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> Where did all the money go? TL;DR: Socialism. NTL;WR: Capital flight caused by the arbitrary seizure of private property. Longer still: They allowed the st

> Where did all the money go? TL;DR: Socialism. NTL;WR: Capital flight caused by the arbitrary seizure of private property. Longer still: They allowed the state to control the oil revenues entirely, and because they wanted to enrich themselves, they promised unsustainable entitlements to the public which eventually fell through when the oil price dropped slightly. Because they didn't give a damn, the private sector was not involved to invest any portion of the revenues, and the government couldn't possibly care less to invest them. Now lacking the revenue they took for granted, the entitlements they promised the public have bankrupted the state, and all good-natured attempts to liberalize the economy (which could save it literally at any point, but with increasing transitional pain) have seemingly been met with threats against life. Added: Hey cowards, if you dislike this post so much, why don't you make a reply and tell us all why it's wrong? There is probably a civil war on the horizon and you can't help but QB the ideology of the establishment which has turned Venezuela from a forward and developed country with a bright future into a prison hellscape of rape, murder, and mugging.

lawlessone 9y ago
They do it so wrong and it seems like countries like Norway ,Sweden etc seem to get the balance right.
- microcolonel 9y ago
  That's because Norway and Sweden respect private property to some extent, even with Norway's wealth tax (and additional taxes on oil extraction). The oil companies are ultimately private in Norway. There's no doing it right if your end game is basically communism; but if you have a clear purpose for some prejudicial taxes, and ultimately respect some form of property rights, then it can sometimes work out for many decades, as it has in Norway (though I would argue that Norway's system, as it is today, is unsustainable as well, but not in a Venezuela kind of way).
  - kunimu 9y ago
    Venezuela also respects private property, just to a somewhat lesser extent than other countries. It's important to note that the state's protection of such property is to be expected in this case, in which it is the government which acts as a capitalist itself on the global scale and on the internal scale (such as by employing wage labour). There are numerous examples of people and businesses which own private property and employ people in exchange for wages in Venezuela. The fact that such activity is highly taxed or limited is irrelevant to the point about private property being defended and respected. For it is private property which can ensure the cycle of M-C-M' which we see respected and the functioning of money as the general equivalent form of Value.
    - microcolonel 9y ago
      > The fact that such activity is highly taxed or limited is irrelevant to the point about private property being defended and respected. I'd agree with that, but with the exception of wealth (and possibly property) taxes. I might accept that real property must be rented from the state to accomplish certain goals, but I'm not so sure other property can be. In reality, if the rates are low enough, even a wealth tax is not a mortal threat to property, but it is still questionable (which is why it seems some Norwegian parties are looking to ditch it). Last time I said this, I was dragged into a bickering match, but: wealth taxes have many of the properties of rents, which sets them far apart from income, consumption, and excise taxes. Transactional taxes (income, consumption, excise, even inheritance [though I oppose this one for double taxation reasons]) pose no threat to property rights, they just ultimately change the true price of goods and services. Property and wealth taxes pose a threat to property rights, since they threaten the property directly. But that's not what people are talking about here anyway, they're talking about literal seizures of private property.
    - sol_remmy 9y ago
      "Venezuela also respects private property, just to a somewhat lesser extent than other countries. " Your flat out wrong. Easy example: The government nationalized a GM vehicle factory within the country and then a few weeks later GM officially withdrew. Does that sound like Venezuela respects private property to you? A nationalization like that would never happen in Western Europe
- afsina 9y ago
  Population matters (31M vs 5M-9M). Besides Nordics have much freer markets and they do not confiscate private property like this.
  - microcolonel 9y ago
    Though for what it's worth, Venezuela has access to considerably more oil.
    - adventured 9y ago
      Theoretically. The actuality of it is very different though. Their oil is difficult for them to acquire and its processing costs are much higher than competitors such as Iraq or Saudi Arabia (or US shale). Their Orinoco Belt oil sands - which holds most of their reserve - would be challenging for the US or Canada to maximize the value of; they basically stand no chance at utilizing it without much higher levels of domestic development/capability (or without fully outsourcing its development).
      - protomyth 9y ago
        The oil sands in Canada is having a problem keeping investors with the low price and high cost of refinement. Venezuela is in a similar position where refining is concerned.
      - aclsid 9y ago
        The Orinoco Belt is composed of extra heavy crude or heavy crude, not oil sands, which is where shale comes from. While not having the same profitability as light crude, it is still better than shale. One of the big impact of the cost of Venezuelan crude is its high content of sulfur, which makes refining more expensive, but to this day, Venezuela is one of the few countries where even with a low barrel price, the activity is profitable, or at least it should be. But when you have a state company that has quadrupled its payroll, paying for all kinds of social services in the country, corruption, all while also diverting funds from investment, you make the operation run at a loss.
- adventured 9y ago
  Sweden is extremely far from being a Socialist nation. Nearly all of their economy is private. They have a prosperous, highly functional market based economy, that has traditional protections for property rights and classic asset ownership. Sweden has vast private wealth, including a very large number of millionaires. Or just take a look at the list of their billionaires. Sweden's economic boom coincided with large reductions in the size of the state, including both regulation and taxation policies, not increases. They have a 22% corporate income tax rate along with a favorable operating environment that encourages entrepreneurship, which entails ownership of private property. If you look across Sweden's economic engine, it's overwhelmingly private in nature, not state owned and operated. Their growth mostly didn't come from state enterprises, it came from domestic business formation and expansion. Land and housing is commonly privately owned, as in most market economies. Sweden overtly violates almost every tenet of Socialism. There are very few things about Sweden that are in fact Socialistic at all (healthcare is a big one, which is heavily socialized for most of the planet). At this point they may be more Capitalist than America is, their economy has fewer economic regulations per dollar of GDP for example.
  - microcolonel 9y ago
    Yeah, I don't see the point of contention against your post. Sweden is largely a free economy with rather high personal taxes. Their energy sector (linked directly with Norway) is (as of recent) considerably freer than you can expect in most of the world. They have many great arms and aerospace manufacturers which operate more independently of the government than the defense industries in most places (which I guess is for historic reasons, owing to Sweden's long history of immense military action [including being willing to invade Russia with the intent of taking Moscow]). Aside: I really take umbrage with Bernie describing Denmark as a socialist success story, when their success seems to be linked directly to liberalization.
    - adventured 9y ago
      The contention of course derives from Scandinavia broadly being the sole positive argument that modern Socialists have to rest upon as an example. If you take that bogus example out from under them by pointing out that Sweden is nowhere near being a Socialist nation (quite the opposite in fact, they're a booming private market economy with vast private wealth), their world-view implodes.
- ameister14 9y ago
  Norway and Sweden are capitalist states with significant social programs. The government does not own the means of production and doesn't completely manage the economy - they just tax it; in fact they don't even tax corporations all that heavily.
  - jbooth 9y ago
    Norway's doing something very similar to Venezuela as far as nationalized oil going to the public purse, and it's working out great for them. When social-democratic countries screw up due to authoritarianism and corruption, it's 'because socialism'. When capitalist countries screw up the same way, and there have been a lot of them, it's because of the corruption.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - talmand 9y ago
      I would think most people say socialism in this case because it was put up by many influential people as a proud of example of socialism back when times were good. It's the same thing when socialists point to failing capitalistic systems and say "capitalism". It's the problem of people not wanting to properly discuss things and always fall back on blaming people based on labels.
    - ameister14 9y ago
      >Norway's doing something very similar to Venezuela as far as nationalized oil going to the public purse, and it's working out great for them. They did it in a completely different way, though, and the funds were managed and executed differently. Norway helped establish a company and essentially behave as shareholders, with their share revenues going into a fund that reinvests it in stock internationally. They deliberately do not depend on it to subsidize social programs entirely and only withdraw 3% per year. Venezuela's leadership actively controlled the fund and used it to support wide-reaching social policies that could only be sustained with new revenues, pushing more oil production and making it a larger percentage of their economy which ultimately caused massive failure when the oil prices went down, they were producing at high capacity already and they couldn't get rid of the social programs.
- planteen 9y ago
  Sweden has never had significant oil production. In fact, it hasn't produced any oil for 20 years. So I don't think its really a valid comparison with Venezuela (although Norway is).
gandhium 9y ago
Sadly your first TLDR offended bunch of folks still believing in socialism and you've got downvoted. Meanwhile - all (and I mean ALL) countries which adopted socialism - all of them plunged into poverty, corruption and in some cases civil war and dissolution. One can think it should teach a lesson... but some people just want to believe.
- hnarn 9y ago
  Social democracy is objectively a form of socialism and it has been implemented in practice in large parts of Northern Europe for around a century. You're free to have whatever opinions you wish but when your claims simply are wrong you are just being ignorant and unwilling to learn.
  - microcolonel 9y ago
    Northern Europe contains no "social democracies". They existed for a time, but were superseded by liberal democracies for practical reasons. There are remnants of attempts at socialism, but that is not the direction they are taking.
    - hnarn 9y ago
      Please explain the difference and how they were superseded.
- danharaj 9y ago
  Every socialist revolution back to the Paris commune has been met with violence from the capitalist powers of the world. You can visit wikipedia and count how many countries participated in the Russian civil war on the side of the whites. Try to count how many times the United States tried to assassinate Castro while you're at it. Since all socialist revolutions are met with the full ferocity of the capitalist states, it's not clear how they can win militarily without becoming a dictatorship. A military is perhaps the social organization least amenable to democracy and most amenable to dictatorship. It's no surprise that socialist revolutions which succeed via military dictatorship and never demobilize (because they can't, because they are constantly under threats real and perceived) begin to reflect military dictatorship in their social structure. No socialist revolution has succeeded in an industrialized nation. They have all taken place in the periphery, either in colonies of imperial powers or extremely weak states like tsarist Russia. None of those successful revolutions managed to industrialize without devolving into centralized, dictatorial rule. Socialist thinkers back to Marx thought that socialism is enabled by industrialization; not something that can be implemented beforehand. This sounds entirely consistent with history. Note that the State had a crucial role to play in the development of capitalism. You can't pretend that capitalism isn't born of and sustained by violence when it has been instrumental in every development that led to capitalism's ascent, from forcible enclosure of the commons, to imperialist plundering of non-industrialized nations, to strikes broken by national militaries, and so forth. If it doesn't seem so violent now, maybe it's because resistance to it has been thoroughly purged from your milieu and the violence that remains has been pushed slightly out of your perspective. Nothing to see. There's no possible way capitalist nations were responsible for, say, the world's largest ever cholera outbreak in Yemen. Socialism is the democratic control of the means of production. All attempted socialist revolutions devolved into a system of bureaucratic control by a centralized government. It sounds like socialism hasn't ever been achieved. > One can think it should teach a lesson... but some people just want to believe. Most socialists think that an alternative system is necessary because capitalism with all its contradictions are untenable. Treating socialists as shallow thinkers just makes you look shallow. But it is quite a fashionable look these days.
Helmet 9y ago
You're absolutely right; the fact that you're being down-voted is quite ironic on many fronts, but then again, ideological conformity is now the norm even in the tech world.
res0nat0r 9y ago
> TL;DR: Socialism. You're being downvoted because of this. The country isn't failing because of "socialism", but because of the country stupidly spending it's money and it's oligarchy stealing money from the country to line it's pockets among many other things.
- curiousgeorgio 9y ago
  So somehow it wasn't true socialism this time? They weren't doing socialism "the right way"? Stop with the excuses - Venezuela is pretty much the text-book example of socialism and its inevitable consequences (see "the country stupidly spending it's money").
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - adventured 9y ago
    That seems a bit excessive. Surely we should give Socialism another 30 or 40 tries before finally declaring that rigid state command & control of the economy and most aspects of existence through the extreme and constant application of violence, doesn't work. Just because after a century of repeated failed attempts there has yet to be a single successful Socialist outcome, that doesn't mean one day with enough death and destruction, that grand ambition of vast material production [1] won't be achieved. [1] One of the much touted original claims of Socialist doctrine, was that it would lead to vast material abundance that would best Capitalism. At its core was materialism ideologically, espoused by all the thought-leaders that were responsible for creating Socialism.
    - mcv 9y ago
      State Socialism is not the only form of socialism. Libertarian Socialists predicted in the 19th century that state socialism would lead to tyranny. Let me share my favourite political quote by Mikhail Bakunin: "Freedom without socialism is privilege and injustice; socialism without freedom is slavery and brutality" I think the 20th century has proven him correct on both counts. We need both socialism and freedom in equal measure, which is exactly what North-European social democracies are trying to do. Imperfectly still, but it's already better than any alternative I've seen.
sctb 9y ago
Complaining about voting like this just injects inflammation and deflects the conversation further off topic. And then users downvote or flag you more because it's against the guidelines. So please just leave it out and comment civilly, substantively, and on-topic instead. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- curiousgeorgio 9y ago
  Downvoting for the sake of disagreement alone is also frowned-upon, if not against the guidelines. From what I understand, a downvote or flag should be reserved for content that doesn't add to the discussion or is obviously inappropriate. These comments are being downvoted for no good reason or explanation, and the discussion deserves to exist here, so the downvotes - in this case - should be called out for what they are: cowardly responses to viewpoints that someone just happens to disagree with but can't engage with reason or civil debate.
crdoconnor 9y ago
Pretty much the same thing happened in the 80s when there was a precipitous drop in the price of oil. The anger fomented by that is exactly what got Chavez and his socialist platform elected. Now, of course, it's "all socialism's fault", just as last time it was "all capitalism's fault". People have short memories. So no, it wasn't socialism that's causing Venezuela to fall apart any more than it's going to be socialism that will Saudi Arabia to tear itself apart in the next few years (they've have more cash on hand right now but they are hurtling towards exactly the same place). It's Dutch Disease and the resource curse. >Longer still: They allowed the state to control the oil revenues entirely, and because they wanted to enrich themselves, they promised unsustainable entitlements to the public which eventually fell through when the oil price dropped slightly. Because they didn't give a damn, the private sector was not involved to invest any portion of the revenues, and the government couldn't possibly care less to invest them. Yes, their real mistake was building some houses and hospitals with the oil revenue instead of letting it get siphoned off into swiss bank accounts as was happening before /s The "private sector" (powerful Venezuelan business interests) essentially plotted its own demise when it launched the 2003 coup. That was unfortunate, as was Chavez's response to crush them, but it was to a large extent, self inflicted.
- thriftwy 9y ago
  > building some houses with the oil revenue Do you mean "in Miami" here? Because in this thread that's where the money supposedly go. A lot of countries live with Dutch disease without crumbling.
pwagland 9y ago
I haven't downvotes your answer, but you ask why people voted you down… so here goes. It is because you try to pin everything on Socialism, when the real problem is actually Cronyism and Despotism. I.e. it was their political system, not their financial system, that did them in. There are plenty of countries with various degrees of socialism that are not bankrupt. Australia, for example, had a socialist, very left leaning, government that gave many of the same things out. But these countries generally have well established democratic institutions. And it is these institutions that allow a country to change direction if it makes a mistake. Venezuela on the other hand does not have a strong democratic institution, and so has no real way to escape the mess that it created. Its leaders are invested in the solution that they chose, and dug ever deeper in to show how right they were.

lawlessone 9y ago

They do it so wrong and it seems like countries like Norway ,Sweden etc seem to get the balance right.

microcolonel 9y ago
That's because Norway and Sweden respect private property to some extent, even with Norway's wealth tax (and additional taxes on oil extraction). The oil companies are ultimately private in Norway. There's no doing it right if your end game is basically communism; but if you have a clear purpose for some prejudicial taxes, and ultimately respect some form of property rights, then it can sometimes work out for many decades, as it has in Norway (though I would argue that Norway's system, as it is today, is unsustainable as well, but not in a Venezuela kind of way).
- kunimu 9y ago
  Venezuela also respects private property, just to a somewhat lesser extent than other countries. It's important to note that the state's protection of such property is to be expected in this case, in which it is the government which acts as a capitalist itself on the global scale and on the internal scale (such as by employing wage labour). There are numerous examples of people and businesses which own private property and employ people in exchange for wages in Venezuela. The fact that such activity is highly taxed or limited is irrelevant to the point about private property being defended and respected. For it is private property which can ensure the cycle of M-C-M' which we see respected and the functioning of money as the general equivalent form of Value.
  - microcolonel 9y ago
    > The fact that such activity is highly taxed or limited is irrelevant to the point about private property being defended and respected. I'd agree with that, but with the exception of wealth (and possibly property) taxes. I might accept that real property must be rented from the state to accomplish certain goals, but I'm not so sure other property can be. In reality, if the rates are low enough, even a wealth tax is not a mortal threat to property, but it is still questionable (which is why it seems some Norwegian parties are looking to ditch it). Last time I said this, I was dragged into a bickering match, but: wealth taxes have many of the properties of rents, which sets them far apart from income, consumption, and excise taxes. Transactional taxes (income, consumption, excise, even inheritance [though I oppose this one for double taxation reasons]) pose no threat to property rights, they just ultimately change the true price of goods and services. Property and wealth taxes pose a threat to property rights, since they threaten the property directly. But that's not what people are talking about here anyway, they're talking about literal seizures of private property.
  - sol_remmy 9y ago
    "Venezuela also respects private property, just to a somewhat lesser extent than other countries. " Your flat out wrong. Easy example: The government nationalized a GM vehicle factory within the country and then a few weeks later GM officially withdrew. Does that sound like Venezuela respects private property to you? A nationalization like that would never happen in Western Europe
afsina 9y ago
Population matters (31M vs 5M-9M). Besides Nordics have much freer markets and they do not confiscate private property like this.
- microcolonel 9y ago
  Though for what it's worth, Venezuela has access to considerably more oil.
  - adventured 9y ago
    Theoretically. The actuality of it is very different though. Their oil is difficult for them to acquire and its processing costs are much higher than competitors such as Iraq or Saudi Arabia (or US shale). Their Orinoco Belt oil sands - which holds most of their reserve - would be challenging for the US or Canada to maximize the value of; they basically stand no chance at utilizing it without much higher levels of domestic development/capability (or without fully outsourcing its development).
    - protomyth 9y ago
      The oil sands in Canada is having a problem keeping investors with the low price and high cost of refinement. Venezuela is in a similar position where refining is concerned.
    - aclsid 9y ago
      The Orinoco Belt is composed of extra heavy crude or heavy crude, not oil sands, which is where shale comes from. While not having the same profitability as light crude, it is still better than shale. One of the big impact of the cost of Venezuelan crude is its high content of sulfur, which makes refining more expensive, but to this day, Venezuela is one of the few countries where even with a low barrel price, the activity is profitable, or at least it should be. But when you have a state company that has quadrupled its payroll, paying for all kinds of social services in the country, corruption, all while also diverting funds from investment, you make the operation run at a loss.
adventured 9y ago
Sweden is extremely far from being a Socialist nation. Nearly all of their economy is private. They have a prosperous, highly functional market based economy, that has traditional protections for property rights and classic asset ownership. Sweden has vast private wealth, including a very large number of millionaires. Or just take a look at the list of their billionaires. Sweden's economic boom coincided with large reductions in the size of the state, including both regulation and taxation policies, not increases. They have a 22% corporate income tax rate along with a favorable operating environment that encourages entrepreneurship, which entails ownership of private property. If you look across Sweden's economic engine, it's overwhelmingly private in nature, not state owned and operated. Their growth mostly didn't come from state enterprises, it came from domestic business formation and expansion. Land and housing is commonly privately owned, as in most market economies. Sweden overtly violates almost every tenet of Socialism. There are very few things about Sweden that are in fact Socialistic at all (healthcare is a big one, which is heavily socialized for most of the planet). At this point they may be more Capitalist than America is, their economy has fewer economic regulations per dollar of GDP for example.
- microcolonel 9y ago
  Yeah, I don't see the point of contention against your post. Sweden is largely a free economy with rather high personal taxes. Their energy sector (linked directly with Norway) is (as of recent) considerably freer than you can expect in most of the world. They have many great arms and aerospace manufacturers which operate more independently of the government than the defense industries in most places (which I guess is for historic reasons, owing to Sweden's long history of immense military action [including being willing to invade Russia with the intent of taking Moscow]). Aside: I really take umbrage with Bernie describing Denmark as a socialist success story, when their success seems to be linked directly to liberalization.
  - adventured 9y ago
    The contention of course derives from Scandinavia broadly being the sole positive argument that modern Socialists have to rest upon as an example. If you take that bogus example out from under them by pointing out that Sweden is nowhere near being a Socialist nation (quite the opposite in fact, they're a booming private market economy with vast private wealth), their world-view implodes.
ameister14 9y ago
Norway and Sweden are capitalist states with significant social programs. The government does not own the means of production and doesn't completely manage the economy - they just tax it; in fact they don't even tax corporations all that heavily.
- jbooth 9y ago
  Norway's doing something very similar to Venezuela as far as nationalized oil going to the public purse, and it's working out great for them. When social-democratic countries screw up due to authoritarianism and corruption, it's 'because socialism'. When capitalist countries screw up the same way, and there have been a lot of them, it's because of the corruption.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - talmand 9y ago
    I would think most people say socialism in this case because it was put up by many influential people as a proud of example of socialism back when times were good. It's the same thing when socialists point to failing capitalistic systems and say "capitalism". It's the problem of people not wanting to properly discuss things and always fall back on blaming people based on labels.
  - ameister14 9y ago
    >Norway's doing something very similar to Venezuela as far as nationalized oil going to the public purse, and it's working out great for them. They did it in a completely different way, though, and the funds were managed and executed differently. Norway helped establish a company and essentially behave as shareholders, with their share revenues going into a fund that reinvests it in stock internationally. They deliberately do not depend on it to subsidize social programs entirely and only withdraw 3% per year. Venezuela's leadership actively controlled the fund and used it to support wide-reaching social policies that could only be sustained with new revenues, pushing more oil production and making it a larger percentage of their economy which ultimately caused massive failure when the oil prices went down, they were producing at high capacity already and they couldn't get rid of the social programs.
planteen 9y ago
Sweden has never had significant oil production. In fact, it hasn't produced any oil for 20 years. So I don't think its really a valid comparison with Venezuela (although Norway is).

gandhium 9y ago

Sadly your first TLDR offended bunch of folks still believing in socialism and you've got downvoted. Meanwhile - all (and I mean ALL) countries which adopted socialism - all of them plunged into poverty, corruption and in some cases civil war and dissolution. One can think it should teach a lesson... but some people just want to believe.

hnarn 9y ago
Social democracy is objectively a form of socialism and it has been implemented in practice in large parts of Northern Europe for around a century. You're free to have whatever opinions you wish but when your claims simply are wrong you are just being ignorant and unwilling to learn.
- microcolonel 9y ago
  Northern Europe contains no "social democracies". They existed for a time, but were superseded by liberal democracies for practical reasons. There are remnants of attempts at socialism, but that is not the direction they are taking.
  - hnarn 9y ago
    Please explain the difference and how they were superseded.
danharaj 9y ago
Every socialist revolution back to the Paris commune has been met with violence from the capitalist powers of the world. You can visit wikipedia and count how many countries participated in the Russian civil war on the side of the whites. Try to count how many times the United States tried to assassinate Castro while you're at it. Since all socialist revolutions are met with the full ferocity of the capitalist states, it's not clear how they can win militarily without becoming a dictatorship. A military is perhaps the social organization least amenable to democracy and most amenable to dictatorship. It's no surprise that socialist revolutions which succeed via military dictatorship and never demobilize (because they can't, because they are constantly under threats real and perceived) begin to reflect military dictatorship in their social structure. No socialist revolution has succeeded in an industrialized nation. They have all taken place in the periphery, either in colonies of imperial powers or extremely weak states like tsarist Russia. None of those successful revolutions managed to industrialize without devolving into centralized, dictatorial rule. Socialist thinkers back to Marx thought that socialism is enabled by industrialization; not something that can be implemented beforehand. This sounds entirely consistent with history. Note that the State had a crucial role to play in the development of capitalism. You can't pretend that capitalism isn't born of and sustained by violence when it has been instrumental in every development that led to capitalism's ascent, from forcible enclosure of the commons, to imperialist plundering of non-industrialized nations, to strikes broken by national militaries, and so forth. If it doesn't seem so violent now, maybe it's because resistance to it has been thoroughly purged from your milieu and the violence that remains has been pushed slightly out of your perspective. Nothing to see. There's no possible way capitalist nations were responsible for, say, the world's largest ever cholera outbreak in Yemen. Socialism is the democratic control of the means of production. All attempted socialist revolutions devolved into a system of bureaucratic control by a centralized government. It sounds like socialism hasn't ever been achieved. > One can think it should teach a lesson... but some people just want to believe. Most socialists think that an alternative system is necessary because capitalism with all its contradictions are untenable. Treating socialists as shallow thinkers just makes you look shallow. But it is quite a fashionable look these days.

Helmet 9y ago

You're absolutely right; the fact that you're being down-voted is quite ironic on many fronts, but then again, ideological conformity is now the norm even in the tech world.

res0nat0r 9y ago

> TL;DR: Socialism. You're being downvoted because of this. The country isn't failing because of "socialism", but because of the country stupidly spending it's money and it's oligarchy stealing money from the country to line it's pockets among many other things.

curiousgeorgio 9y ago
So somehow it wasn't true socialism this time? They weren't doing socialism "the right way"? Stop with the excuses - Venezuela is pretty much the text-book example of socialism and its inevitable consequences (see "the country stupidly spending it's money").
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- adventured 9y ago
  That seems a bit excessive. Surely we should give Socialism another 30 or 40 tries before finally declaring that rigid state command & control of the economy and most aspects of existence through the extreme and constant application of violence, doesn't work. Just because after a century of repeated failed attempts there has yet to be a single successful Socialist outcome, that doesn't mean one day with enough death and destruction, that grand ambition of vast material production [1] won't be achieved. [1] One of the much touted original claims of Socialist doctrine, was that it would lead to vast material abundance that would best Capitalism. At its core was materialism ideologically, espoused by all the thought-leaders that were responsible for creating Socialism.
  - mcv 9y ago
    State Socialism is not the only form of socialism. Libertarian Socialists predicted in the 19th century that state socialism would lead to tyranny. Let me share my favourite political quote by Mikhail Bakunin: "Freedom without socialism is privilege and injustice; socialism without freedom is slavery and brutality" I think the 20th century has proven him correct on both counts. We need both socialism and freedom in equal measure, which is exactly what North-European social democracies are trying to do. Imperfectly still, but it's already better than any alternative I've seen.

sctb 9y ago

Complaining about voting like this just injects inflammation and deflects the conversation further off topic. And then users downvote or flag you more because it's against the guidelines. So please just leave it out and comment civilly, substantively, and on-topic instead. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

curiousgeorgio 9y ago
Downvoting for the sake of disagreement alone is also frowned-upon, if not against the guidelines. From what I understand, a downvote or flag should be reserved for content that doesn't add to the discussion or is obviously inappropriate. These comments are being downvoted for no good reason or explanation, and the discussion deserves to exist here, so the downvotes - in this case - should be called out for what they are: cowardly responses to viewpoints that someone just happens to disagree with but can't engage with reason or civil debate.

crdoconnor 9y ago

Pretty much the same thing happened in the 80s when there was a precipitous drop in the price of oil. The anger fomented by that is exactly what got Chavez and his socialist platform elected. Now, of course, it's "all socialism's fault", just as last time it was "all capitalism's fault". People have short memories. So no, it wasn't socialism that's causing Venezuela to fall apart any more than it's going to be socialism that will Saudi Arabia to tear itself apart in the next few years (they've have more cash on hand right now but they are hurtling towards exactly the same place). It's Dutch Disease and the resource curse. >Longer still: They allowed the state to control the oil revenues entirely, and because they wanted to enrich themselves, they promised unsustainable entitlements to the public which eventually fell through when the oil price dropped slightly. Because they didn't give a damn, the private sector was not involved to invest any portion of the revenues, and the government couldn't possibly care less to invest them. Yes, their real mistake was building some houses and hospitals with the oil revenue instead of letting it get siphoned off into swiss bank accounts as was happening before /s The "private sector" (powerful Venezuelan business interests) essentially plotted its own demise when it launched the 2003 coup. That was unfortunate, as was Chavez's response to crush them, but it was to a large extent, self inflicted.

thriftwy 9y ago
> building some houses with the oil revenue Do you mean "in Miami" here? Because in this thread that's where the money supposedly go. A lot of countries live with Dutch disease without crumbling.

pwagland 9y ago

I haven't downvotes your answer, but you ask why people voted you down… so here goes. It is because you try to pin everything on Socialism, when the real problem is actually Cronyism and Despotism. I.e. it was their political system, not their financial system, that did them in. There are plenty of countries with various degrees of socialism that are not bankrupt. Australia, for example, had a socialist, very left leaning, government that gave many of the same things out. But these countries generally have well established democratic institutions. And it is these institutions that allow a country to change direction if it makes a mistake. Venezuela on the other hand does not have a strong democratic institution, and so has no real way to escape the mess that it created. Its leaders are invested in the solution that they chose, and dug ever deeper in to show how right they were.