Alas, Michael Bloomberg. You aren’t the man I thought you were.

On Tuesday, asked about Elizabeth Warren’s (very smart) proposal for a wealth tax, he responded with the favorite right-wing calumny of the moment – suggesting that her plan would turn us into Venezuela.

That’s a shameful line of argument. In fact, whenever you see someone invoking Venezuela as a reason not to consider progressive policy ideas, you know right away that the person in question is uninformed, dishonest, or both. It basically shows that the speaker or writer isn’t willing to engage in serious discussion, preferring to scare people with a boogeyman of which he or she knows nothing.

What, after all, do we learn from the Venezuelan experience? Yes, the country is a mess. Venezuela has always been a one-industry economy, with huge inequality. Hugo Chavez got into power because of rage against the nation’s elite, but used the power badly. He seized the oil sector, which you only do if you can run it honestly and efficiently; instead, he turned it over to corrupt cronies, who degraded its performance. Then, when oil prices fell, his successor tried to cover the income gap by printing money. Hence the crisis.

It’s a bad story, and not without precedent: “Macroeconomic populism” has a long history in Latin America, and usually comes to grief.