Down in Hugoland, free markets continue to be brought to a slow, grinding halt as the “democratically-elected” El Presidente shuts down a nearly-completed shopping mall in Caracas.

“They had already built a monster there,” Chavez said. “I passed by there just recently and said, ‘What is this? My God!’”

So the often-impulsive president told an allied mayor to halt construction and said this prime block of urban real estate should be expropriated. He said the sprawling six-story building might be put to better use as a hospital or university.

The exercise in drive-by socialism illustrates Chavez’s tendency to govern from his gut, and to leap in when he thinks other government agencies — in this case city planners — aren’t doing their job.

The new Sambil mall was scheduled to open in the La Candelaria district early next year, packed with 273 shops, movie theaters and offices. Chavez complained — with reason, some experts say — that it would add yet more traffic to an area that’s already so crowded “not a soul fits.”

“Stop it, Mr. Mayor. And we’re going to review all of it. And we’re going to expropriate that and turn it into a hospital — I don’t know — a school, a university,” Chavez said during his weekly broadcast on Sunday. [...]

Despite Chavez’s calls for moving toward socialism, many Venezuelans have tended to ignore his exhortations to shed their consumerist habits. Shopping malls with stores such as Louis Vuitton and Timberland have sprouted up rapidly in recent years as windfall oil earnings have boosted the economy.

If the voters can’t throw him out of office, maybe the mall rats will.