulations, expanded trade restrictions.

This seeker of the Democratic presidential nomination is hardly alone. Other progressives, including one in the White House and still others trying to get there, are seeking similar ends and have already achieved many of them in a situation in which we ought to be in retreat from what has already been overdone. While we’re not about to become Venezuela and do need to rein in such abuses as corporate welfare, this constant lessening of our economic freedom poses major dangers and crimps possibilities that would benefit all, not least the poorest among us.

Every now and then the celebrities, the politicians and the so-called intellectuals who support all of this ought to do something simple. They ought to look around and note what has worked and what hasn’t.

— Jay Ambrose is a columnist

for Tribune News Service.