No need to look in the history books to get a sense of how destructive socialism can be to a country's economy, Hugo Chavez is conducting an ongoing case study just to the south of us. Stephen Dudley has a must-read report from Caracas in today's Miami Herald:

There's a melancholic feel in the Caracas stock market these days, almost like a gravely ill patient who is coming to terms with the sickness. On a recent Monday, at what should have been the height of mid-morning trading, computer banks sat empty and just two employees kept watch of the trades.

Last year, the market was one of the hottest in the world, growing three-fold alongside an oil-fueled GDP that grew by over 10 percent, tops in Latin America.

But the market suffered a crushing blow earlier this year when President Hugo Chavez nationalized telecommunications giant CANTV and the capital's Electricidad de Caracas (EDC), effectively eliminating 30 percent of its volume. [snip]

The government has taken over what it deems as ''idle'' lands and factories and handed them over to peasants and workers. It's taken a majority stake in private companies holding oil concessions and threatened to take over the country's largest private steel producer.

More recently, Chavez has focused on the banking side. In April, the president ordered Venezuela's bank deposit protection fund, which works like the FDIC in the United States, to release its assets ''to the poor.'' He has forced the Central Bank to do the same, and said he might withdraw from the International Monetary Fund.

But the biggest blow came in January, shortly after Chavez won re-election by a landslide, when he announced the nationalization of the telecommunications and electricity sectors, both traded on the Bolsa de Valores de Caracas, the stock market's official name.

On ''Red Monday,'' as it became known, CANTV shares tanked in New York, before trading was halted. The buyback came a few months later, and just like that, the most widely traded Venezuelan stock had virtually disappeared. A limited number of CANTV shares are still available on the Caracas stock market, and small amounts of EDC shares are still held by employees and retirees.

Chavez's ideological shift also has hit international investors. Venezuela is one of only two countries in the region that had negative Foreign Direct Investment in 2006. In March, the Institute of International Finance, which represents 375 banks, called Chavez the ''all powerful president'' who acts with ``hostility toward markets [and] poses substantial risk to private firms.''

That's some utopia Chavez is building - one can only imagine what it'll look like when the oil money runs dry.