Seems dirt-poor Haiti has no problem maintaining a consulate in Miami, nor wretched Belarus, nor tiny Antigua and Barbuda. Other countries, such as the Gambia, Singapore, Liberia, and Switzerland, maintain honorary consulates, usually because their need for one in Miami is minimal but necessary, and they know how to keep costs down.

Well, not Venezuela, whose Florida consulate serves more than 102,000 of its nationals, most of whom fled the Chavista socialist horror show, and which has just been evicted as a deadbeat for not being able to cough up $142,119 in consular back rent, according to the Associated Press's Josh Goodman, a reliable, low-bias reporter, citing Caracas Capital's knowledgeable Russ Dallen.

"The fact Venezuela can't come up with such a small amount of cash tells you what dire straits they're in," said Russ Dallen, a Miami-based investor specializing in Venezuelan bonds who discovered the eviction notice on Thursday.

What it shows is how fast socialists blow through money to drive themselves into penury. If sovereign Venezuela can't cough up a lousy $142K to pay its back rent, what does it say about its fiscal condition after two decades of socialism? Already we know they have defaulted on their debt (from Russ Dallen, the same reliable source). Goodman did some reporting as well and found that the Chavistas actually once owned the building and then sold it for $70 million in 2005, in what was probably a tidy profit – that could have paid around 42 months of rent if they hadn't wasted it on corruption, or paying Castro, or hiring bureaucrats, which is what they did. They earned a trillion dollars from the last decade's oil boom, and it's now come to this.

The stunning thing is that they had to have seen it coming – and just did nothing. Any other regime that finds itself similarly en-crisis-ed (to make up a word) hotfoots it over to the International Monetary Fund for some tough love and money or, if it's smart, initiates free-market reforms to attract investors and their money to wriggle out of such a crisis. Not Venezuela. It just doubles down and lets what happens happen, the better to Blame Gringo for its failures.

Venezuela in fact is so resistant to cleaning up its act that it won't even let charity aid in to feed its starving people, so perhaps we shouldn't be surprised to see it doing nothing about paying its bills, even on such a sensitive matter as its diplomatic face to the international community. Its government loves socialism above anything else, even if its people starve and its diplomats get ignominiously kicked out for non-payment of rent.

What we have here in this wretched, disgusting picture is not a government, but a cancer. It should be treated accordingly.