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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
    - DomreiRoam 9y ago
      Nationalization did happen in France around 1981.
      - adventured 9y ago
        The US also had limited price controls under Nixon. It too was extremely damaging and foolish when the US or France took such intervention measures, which you can see from the broader context / economic climate results: US economic disaster in the 1970s and French economic stagnation for decades.
      - mcv 9y ago
        Nationalisation also happened in Netherland in 2008: https://www.government.nl/topics/state-owned-enterprises/nationalisation-of-financial-institutions-abn-amro-asr-and-sns-reaal https://www.government.nl/topics/state-owned-enterprises/nat... Although in this case it's financial institutions on the verge on bankruptcy, and they were nationalised to save them, with the goal of eventually privatising them again. Nationalisation versus privatisation is a complex subject, and I think there are things that absolutely should be nationalised. Essential infrastructure where no real competition is possible, for example. Like railroads or mail. I suppose it can make sense for the countries oil reserves. But the important part is that whichever way you move on that scale, you do it in a responsible way and ensure that a fair price is paid for them.
        DomreiRoam 9y ago
        It is a complex subject and I agree that in case of monopoly (natural or not) and in case of strategic sector we should make an honest evaluation of what serve best the Nation and the People. Also, if you nationalize it shouldn't mean that you don't compensate fairly the private owner.
  - ameister14 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 don't think that's what people are thinking of when they say something like Venezuela doesn't respect private property. They are thinking of the seizure of ranches and companies so they can be redistributed.
- libertyEQ 9y ago
  I wouldn't consider oil dropping from ~$100/barrel to ~$40/barrel a slight drop. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Texas_Intermediate#/media/File:Crude_oil_spread.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Texas_Intermediate#/media...
  - microcolonel 9y ago
    It's not such a big deal if you haven't built everything on extracting 100% of the net revenue of the oil industry. If your take were lower, it would not be as big a hit, and you could raise the take and split the difference. If your take is 100%, there's nowhere to go.
    - libertyEQ 9y ago
      You stated in your original comment that is was a, "slight drop." I actually agree with much of what you wrote, but let the argument stand on its own, please don't use non-factual content to (note: the Iranian oil coming back into the "open" market might have been related) overstate things. We can't normalize "truthful hyperbole."
  - protomyth 9y ago
    Its even worse for Venezuela. Their oil is plentiful but not a very high grade which requires significantly more money to refine than say Saudi Arabia, Texas, or North Dakota. This means that in a low price environment they aren't taking a cut, they literally cannot make any profit. Further complicating the situation is their mismanagement and lack of technology purchases or even basic maintenance in the oil industry.
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).

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
  - DomreiRoam 9y ago
    Nationalization did happen in France around 1981.
    - adventured 9y ago
      The US also had limited price controls under Nixon. It too was extremely damaging and foolish when the US or France took such intervention measures, which you can see from the broader context / economic climate results: US economic disaster in the 1970s and French economic stagnation for decades.
    - mcv 9y ago
      Nationalisation also happened in Netherland in 2008: https://www.government.nl/topics/state-owned-enterprises/nationalisation-of-financial-institutions-abn-amro-asr-and-sns-reaal https://www.government.nl/topics/state-owned-enterprises/nat... Although in this case it's financial institutions on the verge on bankruptcy, and they were nationalised to save them, with the goal of eventually privatising them again. Nationalisation versus privatisation is a complex subject, and I think there are things that absolutely should be nationalised. Essential infrastructure where no real competition is possible, for example. Like railroads or mail. I suppose it can make sense for the countries oil reserves. But the important part is that whichever way you move on that scale, you do it in a responsible way and ensure that a fair price is paid for them.
      - DomreiRoam 9y ago
        It is a complex subject and I agree that in case of monopoly (natural or not) and in case of strategic sector we should make an honest evaluation of what serve best the Nation and the People. Also, if you nationalize it shouldn't mean that you don't compensate fairly the private owner.
- ameister14 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 don't think that's what people are thinking of when they say something like Venezuela doesn't respect private property. They are thinking of the seizure of ranches and companies so they can be redistributed.
libertyEQ 9y ago
I wouldn't consider oil dropping from ~$100/barrel to ~$40/barrel a slight drop. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Texas_Intermediate#/media/File:Crude_oil_spread.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Texas_Intermediate#/media...
- microcolonel 9y ago
  It's not such a big deal if you haven't built everything on extracting 100% of the net revenue of the oil industry. If your take were lower, it would not be as big a hit, and you could raise the take and split the difference. If your take is 100%, there's nowhere to go.
  - libertyEQ 9y ago
    You stated in your original comment that is was a, "slight drop." I actually agree with much of what you wrote, but let the argument stand on its own, please don't use non-factual content to (note: the Iranian oil coming back into the "open" market might have been related) overstate things. We can't normalize "truthful hyperbole."
- protomyth 9y ago
  Its even worse for Venezuela. Their oil is plentiful but not a very high grade which requires significantly more money to refine than say Saudi Arabia, Texas, or North Dakota. This means that in a low price environment they aren't taking a cut, they literally cannot make any profit. Further complicating the situation is their mismanagement and lack of technology purchases or even basic maintenance in the oil industry.

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).