I'm curious about the pictures of stores with "good selections at high prices". Is there split market like the former USSR where stores without price constraints are selling at higher prices but have a wider selection? One of the challenges there was that suppliers would divert their supplies to the "open price" stores because it made them more money, is that what is going on in Venezula?
It probably has to do with stocking times would be my guess. (i.e. If you get one shipment a week, the day it arrives and ends up on the shelves you look full...by the end of the week, well, you've got almost nothing since you aren't able to get any reserves)
> But despite the severe scarcity Venezuelans are not going hungry. The Food and Agriculture Organisation has said that the Latin American nation more than halved malnutrition indices to less than 5% since Chávez came to power. It gives partial credit to the government-run network of food distribution chains known as Mercal, which delivers subsidised food in shops across the country. And yet food has gone missing, and queues outside food shops often wrap around the block.
It also is probably the difference b/t government and non-government stores to a degree but the real culprit seems to be:
> For Oliveros, an additional cause for the shortage of basic food staples is the decrease in agricultural production resulting from seized companies and land expropriations. "More than 3m hectares were expropriated during 2004-2010. That and overvalued exchange rate destroyed agriculture. It's cheaper to import than it is to produce. That's a perverse model that kills off any productivity," he says.
They destroyed their agricultural system years ago and the government just can't afford to keep spending like they used to with the oil prices where they are now.
Yes that is the caption but the picture shows a store with ample bread products, cereals, meat selections, canned vegetables, oils and other cooking supplies. When the discussion of the article is a "hunt for food" those things all seem like stuff you'd consider "prey".
My question is whether or not that store is accessible to everyone (as described by my father, in the USSR the 'diplomatic' stores were not open to regular citizens) and if the prices are extortionate or merely market priced.
The root of those questions are whether or not an actual economy could be bootstrapped underneath the current mess or if it is too late for that. It is a sad story either way.
The Venezuela government set extremely low prices for essential goods and has devalued the currency to an extreme degree. So anything market priced is extremely expensive (the money isn't worth much) and many local producers went under because they couldn't make money at the prices they were required to charge.
In Poland you could exchange hard currency like US Dollars and German Marks for PeKaO bony (like coupons from national bank) and then use those in stores like Pewex to buy everything. Later it was streamlined like all at one window in the same store or even at check-out. I suspect that is what your father meant by diplomatic stores. The gov wanted hard currency so that it could import from outside the iron curtain, regular folk had no means outside of black market and family and friends living in the west to gain hard currency, so the stores were for tourists, foreign scholars, and diplomats essentially.
Another interesting situation in Poland was fuel rationing. Many things were rationed, but if you were a foreigner entering the the country in the mid '80s you could by coupons for X liters of gasoline. Then you did not even have to wait in the long lines at fuel stations. It was not unheard of people buying stolen fuel under a bridge or in a forest.
Most stores were bare because when inventory came-in it was quickly purchased. Since the prices were controlled people had enough zloty but not enough to spend it on so buying items like paper was desirable because later you could barter it for items you needed on the black market.
I highly recommend reading Life and Death in Shanghai by Nien Cheng [0]. It's a factual, first-hand account of the China's Cultural Revolution and what living in a communist / socialist society is really like from an educated person's perspective. My inlaws escaped Saigon when it fell and say the picture is very accurate.
The socialist downfall of countries are all unique, but follow similar paths. I encourage people to understand the causes of them and how brutal and arbitrary these governments are.
I think we need to be more careful with our terminology than using the terms "communist" and "socialist" interchangeably. Presumably, the real problem we're talking about is state-controlled economies, regardless of the ideologies that set them up.
Depends on your definition of socialism. If you mean "all the means of production are owned by the state", then yes, that probably counts as collectivist.
But if by "socialism", you mean "what goes by that label in Scandanavia", then probably no, "collectivist" doesn't fit. It's just somewhat more government services than the US has, at the price of somewhat higher taxes.
Right which is why I prefer to use collectivism which is prioritizing the group over the individual and would seem to subsume any definition of socialism you could ever reasonably give.
You sound like you think you're agreeing with me, but you're not.
I'm saying that socialism, as practiced in Scandanavia, is not collectivist. That means that, no, collectivism does not "subsume any definition of socialism you could ever reasonably give".
Taking X% of an individual's outcome and putting it into a pool for the collective good sure sounds pretty close to: "Collective ownership of the means to production". Doubly-so if that X is more than 50, as that means you are working more for others or the collective than you are for yourself.
Any who, I really think the definition of "Socialism" and "Socialist" require an overhaul in our current societal climate. I'd say that back when that ideology was conceived, people saw people in general and themselves as barely more than "resource" cogs, and that the rulers or state had some sort of "effectively-divine" right to rule them. I would argue that civilized and connected society has moved past that, to the point that anything remotely close to actual socialism or communism would be equivalent to totalitarianism in people's minds. It would be seen as barbaric, and contrary to people's right to exist.
This is not a distinction, but a generalization, or abstraction that better describes the phenomenon and your assertion that a state controlled economy may be contemplated without respect to the ideology to which it conforms is dubious.
Do I understand you accurately to be saying "if you want participate in a debate with me on my terms you're i part responsible for all the evils of state-run economies"?
Aha now that is an interesting question and I'm glad you asked. I know that I personally would feel responsible if I saw collectivism murdering yet another society and did not call it out for what it is. If I for example saw that people were dying of lead poisoning but instead blamed evil spirits then clearly I would be responsible for mass poisoning.
"Agree with me or you're among history's greatest villains" is neither a novel nor persuasive rhetorical strategy. You should try a different approach.
Socialism just advocates for collective ownership, without specifying the scale or scope of that collective. It does not have to be the state government, and could, for example, be a group of football fans.
The interstate system is a tax and spend program. If you're equating government spending with socialism, then you should probably revisit your understanding of each.
Some classify roads as a public good[1]. Of course, there are private roads as well.
The government owns the interstates, but that is just property, not a means of production.
Public school systems construct stadiums and fund football teams.
Private universities also construct stadiums and fund football(and other sport) team.
Why should a sport team has anything to do with an educational facility? How does a football team...say...further the education of its college students?
Several countries that are fairly socialist have higher living standards than the U.S., where "socialism" is an epithet for some reason. McCarthy lives on I suppose.
Venezuela's problem is totalitarianism. In a socialist country, it is possible for the government to be governed by law and have limits placed on its power. That is not what's been going in in Venezuala.
But what was totalitarian about it? All of the economically destructive measures (price controls, currency exchange rates, impositions on the rich/foreign investment) were immensely popular, right?
I always find it strange that Genghis Khan is used as an example this way. He was solely responsible for one of the largest economic revolutions in history by uniting the Silk Road, standardizing a writing system, and ran a meritocratic society. So yeah of course he could fix it, he's one of the most successful rulers of all time by all metrics.
Edit: Yeah, obviously he and his conquest killed a lot of people. And yeah, in this case it was a metric of success for him and his empire.
He also murdered millions of peasants he saw no use for since rice farming was not on their list of priorities.
When conquering China it was often the case that academics were the first on the chopping block since they were presumably the ones most likely to cause trouble.
Subsidies were indeed popular and probably anything chavez did. Then, popular and orwellian totalitarian are not contradictory.
But lets first understand that "the poor" are not created by the rich in latin america as socialists love to say, its been more than half a century of socialist/socialdemocrat rule and its obvious that they create the poor by making them dependant on the governments' favour. The famous barrios, fabellas and asentamientos are the creation of a socialist elite that uses the filantropy masquerade to get easy money through corruption, currency exchanges, inflation, etc.
I was addressing the comment's point about "checks on government". Specifically:
>>In a socialist country, it is possible for the government to be governed by law and have limits placed on its power. That is not what's been going in in [Venezuela].
My point is, there were in fact limits, and they went through the democratic process to have exceptions made to those limits. That's not totalitarianism, which would be "some figure saw the limits and bypassed them without approval anyway".
Those successful European countries let the economy operate and tax it. Venezuela runs the economy, including setting prices of basic necessities, which then become unavailable because it turns out the government cannot set those the way it thinks it can.
Indeed, this is the difference between socialism in a free market and socialism in a command economy. While the former may try to influence the market (through social programs, state investment, money supply), it still must bend with the winds of market forces.
The latter is an imposition of structure irrespective of the market: It might be seen more as a rigid body that can stand in certain conditions but begins to buckle once the wind changes.
There's no such thing as Socialism in a free market, that's a contradiction in terms. Socialism means non-free market, and uses extreme violence to accomplish its ends of nationalizing wealth and production (which are inherently linked). And indeed, very liberal applications of force is the sole means to accomplish such a thing, which is why all attempts at Socialism throughout history always involved the equivalent end result of a dictatorship and extremely violent suppression of the population.
Socialism requires at a minimum the nationalization of the means of production. If what you're talking about doesn't involve that, then what you're talking about isn't Socialism.
I understand that 51% of Wikipedians on the page for "Socialism" have come to this conclusion, but it may trouble you to know that 51% of Wikipedians on other pages about other aspects/flavors of socialism do not agree, let alone political scientists as a whole.
I'm sorry to be so snarky about this, but "socialism means command economy" is the Scholar's Checkmate of Internet political science debates, and I'm think we benefit by not dignifying it.
Curious to hear how you use this perspective to rationalize the government structure for providing public goods in the U.S., such as defense, roads, and the court system.
Is the U.S. not a free market economy in your view?
> There's no such thing as Socialism in a free market
There's no such thing as a free market, either.
> Socialism means non-free market
Laissez-faire Capitalism ignores that the ideal efficiency of a free market requires the absence of externalities, which are present in the real world.
Socialism attempts to address the existence of externalities (though socialist theory often won't frame it in those terms) through compensatory mechanisms (which may involve outright government control and planned economy, or may, especially in many current strands of socialism, instead include mechanisms to internalize externalities so that the behavior of the imperfectly free market better approaches the efficiency of the ideal free market than an actually unregulated market would without effort to address externalities.)
> and uses extreme violence to accomplish its ends of nationalizing wealth and production (which are inherently linked).
Nationalizing means of production is not an end of socialism, though its a means of some forms of socialism in assuring that the means of production are harnessed to serve the common good of society. Other forms of socialism change (compared to capitalism) the balance of power in firms between labor and capital as a means of harnessing production to serve the common good, others adopt market regulations which serve to internalize externalities so that forces in the regulated market will naturally direct the means of production to serve the general good.
> Socialism requires at a minimum the nationalization of the means of production.
No, it doesn't, if you are referring to "socialism", the political philosophy. If you are referring to "socialism", a particular the phase on the road to communism in Marx's Communism (and thus the "socialism" of Leninsm and its descendants which, while abandoning much of Marx's theory, kept this part), then, yes, socialism does involve that, but note that Marx's Communism was one of many kinds of socialist philosophies of its time, and that the "socialism" phase in Marx's Communism (and, for that matter, Marx's Communism as a whole) is not representative of (though it may be one example of) socialism as a political viewpoint.
I think most socialists would agree that more democratic control of the means of production in general, as compared to laissez-faire capitalism, is a distinguishing feature of socialism. I do not think most socialists would agree that state ownership of the means of production is essential (and, indeed, many would argue that significantly revising the capitalist concept of ownership and property rights in the means of production are necessary to socialism, and that the nature of that revision of what ownership means is more important to socialism than where ownership is located. Socialism as simply state-ownership is a minimally challenging way for capitalists to approach socialism, because it avoids even discussion of the essential difference between socialism and capitalism, which is the challenge to the capitalist understanding of property and ownership.)
The term "socialism" has more than one meaning. Classically, it referred to the means of production being owned and controlled directly by the society, either through the state or workers collectives.
Later the word "socialism" came to also mean a market economy in which the government intervenes to a considerable degree, as in European-style social democracy.
American conservatives have also recently come to label New Deal-style liberalism as "socialism."
I think it would be helpful for productive discussion if people labeled which meaning of the term they are using, and acknowledged that it also has other meanings.
Let me add that the state-ownership version of socialism could be totalitarian or democratic. I am not aware of any countries in the world today that have a state-ownership version of socialism and are democracies. Venezuela, from what I understand, has a partly state-owned economy, and is semi-totalitarian.
update: let me explain some why I think that discussion can be more productive if people acknowledge the term "socialism" has more than one meaning, and are clear about which one they are using.
There are many different economic and governmental systems that are labeled "socialist" including, among others, the totalitarian, total state-control system of the old Soviet Union and the democratic, semi-socialist system of the UK after WWII and up until Margaret Thatcher.
What is needed is to discuss how the various systems work and what are their outcomes, good or bad. This is a complicated and difficult discussion. If people insist on either labeling all of them as "socialist" or only one, then people get into endless, fruitless debates over who is right, and it greatly undermines the more factual discussion about specific different systems and why they go right or wrong. The comments to this link are a good example of what I am talking about. But if everyone agrees there are different definitions, then they can focus on the more important part of discussing the systems themselves.
I think you're definition has some good elements - about nationalizing wealth and production, but I don't get where violence has anything to do with socialism. I've always considered Socialism to be "socializing" the provision of some goods instead of relying on the free market. Providing things like Street Cleaning, Birth Certificates, Roads, military, coast guard, street lighting, traffic lights, Police Services, K-12 education, Courts are all examples of common socialized goods by that definition. Different countries seem to socialize more (or less) than others. Some countries provide some spectrum of (more or less) socialized fire departments, health care, ambulances, emergency care, homeless shelters, etc...
With that in mind - countries like the United States, particularly in the latter half of the 20th century, are quite socialist in comparison to previous eras (though obviously somewhat less so than other countries).
Please describe the ways in which some countries are "fairly" socialist but aren't actually socialist. I'm not aware of a single example of a socialist nation succeeding in any regard towards creating prosperity for its people. Nor am I aware of a successful national experiment in socialism in the last two centuries of various attempts. Every historical attempt has ended extraordinarily badly, universally failing to accomplish high living standards.
None of the Scandinavian nations are even remotely close to being socialist. They all rely on the market economy, they all embrace Capitalism to significant degrees, they all have property rights enshrined into the core of their economies, they all allow for the vast accumulation of wealth without forced redistribution, they all allow for the private ownership of production, they all allow for the accumulation of and investment of capital privately, they all utilize equity and bond markets that can be bought and traded freely (another critical point to Capitalism), and on it goes. They're all substantially closer to Capitalism than Socialism, which is course why they're able to pay for their large welfare states and other actual Socialist nations universally fail at that. Sweden for example famously had drifted too far toward being an over-burdened welfare state - circa the 1970s and 1980s - and had to de-regulate and de-tax their economy, which then resulted in boom courtesy of increased Capitalism. The nations you refer to, are actually welfare states, not Socialist - there is a very big difference.
You can stick your fingers in your ears and scream so that you won't hear reasonable people using the word "socialist" to mean things you don't mean when you say it, but that doesn't change the fact that reasonable people disagree with you about whether "socialism" implies "command economy".
That's entirely unnecessary and silly. Instead I'm going by the word of the very people that were instrumental in creating and spreading Socialism and its intellectual foundations to begin with: Marx, Engels, Hitler, Mussolini, Lenin, Trotsky, etc. No need to rely on arbitrary speculation.
To argue that Socialism means something other than a command economy, you have to disagree with all the major players that were actually responsible for defining Socialism to begin with. I choose not to do that and I accept their elaborate, very well documented descriptions of what it is. And I'm not referring to associationism or the cooperative movements, I'm talking about Socialism.
Reasonable people disagree with you that Marx, Engels, Hitler, Mussolini, Lenin, and Trotsky have defined the word "socialism" with the precision you feel it now has.
Invoking Mussolini this way is a particularly telling example.
So is Hitler. Why not just simplify your argument to "The Nazis were National Socialists. Check and mate!"
> the very people that were instrumental in creating and spreading Socialism and its intellectual foundations to begin with: Marx, Engels, Hitler, Mussolini, Lenin, Trotsky, etc.
Its worth noting that your examples include:
(1) two members of the same early subset of socialism (Marx and Engels) and two later people known for involvement in the same descendant of the form of socialism embraced by the earlier two (Lenin and Trotsky), and
(2) two other people that aren't recognized as having an important involvement in anything recognized as a branch of socialism, though one of them was involved in a political party with "socialist" in the name (Hitler and Mussolini).
Its hardly a broad sampling of "the very people that were instrumental in creating and spreading Socialism and its intellectual foundations to begin with".
Is this why IKEA, which is one of the largest non-state owned Swedish companies is set up as Netherlands-based entity (INGKA Holding), ostensibly for tax evasion purposes?
Sweden does have a lower corporate tax rate than the U.S., though the U.S. tax code offsets this by providing a multitude of different deductions for business expenses. Among other things, government imposed fines are tax deductible as per the U.S. Tax Code. When it comes to personal tax rates, Sweden's rate is much higher than the rate in the U.S. (http://taxfoundation.org/blog/how-scandinavian-countries-pay...)
Not debating the validity of your larger point here, but your assertion re Sweden being economically free as compared to the U.S. isn't that accurate. It is a very much a socialist nation that is also very prosperous.
I never argued that Sweden was more economically free than the US (although frankly they may be at this point, US federal regulations have increased drastically in the last 40 years, the regulatory burden is far larger than it used to be). I said that Sweden was in a two decade long economic slump, and only climbed out of it courtesy of de-regulation and de-taxation of their economy. I'd be happy to link to several articles covering this historical fact; the Swedish architects of that event have talked openly about how and why they did it.
Can you name the ways in which Sweden is a Socialist nation? I'm aware of very few things that can even be argued to define them as such. Quite the opposite, their overwhelming characteristics economically are that they heavily rely on the market economy determined by individual business owners and investors rather than a command economy dictated by the State.
- Do they allow private ownership of property, including the means of production? Yes, Sweden's economy is almost entirely driven by private businesses.
- Does nearly all of their economy function around private business ownership? Yes.
- Do they allow the existence of so called capital classes? People whose wealth is primarily existent in capital, investment, real estate, etc.? Yes.
- Do they force the redistribution of wealth, so as to attempt to prevent the existence of rich and poor classes? No.
- Do they allow the private ownership of real estate, farm land, etc? Yes.
- May the government arbitrarily nationalize your wealth, investments, or business? No, that would be a rare event in Sweden.
- Do they primarily function via the free market economy of non-coerced trade? Or is all trade primarily dictated by the State? Right, almost entirely free trade.
- Does the State determine all investment priorities for all businesses? No, quite the opposite, businesses are free to set their own priorities, build new products at will, choose how they allocate capital.
- Does the State dictate most allocations of capital? No, the opposite.
Things like healthcare, slightly heavy economic regulation, education - are the primarily arguments I'm aware of regarding Sweden, however those define them as a welfare state, not a Socialist state. The US for example has vast free healthcare, housing, and food systems, along with a massive entitlement system, which is why the US is also a welfare state (and not primarily a Capitalist nation as it was a hundred years ago).
> - Do they allow private ownership of property, including the means of production? Yes, Sweden's economy is almost entirely driven by private businesses.
Government spending as % of GDP is an excellent metric re size of the government relative to the private economy. This assumes that as a nation is more socialist, the size of the government will increase.
I don't doubt that private property ownership is permissible in Sweden, but the government dominates GDP as compared to any single private sector.
> - Do they force the redistribution of wealth, so as to attempt to prevent the existence of rich and poor classes? No.
Sweden has higher personal tax rates than the U.S. I dispute your "No." here.
> - May the government arbitrarily nationalize your wealth, investments, or business? No, that would be a rare event in Sweden.
It depends. The Swedish government is a highly functional one and will not act capriciously. I believe they will step in and nationalize wealth/real property if doing so was important to the wellbeing of the nation, whereas the U.S. even during the bailouts of 2008 went through great pains to avoid direct government ownership / control, even to the point of handing private equity firms free risk-adjusted money.
> - Does the State determine all investment priorities for all businesses? No, quite the opposite, businesses are free to set their own priorities, build new products at will, choose how they allocate capital.
Given the GDP % stated above, this is debatable.
> - Does the State dictate most allocations of capital? No, the opposite.
"they all have property rights enshrined into the core of their economies, they all allow for the vast accumulation of wealth without forced redistribution"
I disagree. These nations do not allow vast accumulations of wealth. They have significant taxes that actually prohibit vast accumulations of wealth, by design. It's also a form of forced redistribution, because you are required to pay excessive tax rates..and if you don't, you be sent to prison or be subjected to some form of punishment.
In fact, if you look at the average wages across all industries in a country like Sweden, they are relatively the same.
Why are they the same? Because the government will tax the money away before you can ever get to those higher amounts.
"The nations you refer to, are actually welfare states, not Socialist - there is a very big difference."
I feel like this is the 'no true scotsman' argument all over again. At a certain tax rate, the government owns the means of production.
We can keep playing semantics and call it 'socialist' or 'welfare state', but the reality is that no matter what you call it, high taxes and excessive government regulations is not something that is conducive to a prospering nation.
Even look at California as a small example: The high tax rates and regulations have started squeezing out the middle class and in many parts of the state, you only have two classes of people: poor and rich.
The Nordic countries implement "social democracy" in some form or other. At least they used to, as you mention Sweden has seen its economy liberalized far beyond the US in some sectors these days (Schools, for example).
In the end it's just a question of whether Social Democracy with a free market is half socialism or if it isn't. Not really a useful debate. The roots of social democracy just like all other forms of socialism of course is the workers movement and Marx is very present still in the Social democratic parties' program declarations.
Social democrats accept the market economy. They are socialist in the sense that they are proponents of redistribution/wealth equality, and workers influencing or even owning the means of production (The former through unions having seats in corporate boards, the latter through later scrapped ideas like workers owning corporations through funds, "wage earner funds").
These social democratic ideas try to adapt Marxist theory to a liberal democracy and market economy. Is social democracy socialism despite accepting a market economy? Depends on who you ask. It's simpler to just use the term social democratic instead of socialist. Having a large welfare state is really orthogonal to how the money for said welfare state is raised (Norway for example could in theory have supported its welfare state without much social democracy or socialism).
In Norway, the means of production of petroleum is state-owned (majority at least), well managed, and will provide for the social safety of Norwegians for many, many, many years.
So there _are_ countries with genuine socialist policies that--while contentious and somewhat controversial--are nothing like the Venezuelan catastrophe.
No Venezuela's problem is corruption,populism and incompetence. How comes Norway is freaking rich from the little oil they have and Venezuela can't even achieve the same thing with way more natural resources ?
I think you're referring to European Social Democracies. That's a different type of regime than socialism -- for the most part they don't try to own the means of production. Venezuela is nothing like one of those countries. Chavez built a sort of hybrid of "Bolivarianism" and socialism. They rejected "imperialist" ties, nationalized many industries and tried to develop more self-sustainability.
End of the day, there seems to be a need for balance between capitalist striving and government administration based on something other than profit/loss.
Most of the people who cry "socialism" in the US are inspired/motivated by people who control access to natural resources.
When I say socialism and communism, I mean that the government regulates the economy or large pieces of it. Successful "socialist" western democracies are free-market economies that have higher taxes to provide a social safety net. I wish we could call that "empathetic capitalism".
I think you will have a hard time generating conclusive evidence for this argument. Doing so will force you to argue that well-known people who describe themselves as philosophically socialist are wrong about that.
Such as whom? Bernie Sanders is a politician clearly lying about the definition of socialism, while those he claims to want to imitate deny they are socialist.[1]
No. Welfare state is the apparatus prividing social security and benefits for a population. It's not an ideology or a political system. Sweden has a large welfare state in the sense that we have free single payer health care, free education etc.
We are a social democracy in the sense that the current political climate and consensus is shaped by a few decades of social democratic rule. High progressive taxes etc are seen as norm and are of course necessary to finance a large welfare state.
However: How the money for a large welfare state like the Nordic ones is raised is orthogonal to whether it's being spent on a large welfare state or not. Had we had 10% military spending we'd have a much smaller welfare state than today, with the same taxes.
It's entirely possible for a country to have a very large welfare state without being the least bit socialist - especially if they have natural resources. If the swedish national mining Company (yes, a state owned Company!) suddenly found resources allowing taxes to be halved - we would.
The prior comment said that the correct term for a large social safety net was "democratic socialism", that was what I was responding to. This is a lie propagated by Bernie Sanders.[1] I agree that a welfare state is not necessarily socialist- that was my point! So, you think you are disagreeing with me, but you are perhaps missing is the point that, in the USA, Sanders continual lying about what Socialism means so that he can fit into the Democratic Party has confused the issue in many young people's minds.
The Swedish mining company LKAB is a socialist (state-owned) enterprise, however the entire economy is not composed of socialist enterprises, therefore it is clearly a mixed economy.
Relatively high taxes on their own are not "social" or "socialist".
You can be irritated that the word "socialism" is ambiguous, but your irritation doesn't change the fact that it is. We should be careful trying to use the word "socialism" to mean things that it doesn't always mean. That's all I'm saying.
There are already specific, well-known terms that capture the real problem with states like Venezuela or the Soviet Union. For instance, "command economy".
> I mean that the government regulates the economy or large pieces of it
The Federal Reserve, bank bailouts, the government spending and government-backed monopolies that created the Internet we're typing on etc. The US "government regulates the economy or large pieces of it".
No one had a monopoly on "creating the internet". The government pays for basic, fundamental research, and as a consequence of those investments a new technology we call The Internet was created. A good use of public money, but trying to use the invention of the internet to argue that the US government is controlling the economy is a total misunderstanding of basic facts.
> Successful "socialist" western democracies are free-market economies
Only in the sense that "free-market", in this context, involves substantial government regulation of market participants and activities in the manner that "free-market" is usually, in other contexts, used to signal the absence of.
I think we need to be more careful with our terminology than using the terms "communist" and "socialist" interchangeably.
You might be surprised to learn that not even the Soviet Union considered itself communist (they considered themselves socialist transitioning to communist).
The reality is that "socialist" is a word without a clear definition, and it's better to avoid using it altogether if you want people to understand you. If by socialism you mean, "a country that takes care of the poor" than say that.
Arguing over the definition of the term 'socialism' is arguing over a definition, and a waste of breath.
I agree that it's a pointless argument, but that goes both ways. Plenty of people use the term "socialist" in ways that don't connote planned economies. Moreover, there are examples of state-run economies that are neither socialist nor communist.
The trouble is that when we talk about the positive aspects of socialism, we have an annoying tendancy to exploit the word to make Sweden an apology for Venezuela: we confuse "socialized services" with "command economy" and end up ignoring the real public policy failures of places like Venezuela.
And when we talk about its negative aspects, we tend to make Venezuela a cautionary tale against, say, single-payer health care.
"Socialism" has a clear, simple definition. Socialism is the ownership and control of the means of production by the government for the people.
Its the mis-use of the term socialism and the details of actually implementing government ownership of the means of production that makes discussions so confusing. To pick a few examples, Obamacare is not socialism. Government assistance, as implemented in the US, is not socialism. A state run oil company, on the other hand, may be part of a socialist economy.
It's more complicated even than this, and, unfortunately, that means your argument isn't dispositive. There is, for instance, "market socialism", which describes public/private cooperatives. Sweden would call itself a "social democracy", rather than a "socialist country", but Sweden does some things that clearly cross the line in ownership and control of the means of production for some industries. Moreover: most countries with single-payer health care --- the UK, Canada, France --- have state control over one of the most important sectors of the economy! By your definition, they're (at least in part) socialist countries. But they would dispute the characterization.
It's not other people who are causing these problems by incorrectly using the terms. It's that reliably using the term "socialism" with any precision requires so much clunky verbiage that nobody --- on either side --- can use it correctly. When we use the term or see it used, we should raise a flag so that we all understand it's ambiguous, and leave it at that.
For what it's worth: by no definition does it make sense to call Obamacare "socialist".
Obamacare is socialist in the sense that it enabled a great deal of government control over the healthcare market, which is a rather large sector of the economy, almost indisputably one of the 'commanding heights'.
There is the saying "why own the farm If you can own the farmer?", which has been attributed to various totalitarians (and whose true origin I am unaware of), that highlights the fact that owning the actual means of production is unnecessary if you control the owner. This can be through regulation, corruption, or other means.
I don't see socialism as a 'treacherous' word, but 'socialism' is more a spectrum than a boolean variable. For instance, I am sure you are more socialist than I am, but that does not make you the same as Castro or Mao.
I don't understand where you believe I am making a fundamental attribution error. I am an extreme libertarian or an anarcho-capitalist (depending on where you draw the line), and from what I've read in your posts over the last years, you are nowhere near that side of the spectrum(s), unless you usually argue in favor of things you disagree with.
this is like saying that "real-time" has clear, simple definition... except for all those times in which people writing medical software disagree with people writing videogames.
socialism is a word that doesn't let people communicate effectively. you say it meaning one thing, and people may understand in a multitude of ways. I think the advice to avoid using it is sound.
Maybe give people a survey to assign a word2vec-like coordinate to their beliefs about each term, and then tell them which term is actually closest to their belief vector?
No. Some of us would contend that the basic tenets of socialism cause a society to degenerate in the same way. Communism brings it on brutally, all of a sudden.
Besides, Venezuela considers itself socialist. "21st century socialism", they proudly named it.
> I think we need to be more careful with our terminology than using the terms "communist" and "socialist" interchangeably.
I was born in the Socialist Republic of Romania (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_Republic_of_Romania) in the early 1980s, which was ruled by the Romanian Communist Party (which was the only allowed party). The situation was pretty much the same in all the former Eastern Block countries, with socialism being used interchangeably with communism, there were no debates in our local press about which one was which. I think "communism is different than socialism" is a Western-countries' thing, where Obama is called a socialist because he tried to make sense of the US health-care system (long story short: he's not).
And on a more general level of discussion, I'm not sure there really is a difference between the two. I've read some left-leaning literature (Marx's Capital I, his "German Ideology" and other younger writings of his, Lenin's "What Is to Be Done?", Kołakowski's 3-volume "Main Currents of Marxism", some Lukács, Jacques Rancière's "Nights of Labor: The Workers Dream in Nineteenth Century France") and no-where in those volumes there was a clear distinction made between "communism" and "socialism". The only nuance I can think of is Lenin's insistence that trade-unionist communism was a bad thing, because that involved making a pact with the "enemy" (the capitalists) and only settling for small gains, ignoring the bigger picture. He was of course right, from a workers' point of view perspective, you either control all means of productions or you risk still depending on the capitalists. 100+ or so years since his early writings the European working class is basically dead.
> The situation was pretty much the same in all the former Eastern Block countries, with socialism being used interchangeably with communism
Well, yeah, authoritarian (Leninist-Stalinist) Communist regimes weren't particularly eager to highlight that Leninist vanguardism was a sharp repudiation of central elements of Marxist Communism (and one that, after making some early marks, was singularly unsuccessful in establishing itself any place where capitalism and the elements Marx saw as necessary for moving on to socialism had ever existed, as opposed to other strands of socialism, both Marxist-derived and otherwise), and that Marxist Communism itself was one of many strands of socialist theory, and that all of the advanced "capitalist" economies of the West had -- largely as a result of non-Marxist, or at least non-Leninist, socialist forces -- long since departed from the "capitalism" critiqued by Marx for what the modern mixed economy, which is neither strictly capitalist nor socialist by 19th or early 20th century standards, keeping superficially the property structure of the former, with many structures inspired by the latter.
> I think "communism is different than socialism" is a Western-countries' thing
Well, yes, seeing socialism as broader than Communism is probably more common in places where the successful forms of socialism absolutely weren't Leninist Communism, often weren't other derivations of Marxist Communism -- and, in some cases, characterized Leninist Communist as "state capitalism" -- and had to deal with domestic opponents that wanted to paint them with the brush of Leninism-Stalinism and its atrocities than in one-party Leninist-Stalinist states.
Or rather, we need to be more careful in conflating the axises of political thought - communism does not necessarily require totalitarianism, but, like extreme conservatism, begets it.
> The socialist downfall of countries are all unique, but follow similar paths
The PRC just surpassed US GDP on some measures, whereas in the 1940s it was a western and Japanese occupied backwards basket case. Is that the downfall you mean?
Or do you mean Russia, which couldn't win a war with the Japanese in 1905, never mind Germany a decade later? The New York Times columns of 1918 said Mr. Lenin's government would fall any day now. What actually happened is as Europe and the US fell into depression in the 1930s, Russia was surging ahead and industrializing. It repelled an attack by a military alliance of virtually all of continental Europe in 1941 and Red Army soldiers planted the red flag in 1945. Then it launched the first satellite, man in space etc. After becoming a superpower, the central committee of the CPSU decided to pack it in in the late 1980s, and attune itself to the economic and political system of the rest of the world. Even Molotov never believed in "socialism in one country", and he was the one proclaiming it.
Some downfall, foreign-dominated backwaters rose to become world superpowers.
> in the 1930s, Russia was surging ahead and industrializing
It (The USSR) was also busy having famines that claimed millions of lives.
Because it was too busy selling gold and wheat to buy industry from Americans (that's who built all those plants).
> I think I'd skip an industrialization like that.
Then you could enjoy Holodomor every day thanks to the unfortunate fact that you happened to occupy some prime Lebensraum.
Stalin was a mass murderer, but he ultimately made or allowed the correct strategy to put the USSR in a position to defeat Germany, which was a pretty good trick (to put it lightly).
As we know today, Germans never had any manpower to make use of much lebensraum. They were at Peak German at that time, after which their birth rate declined dramatically. They won't have the men to settle any of those lands they were supposed to colonize.
Anyway, USSR lost the most lives fighting Germany and gained least benefits out of that. Just check:
Arguably the social policies of Nazi Germany likely would have kept the birthrate high for another 2-3 generations, after that.. its hard to say. Alternative histories of Germany winning the war are many, and interesting (and scary) though experiments.
Nobody got 2-3 generations in their position, I think they could only aim for a half generation of high-ish birthrate.
That's what USA got, and it was arguably less urbanized to begin with.
They'll still have massive debt and huge costs of security and investments in freshly acquired "lebensraum". Honestly I think they'll crumble anyway.
Your first paragraph is "the Nazis didn't have enough coal to burn 6M Jews"-level dishonesty. They would have found a way to populate all that sweet, sweet land, like any colonizer in the past or present.
I agree with the second one. The "spoils" claimed weren't much compared to the destruction inflicted on their country and people. That has nothing to do with my original comment though.
I see rapid decolonization. Japanese leave rural areas and northern territories. Russians fled Central Asia, pushed off Caucasus, large swaths of land become anthropic deserts. French in no position to colonize Africa anymore, if anything they're getting colonized. Chinese flock to Southern coast and no longer push that hard demographically on Uighurs/Tibetans.
Germans don't even seem to flock to their Northern, Baltic shore. And it has better climate than absolute most of their supposed "sraum".
Arguable, Polish and Balts skip their countries for greener pastures. If anybody in EU will be lacking room they can move there any minute.
The main example of "old school" colonization (other than the Chinese example mentioned below) I can think of in 2016 is the Israeli colonization of the occupied territories.
Colonies provided wealth and a logistical advantage to their owners. UK and France both fought hard to hold onto theirs well past the end of WWII. More recently, Russia considered Crimea important enough to accept the economic punishment annexing it entailed.
> Chinese flock to Southern coast and no longer push that hard demographically on Uighurs/Tibetans.
Do you have a good source or book that I can read about this? I would like to know more.
> Germans don't even seem to flock to their Northern, Baltic shore. And it has better climate than absolute most of their supposed "scram".
The Nazis are not known for paying careful attention to the climate when drawing up their grand plans. Lebensraum was their official policy, and I doubt they would have left the local population alone, considering what they did to other undesirables.
I don't have good source on Chinese demography, picking info about it one line at a time.
Anyway, there's no reason to think that Germans would easily defeat post-Imperial Russian Republic (given no Bolsheviks and therefore no civil wars, no mass emigration, famines or murders). Soviets basically lost half of pre-WWII years on chaos.
Russia without Soviets would look more like 350M strong Norway than like 140M strong Nigeria how it ended up.
I'm trying to draw parallels here, that sometimes shit happens. Russia's mismanagement of agriculture notwithstanding, sometimes you're up against forces you can't control.
There's a hell of a big difference between an inadvertent result of ill-considered agricultural practices and a deliberate campaign of genocide by starvation.
If there was a "deliberate campaign of genocide by starvation" happening, I'm sure I could look in the New York Times archives of the period and read about that. If I consult the archives, the reporters going through the Ukraine said reports of that were false.
Also, all of Europe had a bad crop that year, I guess the Soviets were controlling the weather?
There's a lot of hyperbole on both sides here. The Soviets at the time claimed Americans were starving by the millions, and of course Americans claimed the Soviets were starving by the millions.
Of course this is a point too subtle to work on Hacker News.
The data on both sides is wobbly to the point of being undependable. Until modern social security systems kicked in the number of people living in the US was largely a hypothetical quantity, especially in far-flung rural areas, the very sort of which were impacted by the Dust Bowl.
The 1930 census https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1930_United_States_Census seems to be fairly comprehensive, but you have to wonder how far into the wilderness these people were willing to go to tabulate who was living in the extreme edges of the American frontier.
The Soviets claimed a lot of things. Of course, so did, and still do, the United States. But it's not for nothing, I think, that you find no shortage of contemporary Soviet and Ukrainian, and modern Russian, attestations of the Holodomor - whereas on the other side of things, not even the furthest right-wing anti-FDR John Birchers ever made even the slightest attempt to claim that any such thing happened in the United States. No one denies the Dust Bowl was bad. No one in the US, as far as I've ever been able to determine, has ever even tried to claim the Dust Bowl was that bad.
Except there is a consensus that millions of people of people died in the USSR during that famine, Ukranians were hit hardest.
I haven't seen much talk of large scale deaths(>10,000)due to the dust bowl. In fact I can't really find much on dust bowl deaths (other then an uptick in the suicide rate) except in places that seem to be excusing the Holodomor.
No-true-Scotsmanism about the Soviet Union and communism is a hell of a hill to pick to die on in 2016. I don't envy you. But my sympathy is strictly limited by the fact that your choice of ideology causes you to bring it on yourself.
Note that a crop failure is not the same thing as a famine.
People and nations can buy and beg food, its political and economic systems which turn crop failure into famine. Hell sometimes you don't even need a crop failure.
> If there was a "deliberate campaign of genocide by starvation" happening, I'm sure I could look in the New York Times archives of the period and read about that. If I consult the archives, the reporters going through the Ukraine said reports of that were false.
> "Lying was Duranty's stock in trade," commented Alsop. In his memoirs British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, then The Manchester Guardian's correspondent in Moscow, talked of Duranty's "persistent lying" [20] and elsewhere called him "the greatest liar I ever knew.".[21]
> It was clear, meanwhile, from Duranty's personal exchanges that he was fully aware at the time of the scale of the calamity. In 1934 he privately reported to the British embassy in Moscow that as many as 10 million people may have died, directly or indirectly, from famine in the Soviet Union in the previous year. Both British intelligence[22][clarification needed] and American engineer Zara Witkin (1900–1940),[23] who worked in the USSR from 1932 to 1934,[24] confirmed that Duranty knowingly misrepresented information about the nature and scale of the famine.
> he travelled to the Soviet Union and eluded authorities to slip into Ukraine, where he kept diaries of the man-made starvation he witnessed
> > I walked along through villages and twelve collective farms. Everywhere was the cry, 'There is no bread. We are dying'. This cry came from every part of Russia, from the Volga, Siberia, White Russia, the North Caucasus, and Central Asia. I tramped through the black earth region because that was once the richest farmland in Russia and because the correspondents have been forbidden to go there to see for themselves what is happening.
> > In the train a Communist denied to me that there was a famine. I flung a crust of bread which I had been eating from my own supply into a spittoon. A peasant fellow-passenger fished it out and ravenously ate it. I threw an orange peel into the spittoon and the peasant again grabbed it and devoured it. The Communist subsided. I stayed overnight in a village where there used to be two hundred oxen and where there now are six. The peasants were eating the cattle fodder and had only a month's supply left. They told me that many had already died of hunger. Two soldiers came to arrest a thief. They warned me against travel by night, as there were too many 'starving' desperate men.
> > 'We are waiting for death' was my welcome, but see, we still, have our cattle fodder. Go farther south. There they have nothing. Many houses are empty of people already dead,' they cried.
Jones: (from your link) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gareth_Jones_(journalist)#Life...
"In 1931 he was offered employment in New York City by Dr Ivy Lee, public relations advisor to organisations such as the Rockefeller Institute, the Chrysler Foundation, and Standard Oil, to research a book about the Soviet Union. In the summer of 1931 he toured the Soviet Union with H. J. Heinz II of the food company dynasty, producing a diary published by Heinz as Experiences in Russia 1931, a diary which probably contains the first usage of the word "starve" in relation to the collectivisation of Soviet agriculture. In 1932 Jones returned to work for Lloyd George and helped the wartime Prime Minister write his War Memoirs.
During the 1930s, he was a reporter for the Western Mail.[2] In late January and early February 1933 Jones was in Germany covering the accession to power of the Nazi Party, and was in Leipzig on the day Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor. A few days later on February 23 in the Richthofen, the fastest and most powerful three-motored aeroplane in Germany, he became the first foreign journalist to fly with Hitler as Jones accompanied Hitler and Joseph Goebbels to Frankfurt where Jones reported for the Western Mail on the new Chancellor's tumultuous acclamation in that city."
It's called the Cold War. Liars lied about liars. All of your sources are committed anti-communists willing to do whatever it took to bring down the USSR. Do you really think they wouldn't lie about this stuff?
Do you have a shred of evidence to suggest that they did? I mean, I realize that's a higher bar to clear than throwing around shitty implications and trying for the "well there really aren't any good guys here" schtick, but you're really going to have to come up with at least a little bit of substance if you want to be taken seriously here.
Death by suicide was the most common, as we're seeing now in the more recent economic troubles. Starvation and job security is certainly a motivating factor in any crisis where that becomes a problem.
There's no good evidence for a massive famine due to the dust bowl people lost their saving but few people died.
A famine is different from a crop failure. Crop failures can help cause famines,but typically famines happen because political and/or economic failures. For example in cases of extreme authoritarianism(like the USSR and China - PRC) and colonialism(Ireland, Nepal).
That's how the British empire industrialized (in India, Ireland) etc.
The western countries bordering Ukraine had food shortages the same year the Ukraine did, no mention of that.
Also if you read New York Times during this period, the reporters travelling the Ukraine said there were no famine conditions - the Times said this, not Pravda.
The China during the Cultural Revolution was not a success. Millions were murdered, people starved, and a terrible stain marks that period of China's long history.
It was the pro-capitalist reforms that turned China into the success it is today, and as China starts to falter with it's unmanageable debt and unproductive, government-directed parts of the economy, the reforms will inevitably be capitalist, pro-market solutions that remove the state and promote competition.
So yes, some economies can succeed despite their socialist, government-controlled economic policies, but when things start to fail, solutions all point to the markets.
It's amazing how this merry-go-round of meaningless and misleading language gets echoed in an echo chamber unquestioned.
The USSR had markets just like the US did. You go to the store, you see radishes and milk, you buy radishes with your rubles at this market, you go to another store, you buy the blue shirt instead of the tan one with your rubles. The markets are the same. What do I have to twist my thought process around to think they are not the same.
Not to go off on another tangent, but that store could be privately or state owned in Russia. Just like liquor stores and post offices can be state owned in the US. The transistor and Internet was created in the US by government spending and government granting of monopolies (read the MCI lawsuit papers) The ARPAnet and NSFnet were not allowed commercial traffic until the 1990s. Then there is the Federal Reserve, NSF, DARPA, bank bailouts - the US economy has been government-directed since WWII, as Warren Buffett's father pointed out in Congress back when that all started.
It always amazes me when people vehemently defend the USSR and similar, especially in a place like HN. The USSR was nothing like the United States. You did not start a "radish and milk" store in the USSR without approval from the government. To argue that the USSR was anything remotely close to a free market is absurd and a dangerous reinterpretation of established history. I'm afraid you have very skewed, incorrect understanding of facts and of human nature.
This is just false. All business in the USSR was not tightly state owned. Yes, the "commanding heights" of the economy were. You're claiming Kiev had no privately owned stores? Like many people here you're talking about a subject you don't know much about.
I've not been to Soviet Kiev, but yeah, I'm claiming that Late Soviet Moscow had no privately owned stores. I would be very interested to read about these if they existed.
First ones began to appear around 1987 I think in the form of КООП.
I know people who have opened stores in the US, and all of them have needed permits and various bits of government approval, sometimes zoning board hearings and whatnot. The larger the enterprise, the more approval needed, just like the USSR. You seem to lack knowledge of how tbe economy in the USSR functioned.
You keep using this word market. A market in the US was the same as a USSR market. Yes, other things varied, but markets were the same.
Also you are attributing and inferring some statements to me that I did not say.
Once again, debates over definitions completely derail any sensible discussion of socialism. The word "markets" as used by people criticizing command economies for not having them does not simply mean "places where radishes are kept with numbers attached to them".
It is perfectly reasonable to use the term "market" that way. After all, what else would you call a place where radishes are stored with price tags? But that's not what the person arguing with you is saying, and trying to rebut them based on an alternate definition is unproductive.
Alternate definition? A market is a place where you exchange currency for commodities. That is a definition of what a market is, not an "alternative definition".
There is no being coy at all, I can't even twist my head around how these similar places in the US and Russia are not the same. What is his "alternate definition" where such a place in Russia is stripped of the word market?
As I said, that is indeed one definition of a market. But the parent commenter is referring to markets in the free market sense, in which the markets perform price discovery.
You refer to a market in the US that sells radishes for dollars as "free", which presumably means the identical market selling radishes for rubles in the USSR is unfree, and I am the one playing around? I have trouble fathoming definitions so steeped in ideology, it reminds me of the US Congress cafeteria renaming French fries as Freedom fries when France chose not to join the US on some imperial venture.
That's a minor point as you answered the question, sort of. But not to satisfaction. A market in the US or USSR sells commodities at a set price. People buy goods or they don't. The markets operate exactly the same.
As you're attempting to make a rational argument unlike others, I will get to the point. The markets in the US and USSR were the same, despite you following some US ideological line and calling the US one a "free" one. It is production that was different, and control of production. Misdirecting the difference from control of production to "free" markets is just more misdirection and sophistry (which is widespread, not particularly pertaining to you).
The difference was already pointed out by tptacek - price discovery is an emergent phenomena in "free" markets, as opposed to set by some central authority. There's of course plenty of debate to be had about how "free" markets are in the West, as there are a variety of markets that are heavily regulated. But it is obvious which one is more "free" if we're comparing the USSR to the West, even if the difference is mostly symbolic.
Perhaps you can tell us more about how the USSR stock market worked. People in the US know very little about it, even believing it may not have existed.
You know, debates over definitions give people who have nothing of substance to contribute a chance to be "right" about a subject. I wish we'd see less of them here; in this comments section, we could probably trim out 90% of the back-and-forth chatter.
The factory was producing substandard steel. Often they'd ship it to customers and it would arrive in an unusable condition because it had been stored outside and was more rust than steel. But they'd try and use it anyway, because if they complained the bureaucrats in Moscow would brand them troublemakers and route the next shipment to someone else and then they wouldn't meet their production goals, which meant their pay would be drastically cut, and their family would starve.
Your "blue shirt vs. tan shirt" is absurdly simplistic, and makes enormous incorrect assumptions, like "Is there even a shirt there to buy that day?"
Some other reading for you would be about Krushchev's visit to the US in the 1950's. He visited a few supermarkets and assumed that they had been set up just for his visit (Potemkin villages) as that was what the Soviet Union would have done. Because having that much product on the shelves was absurd.
"During a visit to the United States in 1989 he became more convinced than ever that Russia had been ruinously damaged by its centralized, state-run economic system, where people stood in long lines to buy the most basic needs of life and more often than not found the shelves bare. He was overwhelmed by what he saw at a Houston supermarket, by the kaleidoscopic variety of meats and vegetables available to ordinary Americans.
Leon Aron, quoting a Yeltsin associate, wrote in his biography, “Yeltsin, A Revolutionary Life” (St. Martin’s Press, 2000): “For a long time, on the plane to Miami, he sat motionless, his head in his hands. ‘What have they done to our poor people?’ he said after a long silence.” He added, “On his return to Moscow, Yeltsin would confess the pain he had felt after the Houston excursion: the ‘pain for all of us, for our country so rich, so talented and so exhausted by incessant experiments.’ ”"(1)
Capitalism has many evils - most notably the tendency to eat its own young - but it does do most things very very well.
Yeltsin was definitely a patriot and wanted the best for his country. But his education and experience prior to the 1991 attempted coup meant that there were a lot of stumbles as he struggled to change the direction of Russia. I don't think anyone could have been more successful at it than he was.
The light industry and consumer good sectors of the Soviet Economy were woefully underdeveloped - the Brezhnev Stagnation, didn't improve matters and robbed the Soviet economy of much hard currency that could have been used to invest in the economy - but to an extent just like us - the elephant in the room was the amount of GDP spent on the Military - there is a report of a perhaps apocryphal conversation between Gorbachev and Reagan about how each of their respective generals are always demanding more money, more for planes, missiles, tanks, and more.
The soviets lost the cold war not due to any inherent moral issues with their system (where there were many) - but due to economic collapse.
It can be argued that the PRC has done as well as they have by not only embracing free market principles but by turning a blind eye to their own industries essentially cheating on the global stage. The west in general has done similar things but at nowhere near the scale.
Sometimes I wonder if all of the online computers, internet, apps and other stuff makes any sense. We have complicated our lives unnecessarily and multiplied beyond the capacity of our plant to hold us meaningfully or have a life with any semblance of contemplation.
What makes online computers & etc different? You could say that about many technologies, even about agriculture. Life was much simpler and sustainable when we were hunter-gatherers (I'm being sincere, not facetious).
In my opinion, whether they are "necessary" is irrelevant (by objective measures, most things aren't) and simplicity is not a meaningful goal in itself.
Isn't it inherent to your opinion that it doesn't necessarily apply to how other people feel, such that you can't actually use "we" in the way you used it?
As a species, we're drastically better off today than we have ever been. That includes calorie counts globally. The human population of earth has far more food than it needs. There are radically fewer famines today, not more.
The suffering that is happening in Venezuela wasn't caused by 'complications of modern life,' much less apps.
I completely disagree with the base premise, and do not believe our lives are more complex. I believe our lives are drastically simplified versus the concerns of just a few hundred years ago: near total lack of any rights, serious fear of starvation or exposure, constant war, a life filled with non-stop violence and death, almost total poverty, extreme majority illiteracy, constant risk of premature death by unknown illnesses, extraordinarily horrible hygiene and living standards, no stable / functional / trustworthy systems of savings or retirement (meaning a constant fear of not making it through the next year), and on it goes.
You are of course correct. By any objective measure, humanity has never had it so good. We live in the safest and most peaceful time in human history, as measured by the deaths caused by famine, disease, warfare and poverty. This is often overlooked in the common narrative that modern times are unusually violent and unstable.
We do however face grave environmental issues so it's not all a feel-good story.
> Lack of a functional democracy is the problem, not socialism.
It's entirely possible to democratically decide to steal the means of production from the capitalists — and thus experience exactly these consequences.
He was elected democratically, but then he behaved like a dictator. He was not aware of his ignorance in economics, and he had to support of the people. The results were disastrous.
There have been countless statistical anomalies on all elections since 2004; like voting centers with 0 abstention and 100% votes pro-government on extremely remote locations without oversight from the opposition.
But please, continue lecturing me on my country's electoral and voting system.
I was referring socialism as a society where state does not allow private property (at least to a major extent), and violates individual human rights in favor of collective ones.
You're confusing "socialism" with "communist". Socialist societies do not, as a rule, limit ownership of private property. Any that do are usually socialist and something else, like totalitarian or communist.
Likewise a socialist state does not necessarily limit individual freedoms. Communist regimes have, but they're also totalitarian, so which philosophy is to blame is sometimes hard to pin down.
Modern communist societies have also relaxed these restrictions significantly, though there were times when everything was forced communal.
Nobody is saying socialism is inherently bad here. The Nordic model, for instance, still has a free market means of production. Socialist safety nets are fine.
Venezuela has for years had a full-on centrally planned economy with the state setting the prices for goods independent of their costs of production, all as a tool to continue winning electoral support from the poor. That is a very, very nasty aspect of a socialist system, which is avoided by successful socialist nations.
Edit: This was meant to be a reply to the parent comment.
It's entirely possible to have the same result via crony capitalism instead. The problem is too much power in the hands of too few people. It doesn't matter what label their government claims to fall under at this point.
You need to read Hayek's The Road to Serfdom. He explains how giving the State the power to make all the economic decisions necessarily devolves into this kind of dystopia.
Corruption, actually. Their neighboring states aren't any better off.
What's hitting them now is a decade of mismanagement of their petro-business... Combined with a collapse in oil prices. If Colombia's exports dropped in price by 60%, things would not be pretty. Fortunately, unlike Venezuela, its economy is far more diverse.
I'm sorry, but that's not at all accurate. If you think the middle class in Colombia and Brazil are dealing with anything remotely like this, you are nuts.
Corruption is a parasite which adds costs to every resource flow it can find, but this is a wholly different scenario of resources being too scarce due to systemic degradation due to central planning misallocation combined with the drop in oil prices that had sustained it.
Colombian here. You can't even compare the situation to what's happening in Venezuela. There's a lot of corruption in south america but Venezuela is total disaster right now because of the totalitarian goverment.
Sending $1 billion a year since the start of Plan Colombia (1996) implies Colombia would have received over $20 billion by now. In reality the amount of American aid to Colombia is about half of that.
And American aid does not come in cash, the money can only be spent in shiny new American-made military hardware. That's why the Colombian army has lots of Humvees and Black Hawks, paid for the U.S. taxpayer.
It really is a poorly disguised subsidy to the American military industrial complex.
In any case, considering Colombia has the second largest GDP in South America (after Brazil) at about $300 billion a year, receiving even $1 billion a year would be statistically speaking, noise.
Shouldn't rural farmers be making a killing in these conditions? (eg. give me USD or your old iPhone/car and I'll deliver you homemade milk and bread for X months)
> I head out early to a farmers’ market near my house. Before dawn each Saturday, the farmers truck in their produce from the surrounding mountains. Everything’s sold at free-market prices. This is, technically speaking, illegal but essentially goes unenforced nowadays.
They certainly should; farmers made out like bandits during the Wiemar hyperinflation. For Venezuela, see the entry for June 25th here: selling farm produce at free-market prices is illegal, but the ban isn't enforced, and the farmers do well for themselves for as long as their ATM connections stay up.
Florencia, Cristina Kirchner's Argentinian former president daughter, had 5 million dollars in its bank account. Being daughter of a former president seems to be the more rewarding job in our countries.
http://www.buenosairesherald.com/article/218148/florencia-ki...
Sadly, state-controlled economies end up replacing a capital-owning business elite with a connection/power-owning political elite, and in the process, destroying incentives to produce and work.
Stuff like this is to be expected. Communists and socialists alike are, after all, glorified thieves. It turns out, of course, that stealing from "the rich" for "the benefit of the poor" will never stop there. A thief is a thief.
All of which goes to show that a novel can be highly influential and immensely successful albeit that it's badly written, incoherent, very long and subject to scathing critiques as in:
"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year-old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." - John Rogers.
That's not a scathing critique, it's a joke. It resonates well with people who already dislike Atlas Shrugged (including myself), but it doesn't convince anyone. Those who like Atlas Shrugged will read it, maybe laugh, then correctly point out that it's not a well-reasoned argument, it's a joke.
True enough. Plenty of legitimate criticisms are available... The main character is apparently great though she built nothing; her father did all the work. The complete discounting of the workers who do the actual laying of rails and running of trains. Galt steals IP that rightfully belongs to his employer (and was developed with his employer's resources). The fact that they'd all die of starvation or be reduced to subsistence farmers in Galt's Gulch.
I think socialism is the "excuse" rather than the root cause: which is poor government that ran on cronyism and petro-dollars and is completely stuffed after decades of mismanagement. The main difference between this and a number of other governments is that it's happening in the Western hemisphere and not some corner of Africa or the Middle East.
This is of course getting a ton of press in Commie hating USA, but how much worse is this than narcostates or right-wing deathsquad-enforced regimes set up by the US?
And of course since the US/CIA loved to plot overthrows and juntas, how could the country trust aid offers? And the wire recordings of Henry Kissinger trying to deliberately collapse the Argentinian economy before their takeover...
I get that this is site is often a huge capitalistic libertarian O-jerk, and I'm not naive to the logistical failings of authoritarian socialism, but I wonder what the full story is here...
The people didn't starve under the US-backed dictatorships, so those regimes have that much going for them. But they didn't starve under Castro either, and living conditions were probably better under Castro than in any country in the Warsaw Pact (see Anthony Daniels' _Utopias Elsewhere_); so I'd guess that most of the story is that Chavez was just that dumb.
An Island like Cuba is just small enough to make actual communism possibly work - it has just slightly less people that the Los Angeles Metro area does - it also has a very homogeneous cultural background. Cuba however isn't quite rich enough in natural resources to actually reach autarky however, if it was, Cuba might be a very different story.
I'm not a proponent of anything Authoritarian, but communism on a small scale does fascinate me.
just small enough to make actual communism possibly work
This is an important distinction. Humans evolved in tribes, and many of our instinctual responses to how we think we should work together are optimized for such a setting. But these things just can't scale upwards. There are many things that work well at a community level that fall apart with larger groups. So when we see a problem in the world and feel our heart-strings tugged, we should be suspicious that our emotional response is something that can really make sense in the big picture.
I do agree that such things might be able to work at small scales. But I suspect that the threshold is well below the size that you're citing here.
I suspect the threshold is actually about 450 people - but if you scale that up, and have multiple units of 450 people each - then you start to have something workable. The long term problem with planned economies is the inherent inflexibility and immovability in the face of changing realities.
Markets work because they are irrational, and move with people as situations change - like a subconscious reflex - planned economies require conscious effort to reapportion their efforts in the face of change.
The solution to socialism is collectives - lots of little ones from 50-500 people, which then interact with each other using market settlement and price adjustment mechanisms.
Yes, Honduras is in a far worse state right now than Venezuela after Obama and Hillary supported the military coup against the majority indigenous/mestizo backed president, and the handful of white landowners of 90% of the land had the US trained/armed/funded army take over. Berta Caceres is just the latest murder, scores of political candidates, organizers etc. have been murdered, the murder rate is higher than Venezuela certainly, Hondurans have been pouring over the US border as reported etc.
Venezuela has been very heavily dependent on oil for decades and this happens every time oil's price plunges for a long period in Venezuela, look at its history since WWII. The same is happening to every oil-dependent region in the world (except Saudi Arabia, which is doing the market flooding).
The article opening lines talking about how unique the situation is without mentioning what is happening in Honduras this moment is a laugh.
Additionally, the Venezuelan crude is generally viewed as a low quality product. It's not as suitable for many applications. So when prices drop it's one of the first products to get pushed out of the market
But why talk about that when we can have silly ideological arguments over the merits of communism and capitalism instead
That's an odd turn... care to elaborate on the connection between government caused economic crises in South America and identity politics among (what I assume are) North American urbanites?
Venezuela is on the brink. It has a socialist majority because previously the rich bleed them dry. Now the boot is on the other foot and the socialists are starving out the middle and upper classes who traditionally voted for the elite that controlled the media in Venezuela.
So sad. At some point it will flip again and the cycle will repeat itself.
Meanwhile the US continues to pressure the socialist government through sanctions in order to break a government that they don't approve of. Whilst the oil price remains low, the socialist government can't profit enough to get back on track.
The innocents, including children are going to starve, because the USA refuses have any kind of socialist leaning government in its back yard. it's been going on for decades. Rinse and repeat. Meanwhile the socialist "elite" make sure that they have good on their tables and punish the middle classes for their refusal to accept their ideology, happily lining their own bank accounts.
It is somewhat ironic that their neighbour Colombia, that for years was the black sheep of the region, has swapped roles with its previously rich sibling.
>It has a socialist majority because previously the rich bleed them dry
BS. The system was always open enough that you could make something of yourself.
>Now the boot is on the other foot and the socialists are starving out the middle and upper classes.
Except the upper and middle classes still have money to buy products at exorbitant prices. Who do you think are the people who are starving to death, having to kill wild dogs and pigeons to be able to eat something?
>Meanwhile the US continues to pressure the socialist government through sanctions in order to break a government that they don't approve of. Whilst the oil price remains low, the socialist government can't profit enough to get back on track.
There is no track to get back to, Chavez,his XXI century revolution and his cronies have always been about stealing as much as they can.
>The innocents, including children are going to starve.
As someone born, raised and currently living in Venezuela, I can tell you that, yes, previously the elites ruled the country and created massive amounts of poor people.
But 40 years ago, someone like my father,who came from a very modest and tiny town in the east of the country managed to go to school, study and buy a house and a car with my mom who also came from modest upbringing.
They managed to buy an apartment with their salary and put my sister and I through school and college. And just like them, thousands of venezuelans had some hope to get ahead through work.
Right now, I'm an electrical engineer thanks to them and I could work my whole life and never be able to afford the tiniest house. I'm scraping by with less than $100 a month and I already make more money than most people.
Why do you think most young people here have plans or have left the country? Because they have ZERO hope of ever moving out of their parent's house or buying a car. That was not a reality before Chavez came to power.
You can be prepped up the wazoo and if a Venezuela goes down in your backyard what are you going to do? Hide out in your basement and eat tinned tuna?
The best "preparation" is looking ahead and living in a place that isn't about to go to shit. Having a plane ticket and a passport is infinitely more valuable than a bucket of bullets and a gun.
The majority of people wait for things to blow over because that normally works. In my country half the population starved to death because they were trapped. You have to understand that most modern famines are political, not economic in origin. That is why having food insurance is sensible in many countries. Humanitarian assistance (assuming it's not a global event) won't reach you if it is intersected by politics.
Argentina is a good example of the extended misery you'll experience when your whole economy implodes and having a bunker you can huddle in isn't going to help at all. You'll have to go out and trade, eventually, for supplies.
Rwanda is another example of what happens when The Shit Hits The Fan where unless your bunker is invisible or utterly impregnable you're not going to survive for long. When word gets out about a huge stash of weapons and food guess who's first on the hit-list of an angry mob?
Does being a prepper save you from an ISIS-like take-over of your town? What about when the Russians role in and assume control like they've done in Georgia and Ukraine and you're now living in a whole different environment?
Anyone who hoards food and bullets is thinking that when society collapses it will be a little bit of chaos and then they can go back outdoors and carry on.
I'd challenge anyone to show when such a thing has happened in history.
I don't disagree! Maybe you were talking to a super-prepper.
However to play Devil's Advocate I expect you could survive Argentina/Rwanda/Georgia/Ukraine with sufficient preparation e.g. growing food underground.
It just takes an ungodly amount of money to make it work.
> I'd challenge anyone to show when such a thing has happened in history.
That's the interesting problem because I'd say (let's call it) 'cannibal holocaust' does happen with some frequency on a historical scale. It happened in my country and Russia more recently. It's rare but it does happen.
The key element I think isn't so much resources as secrecy of preparations. With sufficient resources and thought you should be able to hole up for the rest of your life.
Whether you'd want to is another issue!
You have to remember that the people who do go fully off the grid aren't all that likely to advertise themselves. I'm thinking they will mostly be dissidents or the military (for deadman's switches, secret bioweapon programs and the like). So your appeal for challengers might come up empty for reasons other than non-existence. People who do this are always going to be pretty extreme.
I wouldn't say they were prepared with bullets and MREs per se but they certainly got off the grid. Also it is an interesting story.
Finally I offer you an example of (intellectual) survival from ancient times in my own country.
The majority of Greek texts you've heard of used to be stored in a small island off the Irish coast, protected against invaders by monks and most likely extreme isolation. If the Carolingian empire hadn't copied them from the monks you'd know next to nothing about the most major figures and events in world history.
When the Roman empire fell, knowledge of it and its predecessors was really in danger of being lost, despite what modern day hipster hun-apologists will tell you. From literacy to ... not-literacy. Without that backup beyond the furthest corner of the Empire, we'd know nothing about major figures like Seneca and Cicero.
Kenneth Clark did an excellent documentary on the subject if you're interested.
The episode is: Civilisation (1969) Episode 1 "The Skin of Our Teeth", from 13:35.
I don't know if you're familiar with Neal Stephenson's Anathem but I imagine he got a lot of inspiration from this.
I agree, keeping 'food insurance' is far from crazy.
You can buy MREs that last five to ten years.
They won't solve all problems but they will certainly give you time to react appropriately e.g. escaping an area or growing food for the following year.
Does anybody remember James Burke's Connections? The very first episode on how to live in a global downturn?
I agree, but that doesn't really require being part of the whole "prepper" subculture, which seems to focus more on scenarios where you're surviving a complete breakdown of society for decades in a bunker. In countries where infrastructure has historically been prone to interruptions, it's fairly common for people to store a good amount of preserved food, but they aren't seen as preppers, just people with a storehouse (which is basically an oversized pantry). My Greek grandparents always had a fairly large supply of food, for example.
I do think many Americans are too far to the unprepared extreme, where a two-day interruption of normal services caused by e.g. a tropical storm sends everyone panicking, because they in some cases literally don't even have one day's worth of food in their house.
Yeah I think that Hollywood has done a number on some people. Surviving isn't that glamorous in real life.
I think for most people having 1 to 3 months of food is ample but if you're in a political troublespot you should triple or quintuple that. It's all about using your wits while not going over the top.
As someone who lives next door to Venezuela, it seems to me the situation over there has really hit the proverbial fan.
Venezuela has been in a disastrous economic situation for years, but nowhere as bad what we are seeing these days.
Just yesterday their government opened the border with Colombia for 12 hours (they have kept it closed for a year) and about 125 thousand people crossed into Colombia to buy basic groceries and medicines. 30% did not cross back.
Venezuelans have been leaving the country for the last decade or so. There are huge numbers of them here already.
It's not easy for them to leave because their currency is basically worthless and access to hard currency is restricted to the well-connected.
Also the Venezuelan government closed the border about one year ago. They also kicked out all Colombians from Venezuela. According to the Venezuelan government everything bad that happens there is consequence of the vast Colombian-American right wing conspiracy.
Colombians are generally cool about Venezuelans, as the two countries are very similar to each other and have a long history together (at one point they were part of the same country). Neither the people nor the government opposes Venezuelan immigration, as far as I can tell.
But Colombia ain't exactly the land of milk and honey and Venezuelans know it. If they are not rushing in greater numbers to the border is because they know that, while there may not be any shortages or blackouts here, jobs are also few and far between.
A little late to comment on my part but all but a handful of my Venezuelan cousins have emigrated and ended up in Miami, Colombia and Argentina. And I know its not only them who have left. Venezuela has lost an entire generation of young professionals to their neighbors.
Sounds like communist Romania in the 80's. The main difference there was that the state had a near monopoly on violence, which they used constantly. Even people who were starving were mostly too scared of the government to contemplate violence.
Sounds like it's time for new elections or executions of the assholes in power.
Suffering from the disease of central government. We need a telethon to stamp this disease out. Look how many were killed in the 20th century because of it. Ideology infects a people then gets turned to government implementation, and when things go badly wrong, it can't be fixed until it collapses and the people finally start to learn their lesson.
I'm reading a lot of comments exclusively blaming communism, but when I lived in Caracas during the first years of the Chavez presidency, I witnessed an overwhelming public support in his favor.
Elections were won with ~70% of the votes, and I also recall various referendum-like votes which Chavez won easily as well. Another fact that surprised me was that every Sunday he would give these 4h long speeches, and a crowd would invariably go to the streets/TV to watch him speak.
Later on I am aware that this scenario changed drastically, but in my layman's eyes the first years of Chavismo seemed very democratic, and of course also very populist (e.g. housing for the poor), which only made the governments approval rates soar.
I'm not saying I'm pro-communism, but before pointing a finger at communism, maybe the democratically elected Venezuelan government's incompetence, especially regarding spending all the revenue from it's single main natural resource on unsustainable populist programs with little ROI, should be blamed.
Chavez was immensely popular. A coup by the army was overturned by mass protests.
His government was very successful by most economic metrics during his time in his office. It is his successor that has dropped the ball with his bungling of the currency mess. And that's the root cause of all this suffering, a bad currency system, and low oil prices.
You call them populist programs with little ROI, but they were investments and initiatives that were improving the lives of giant swathes of the nation's citizens.
If the price of oil was still $100 per barrel the country wouldn't be in this situation, and we wouldn't have all this gnashing of teeth over the inevitable downfall of socialism.
From my position, capitalist economies shouldn't be so arrogant right now. Instead of blaming the economic system of the country, take it as a warning for what happens when natural resource assets stop producing bounty, or currency exchange moves against being in your favor.
American Capitalism would not be immune from an ecological recession caused by plausible threats like warming and ocean acidification and biodiversity loss, and America might not always have the subsidy of the petrodollar. The dollar's status as reserve currency is equal to a finger on the scale in all American's economic favor.
Maybe I didn't express myself clearly. I am not against populist programs to aid humans in deplorable life conditions. But these have to be sustainable, and in 3rd world South American countries, this probably and unfortunately involves not being able to help everyone on the short term. Otherwise, you end up inflating government spending leaving little space for maneuvering when facing an economical crisis.
My point originally was intended at NOT blaming communism, or capitalism as well. IMHO this seems more like a problem involving a government spending all of it's USD100-a-barrel income like a lottery winner, and when the prices fall to less than half of that (which by the way, most countries would welcome happily the amount of petro Venezuela has even at USD40 a barrel) and no other significant investments were made in alternative sources of revenue, they act as if it was solely a natural disaster and absolve themselves of all responsibility.
I didn't express myself clearly, running on very low sleep, I was trying to agree with you and elaborate on your point, except for the one statement about the low ROI of the programs.
> I'm reading a lot of comments exclusively blaming communism, but when I lived in Caracas during the first years of the Chavez presidency, I witnessed an overwhelming public support in his favor.
This isn't in tension, because communism and democracy aren't opposites. In fact, they are logically independent (even if anti-correlated in practice).
That's similar to how it was in 90's Yugoslavia during international sanctions.
We didn't have so much crime (definitely no violent stuff like kidnaping), and cellphone was still big grey brick Fox Mulder would pull out of his jacket ... So sharing knowledge you've found bread or milk was spreading slower.
For those asking how come farmers aren't making huge money in such cases - they still need to buy other stuff and that's equally/proportionally expensive.
In case of Yugoslavia, I think pretty much all petrol/gas was smuggled in (because international sanctions) from nearby countries.
Once you consider that mass producing food means you need to power machines (like tractor) and ultimately transport it somehow to consumers ... Imagine how many jerry cans had to be smuggled ...
And IMHO you're mixing cause and effect when you mention state-controlled economies as a cause of this. It mostly fails because (for one reason or another) country is effectively blocked from trading with the rest of the world, and doesn't have enough variety in materials/resources to be on it's own.
Instead of "And IMHO you're mixing cause and effect ..." I meant "And IMHO you're mixing causation and correlation ..." making final paragraph:
And IMHO you're mixing causation and correlation when you mention state-controlled economies as a cause of this. It mostly fails because (for one reason or another) country is effectively blocked from trading with the rest of the world, and doesn't have enough variety in materials/resources to be on it's own.
I am in a privileged position, though, I understand the situation of 'common people' as I work closely with them as a local business owner.
This journal is really close to the reality.
To those wondering about 'side markets' and 'farmers marking a killing', let me explain.
There is a black market for food and any other good. Shortages are real, especially when it comes to medicines. It's easy to find pasta or rice comparatively. People with chronic diseases are dying - the patients that have the medicines they need require foreign help either from family or friends.
About 5 years ago the minimum wage was about $300. Today it's $40. You can find in any major city people looking for food in the dumpsters. [1]
Why are farmers and producers not making a killing? It's not that simple, but there's definitely people making a killing: black market traffickers which are mostly politicians and military men in strategic positions.
I know a few farmers, so I will speak from experience. This farmer friend I have - let's call him Jose, produces milk and his family has been doing so for more than 40 years.
Jose is the vet in the farm. Venezuela was suffering a long drought due "El Nino" that also affected the electric service. Cows were producing less milk due this - medicines for cows are really hard to get (probiotics, antibiotics, etc), food for animals is mostly imported - just like medicines. The biggest problem, though, is what's brought us here: The government economic policies.
The market for foreign currencies is regulated. Only the government and through the government currencies can be exchanged. Since the government depends heavily on oil for foreign currency we've seen quite a dip in imports. In other words, the government lacks liquidity. Which is why it's really hard to legally obtain imported goods, so if you produce in Venezuela and sell your product in Bolivares (local currency) you would have to get Dollars (foreign currency) to import anything - the government is basically saying no to 95% of requests for currency exchange.
The market for [most] producers is highly regulated. No milk producer can produce milk higher than the fixed price given by the government. For most, there's no incentive.
The government is printing money like crazy making inflation soar (we have the highest inflation in the world! [2])
As you can see, most producers have no incentive as they will not see profit in their ventures since they have a cap for what they can sell the product for.
Imagine that the U.S government says by law "1 pound of rice will cost $1 or less" and anyone selling for more is breaking the law. If the cost of producing rice is $0.1c this would be fine, however, for the rice producer each pound of rice costs $1.5 - how many people do you think are going to produce rice? This happens in Venezuela in almost all product categories (milk, coffee, beans, rice, pasta, flour, and I could keep going, the list is really long).
What has the government done to fix the issue? Basically, nothing since their policy "fixes" is to control more and more our economy.
The government solution to the food shortages and I must say, this is really hard to explain, is to give out bags of food with goods distributed by the "own people in the community". I don't see how will this ever work, since while it's not free they're giving out a bag for $1 that in the black market can easily go for $10, a golden goose for the corrupt. The government is completely ignoring, what in my opinion is far worse, which is, the lack of medicines of any kind for the most part.
The government controls the media, the military, and all forces but one - the legislative power, though through political tricks they've found ways to mostly neutralize it. This year - 2016 - we could potentially have a referendum, though the government is making everything it can...
This will sound like a stupid question but I'll ask it anyway.
Why can't they just drop the price controls?
I expect it is ideological, but surely being alive trumps ideology (in that you'll starve or else people who have decided to become more flexible will kill you).
I have given a lot of thought to this question. It seems fairly simple but given that they've taken the other route, that is, force more controls, the government would look bad.
I think there's a lot of internal problems within the ruling party in regards to what should be done. Unfortunately, the president is the one unwilling to see differently or "betray" his ideology (or so it seems).
There are also subsidies to most products (as the government solution to some of the price caps) and last thing that has been said (in an informal setting by the VP) was that "the subsidies have been a mistake" and that they will try to fix it with some sort of "basic income" but only for the poor rather than for everyone - which opens another HUGE opportunity for white collar corruption - something the government seems to love and cherish.
In short, the president preaches a radicalism that would go against taking "neo-liberal economic policies" and by doing so he (I assume), perceives that the public will find him weak. Which, paradoxically, he already is. In my view, Nicolas Maduro (our president) is in an impossible situation in which the best he can do is to step away - but this opens another pandora box that he seems unwilling to go for, as such he's doing everything in his power to avoid a referendum or any sort of democratic solution.
If yourself or rafaelm could do with a food supply package and the postal system is working correctly, then email me with an address and list of hard to source foodstuffs. My email is my HN username AT fastmail.fm
This is very kind of you to offer. It wouldn't be fair of me to take you up on that, the postal system is not working but private companies doing "door-to-door" deliveries do work very well (most are connected with the government). I personally have used and highly recommend one (which I can let you know in PM if you require)
However if this is something within your possibilities, I'd love to pass this offer to anyone who needs it.
Thanks a lot I really appreciate it!
If you want to help, I'll see if I can find a trustworthy organization that is helping kids that need food and medicine. They are the most vulnerable right now.
In their sick political games, the venezuelan government is not receiving any foreign aid because they say we don't need it. I'm not sure if there are any private organizations receiving donations. I know some of the door-to-door shipping companies the_vzlan mentions are receiving medicine and food packages but I really don't know if they are to be trusted.
Venezuela tries to impose price controls on items below market prices. According to the book Economics in one lesson chapter 17 government price fixing does not work in the long run and leads to shortages of goods.
Actually, this somehow reminds me of my childhood here in ex-USSR.
No groceries (deficit on everything worth buying), no money to by anything in reasonable quantities, extreme inflation, state-issued coupons for different amounts of items (you still had to pay for them, these were used for rationing).
We were large family, so we got a right to stand for a few hours in line every few weeks at a distant shop where families with four or more children could shop for items not available elsewhere.
Crime rates were through the roof, but not kidnappings. Muggings, burglaries, extortion, plain and simple beating up because you looked the wrong way. These were the days when gangs started forming, so old rules (stand up and fight even if you'll lose) did not work.
This story gives me shivers. It was extremely hard to provide for your children back then. I cannot imagine how people from countries with much worse conditions can manage.
Edit adds this paragraph. I was a child then. I thought that everything around was a norm. I, actually, did not care much. Now I do.
Since both countries "owned" a good part of the world real estate at some point in their history, it seems pretty easy to cherry-pick and find something to support whatever point you're trying to make.
The only real insight I've found is that colonialism is a bad idea and you shouldn't do it anymore.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 89.2 ms ] threadhttps://www.theguardian.com/global-development/poverty-matte...
> But despite the severe scarcity Venezuelans are not going hungry. The Food and Agriculture Organisation has said that the Latin American nation more than halved malnutrition indices to less than 5% since Chávez came to power. It gives partial credit to the government-run network of food distribution chains known as Mercal, which delivers subsidised food in shops across the country. And yet food has gone missing, and queues outside food shops often wrap around the block.
It also is probably the difference b/t government and non-government stores to a degree but the real culprit seems to be:
> For Oliveros, an additional cause for the shortage of basic food staples is the decrease in agricultural production resulting from seized companies and land expropriations. "More than 3m hectares were expropriated during 2004-2010. That and overvalued exchange rate destroyed agriculture. It's cheaper to import than it is to produce. That's a perverse model that kills off any productivity," he says.
They destroyed their agricultural system years ago and the government just can't afford to keep spending like they used to with the oil prices where they are now.
Store shelves that are well-stocked, like those in this bakery near Zerpa’s house, are typically full of non-essential items set at sky-high prices
My question is whether or not that store is accessible to everyone (as described by my father, in the USSR the 'diplomatic' stores were not open to regular citizens) and if the prices are extortionate or merely market priced.
The root of those questions are whether or not an actual economy could be bootstrapped underneath the current mess or if it is too late for that. It is a sad story either way.
Another interesting situation in Poland was fuel rationing. Many things were rationed, but if you were a foreigner entering the the country in the mid '80s you could by coupons for X liters of gasoline. Then you did not even have to wait in the long lines at fuel stations. It was not unheard of people buying stolen fuel under a bridge or in a forest.
Most stores were bare because when inventory came-in it was quickly purchased. Since the prices were controlled people had enough zloty but not enough to spend it on so buying items like paper was desirable because later you could barter it for items you needed on the black market.
The socialist downfall of countries are all unique, but follow similar paths. I encourage people to understand the causes of them and how brutal and arbitrary these governments are.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_and_Death_in_Shanghai
But if by "socialism", you mean "what goes by that label in Scandanavia", then probably no, "collectivist" doesn't fit. It's just somewhat more government services than the US has, at the price of somewhat higher taxes.
I'm saying that socialism, as practiced in Scandanavia, is not collectivist. That means that, no, collectivism does not "subsume any definition of socialism you could ever reasonably give".
Any who, I really think the definition of "Socialism" and "Socialist" require an overhaul in our current societal climate. I'd say that back when that ideology was conceived, people saw people in general and themselves as barely more than "resource" cogs, and that the rulers or state had some sort of "effectively-divine" right to rule them. I would argue that civilized and connected society has moved past that, to the point that anything remotely close to actual socialism or communism would be equivalent to totalitarianism in people's minds. It would be seen as barbaric, and contrary to people's right to exist.
Socialism means the state ("the people") owns the means of production.
As far as I can tell, manufacturing is not owned by the government and construction workers are not employed by the state.
Some classify roads as a public good[1]. Of course, there are private roads as well.
The government owns the interstates, but that is just property, not a means of production.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good
Private universities also construct stadiums and fund football(and other sport) team.
Why should a sport team has anything to do with an educational facility? How does a football team...say...further the education of its college students?
Venezuela's problem is totalitarianism. In a socialist country, it is possible for the government to be governed by law and have limits placed on its power. That is not what's been going in in Venezuala.
Edit: Yeah, obviously he and his conquest killed a lot of people. And yeah, in this case it was a metric of success for him and his empire.
When conquering China it was often the case that academics were the first on the chopping block since they were presumably the ones most likely to cause trouble.
So yeah, he fixed the economy?
Mainly because he is seen as a barbarian conqueror, so people understand me if I use that phrase.
(whether he was or not is immaterial: though by modern standards, he was a barbarian conqueror and completely unethical)
But lets first understand that "the poor" are not created by the rich in latin america as socialists love to say, its been more than half a century of socialist/socialdemocrat rule and its obvious that they create the poor by making them dependant on the governments' favour. The famous barrios, fabellas and asentamientos are the creation of a socialist elite that uses the filantropy masquerade to get easy money through corruption, currency exchanges, inflation, etc.
>>In a socialist country, it is possible for the government to be governed by law and have limits placed on its power. That is not what's been going in in [Venezuela].
My point is, there were in fact limits, and they went through the democratic process to have exceptions made to those limits. That's not totalitarianism, which would be "some figure saw the limits and bypassed them without approval anyway".
The latter is an imposition of structure irrespective of the market: It might be seen more as a rigid body that can stand in certain conditions but begins to buckle once the wind changes.
Socialism requires at a minimum the nationalization of the means of production. If what you're talking about doesn't involve that, then what you're talking about isn't Socialism.
I'm sorry to be so snarky about this, but "socialism means command economy" is the Scholar's Checkmate of Internet political science debates, and I'm think we benefit by not dignifying it.
Is the U.S. not a free market economy in your view?
There's no such thing as a free market, either.
> Socialism means non-free market
Laissez-faire Capitalism ignores that the ideal efficiency of a free market requires the absence of externalities, which are present in the real world.
Socialism attempts to address the existence of externalities (though socialist theory often won't frame it in those terms) through compensatory mechanisms (which may involve outright government control and planned economy, or may, especially in many current strands of socialism, instead include mechanisms to internalize externalities so that the behavior of the imperfectly free market better approaches the efficiency of the ideal free market than an actually unregulated market would without effort to address externalities.)
> and uses extreme violence to accomplish its ends of nationalizing wealth and production (which are inherently linked).
Nationalizing means of production is not an end of socialism, though its a means of some forms of socialism in assuring that the means of production are harnessed to serve the common good of society. Other forms of socialism change (compared to capitalism) the balance of power in firms between labor and capital as a means of harnessing production to serve the common good, others adopt market regulations which serve to internalize externalities so that forces in the regulated market will naturally direct the means of production to serve the general good.
> Socialism requires at a minimum the nationalization of the means of production.
No, it doesn't, if you are referring to "socialism", the political philosophy. If you are referring to "socialism", a particular the phase on the road to communism in Marx's Communism (and thus the "socialism" of Leninsm and its descendants which, while abandoning much of Marx's theory, kept this part), then, yes, socialism does involve that, but note that Marx's Communism was one of many kinds of socialist philosophies of its time, and that the "socialism" phase in Marx's Communism (and, for that matter, Marx's Communism as a whole) is not representative of (though it may be one example of) socialism as a political viewpoint.
I think most socialists would agree that more democratic control of the means of production in general, as compared to laissez-faire capitalism, is a distinguishing feature of socialism. I do not think most socialists would agree that state ownership of the means of production is essential (and, indeed, many would argue that significantly revising the capitalist concept of ownership and property rights in the means of production are necessary to socialism, and that the nature of that revision of what ownership means is more important to socialism than where ownership is located. Socialism as simply state-ownership is a minimally challenging way for capitalists to approach socialism, because it avoids even discussion of the essential difference between socialism and capitalism, which is the challenge to the capitalist understanding of property and ownership.)
It was the formation of class societies of workers and parasites 10000 years ago which led to violence, suppression of the population etc.
Later the word "socialism" came to also mean a market economy in which the government intervenes to a considerable degree, as in European-style social democracy.
American conservatives have also recently come to label New Deal-style liberalism as "socialism."
I think it would be helpful for productive discussion if people labeled which meaning of the term they are using, and acknowledged that it also has other meanings.
Let me add that the state-ownership version of socialism could be totalitarian or democratic. I am not aware of any countries in the world today that have a state-ownership version of socialism and are democracies. Venezuela, from what I understand, has a partly state-owned economy, and is semi-totalitarian.
update: let me explain some why I think that discussion can be more productive if people acknowledge the term "socialism" has more than one meaning, and are clear about which one they are using.
There are many different economic and governmental systems that are labeled "socialist" including, among others, the totalitarian, total state-control system of the old Soviet Union and the democratic, semi-socialist system of the UK after WWII and up until Margaret Thatcher.
What is needed is to discuss how the various systems work and what are their outcomes, good or bad. This is a complicated and difficult discussion. If people insist on either labeling all of them as "socialist" or only one, then people get into endless, fruitless debates over who is right, and it greatly undermines the more factual discussion about specific different systems and why they go right or wrong. The comments to this link are a good example of what I am talking about. But if everyone agrees there are different definitions, then they can focus on the more important part of discussing the systems themselves.
With that in mind - countries like the United States, particularly in the latter half of the 20th century, are quite socialist in comparison to previous eras (though obviously somewhat less so than other countries).
Please describe the ways in which some countries are "fairly" socialist but aren't actually socialist. I'm not aware of a single example of a socialist nation succeeding in any regard towards creating prosperity for its people. Nor am I aware of a successful national experiment in socialism in the last two centuries of various attempts. Every historical attempt has ended extraordinarily badly, universally failing to accomplish high living standards.
None of the Scandinavian nations are even remotely close to being socialist. They all rely on the market economy, they all embrace Capitalism to significant degrees, they all have property rights enshrined into the core of their economies, they all allow for the vast accumulation of wealth without forced redistribution, they all allow for the private ownership of production, they all allow for the accumulation of and investment of capital privately, they all utilize equity and bond markets that can be bought and traded freely (another critical point to Capitalism), and on it goes. They're all substantially closer to Capitalism than Socialism, which is course why they're able to pay for their large welfare states and other actual Socialist nations universally fail at that. Sweden for example famously had drifted too far toward being an over-burdened welfare state - circa the 1970s and 1980s - and had to de-regulate and de-tax their economy, which then resulted in boom courtesy of increased Capitalism. The nations you refer to, are actually welfare states, not Socialist - there is a very big difference.
To argue that Socialism means something other than a command economy, you have to disagree with all the major players that were actually responsible for defining Socialism to begin with. I choose not to do that and I accept their elaborate, very well documented descriptions of what it is. And I'm not referring to associationism or the cooperative movements, I'm talking about Socialism.
Invoking Mussolini this way is a particularly telling example.
So is Hitler. Why not just simplify your argument to "The Nazis were National Socialists. Check and mate!"
Its worth noting that your examples include:
(1) two members of the same early subset of socialism (Marx and Engels) and two later people known for involvement in the same descendant of the form of socialism embraced by the earlier two (Lenin and Trotsky), and
(2) two other people that aren't recognized as having an important involvement in anything recognized as a branch of socialism, though one of them was involved in a political party with "socialist" in the name (Hitler and Mussolini).
Its hardly a broad sampling of "the very people that were instrumental in creating and spreading Socialism and its intellectual foundations to begin with".
Sweden does have a lower corporate tax rate than the U.S., though the U.S. tax code offsets this by providing a multitude of different deductions for business expenses. Among other things, government imposed fines are tax deductible as per the U.S. Tax Code. When it comes to personal tax rates, Sweden's rate is much higher than the rate in the U.S. (http://taxfoundation.org/blog/how-scandinavian-countries-pay...)
Not debating the validity of your larger point here, but your assertion re Sweden being economically free as compared to the U.S. isn't that accurate. It is a very much a socialist nation that is also very prosperous.
Can you name the ways in which Sweden is a Socialist nation? I'm aware of very few things that can even be argued to define them as such. Quite the opposite, their overwhelming characteristics economically are that they heavily rely on the market economy determined by individual business owners and investors rather than a command economy dictated by the State.
- Do they allow private ownership of property, including the means of production? Yes, Sweden's economy is almost entirely driven by private businesses.
- Does nearly all of their economy function around private business ownership? Yes.
- Do they allow the existence of so called capital classes? People whose wealth is primarily existent in capital, investment, real estate, etc.? Yes.
- Do they force the redistribution of wealth, so as to attempt to prevent the existence of rich and poor classes? No.
- Do they allow the private ownership of real estate, farm land, etc? Yes.
- May the government arbitrarily nationalize your wealth, investments, or business? No, that would be a rare event in Sweden.
- Do they primarily function via the free market economy of non-coerced trade? Or is all trade primarily dictated by the State? Right, almost entirely free trade.
- Does the State determine all investment priorities for all businesses? No, quite the opposite, businesses are free to set their own priorities, build new products at will, choose how they allocate capital.
- Does the State dictate most allocations of capital? No, the opposite.
Things like healthcare, slightly heavy economic regulation, education - are the primarily arguments I'm aware of regarding Sweden, however those define them as a welfare state, not a Socialist state. The US for example has vast free healthcare, housing, and food systems, along with a massive entitlement system, which is why the US is also a welfare state (and not primarily a Capitalist nation as it was a hundred years ago).
Government spending as % of GDP is an excellent metric re size of the government relative to the private economy. This assumes that as a nation is more socialist, the size of the government will increase.
Sweden slightly over 50% (http://www.tradingeconomics.com/sweden/government-spending-t...) U.S. 20% (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYONGDA188S)
I don't doubt that private property ownership is permissible in Sweden, but the government dominates GDP as compared to any single private sector.
> - Do they force the redistribution of wealth, so as to attempt to prevent the existence of rich and poor classes? No.
Sweden has higher personal tax rates than the U.S. I dispute your "No." here.
> - May the government arbitrarily nationalize your wealth, investments, or business? No, that would be a rare event in Sweden.
It depends. The Swedish government is a highly functional one and will not act capriciously. I believe they will step in and nationalize wealth/real property if doing so was important to the wellbeing of the nation, whereas the U.S. even during the bailouts of 2008 went through great pains to avoid direct government ownership / control, even to the point of handing private equity firms free risk-adjusted money.
> - Does the State determine all investment priorities for all businesses? No, quite the opposite, businesses are free to set their own priorities, build new products at will, choose how they allocate capital.
Given the GDP % stated above, this is debatable.
> - Does the State dictate most allocations of capital? No, the opposite.
Same as the previous point.
I disagree. These nations do not allow vast accumulations of wealth. They have significant taxes that actually prohibit vast accumulations of wealth, by design. It's also a form of forced redistribution, because you are required to pay excessive tax rates..and if you don't, you be sent to prison or be subjected to some form of punishment.
In fact, if you look at the average wages across all industries in a country like Sweden, they are relatively the same.
Here are some stats: http://lostinstockholm.com/2012/01/10/average-salaries-in-sw...
Why are they the same? Because the government will tax the money away before you can ever get to those higher amounts.
"The nations you refer to, are actually welfare states, not Socialist - there is a very big difference."
I feel like this is the 'no true scotsman' argument all over again. At a certain tax rate, the government owns the means of production.
We can keep playing semantics and call it 'socialist' or 'welfare state', but the reality is that no matter what you call it, high taxes and excessive government regulations is not something that is conducive to a prospering nation.
Even look at California as a small example: The high tax rates and regulations have started squeezing out the middle class and in many parts of the state, you only have two classes of people: poor and rich.
In the end it's just a question of whether Social Democracy with a free market is half socialism or if it isn't. Not really a useful debate. The roots of social democracy just like all other forms of socialism of course is the workers movement and Marx is very present still in the Social democratic parties' program declarations.
Social democrats accept the market economy. They are socialist in the sense that they are proponents of redistribution/wealth equality, and workers influencing or even owning the means of production (The former through unions having seats in corporate boards, the latter through later scrapped ideas like workers owning corporations through funds, "wage earner funds").
These social democratic ideas try to adapt Marxist theory to a liberal democracy and market economy. Is social democracy socialism despite accepting a market economy? Depends on who you ask. It's simpler to just use the term social democratic instead of socialist. Having a large welfare state is really orthogonal to how the money for said welfare state is raised (Norway for example could in theory have supported its welfare state without much social democracy or socialism).
Socialism is collective ownership of the means of production. Which always has significant societal drawbacks.
So there _are_ countries with genuine socialist policies that--while contentious and somewhat controversial--are nothing like the Venezuelan catastrophe.
Citation about developed countries where it is true desperately needed.
End of the day, there seems to be a need for balance between capitalist striving and government administration based on something other than profit/loss.
Most of the people who cry "socialism" in the US are inspired/motivated by people who control access to natural resources.
OK, but the universally accepted term is democratic socialism, which is quite accurate. "Capitalism" implies a lot more than just free markets.
[1] http://www.thelocal.dk/20151101/danish-pm-in-us-denmark-is-n...
We are a social democracy in the sense that the current political climate and consensus is shaped by a few decades of social democratic rule. High progressive taxes etc are seen as norm and are of course necessary to finance a large welfare state.
However: How the money for a large welfare state like the Nordic ones is raised is orthogonal to whether it's being spent on a large welfare state or not. Had we had 10% military spending we'd have a much smaller welfare state than today, with the same taxes.
It's entirely possible for a country to have a very large welfare state without being the least bit socialist - especially if they have natural resources. If the swedish national mining Company (yes, a state owned Company!) suddenly found resources allowing taxes to be halved - we would.
The Swedish mining company LKAB is a socialist (state-owned) enterprise, however the entire economy is not composed of socialist enterprises, therefore it is clearly a mixed economy.
Relatively high taxes on their own are not "social" or "socialist".
[1]http://www.thelocal.dk/20151101/danish-pm-in-us-denmark-is-n...
There are already specific, well-known terms that capture the real problem with states like Venezuela or the Soviet Union. For instance, "command economy".
The Federal Reserve, bank bailouts, the government spending and government-backed monopolies that created the Internet we're typing on etc. The US "government regulates the economy or large pieces of it".
Also you attribute statements to me that I did not make, then say these statements you made up and attribute to me are wrong.
Only in the sense that "free-market", in this context, involves substantial government regulation of market participants and activities in the manner that "free-market" is usually, in other contexts, used to signal the absence of.
You might be surprised to learn that not even the Soviet Union considered itself communist (they considered themselves socialist transitioning to communist).
The reality is that "socialist" is a word without a clear definition, and it's better to avoid using it altogether if you want people to understand you. If by socialism you mean, "a country that takes care of the poor" than say that.
Arguing over the definition of the term 'socialism' is arguing over a definition, and a waste of breath.
The trouble is that when we talk about the positive aspects of socialism, we have an annoying tendancy to exploit the word to make Sweden an apology for Venezuela: we confuse "socialized services" with "command economy" and end up ignoring the real public policy failures of places like Venezuela.
And when we talk about its negative aspects, we tend to make Venezuela a cautionary tale against, say, single-payer health care.
Its the mis-use of the term socialism and the details of actually implementing government ownership of the means of production that makes discussions so confusing. To pick a few examples, Obamacare is not socialism. Government assistance, as implemented in the US, is not socialism. A state run oil company, on the other hand, may be part of a socialist economy.
It's not other people who are causing these problems by incorrectly using the terms. It's that reliably using the term "socialism" with any precision requires so much clunky verbiage that nobody --- on either side --- can use it correctly. When we use the term or see it used, we should raise a flag so that we all understand it's ambiguous, and leave it at that.
For what it's worth: by no definition does it make sense to call Obamacare "socialist".
Perhaps that's true, but if it's true it's only true in the sense that it illustrates how treacherous the word "socialism" is.
I don't see socialism as a 'treacherous' word, but 'socialism' is more a spectrum than a boolean variable. For instance, I am sure you are more socialist than I am, but that does not make you the same as Castro or Mao.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error
this is like saying that "real-time" has clear, simple definition... except for all those times in which people writing medical software disagree with people writing videogames.
socialism is a word that doesn't let people communicate effectively. you say it meaning one thing, and people may understand in a multitude of ways. I think the advice to avoid using it is sound.
This seems to be a consistent truth. Perhaps we should develop tools to be able to converse with people who don't use the same definitions that we do?
I don't know about "free trade," though, what sorts of alternate definitions are people using for that?
Besides, Venezuela considers itself socialist. "21st century socialism", they proudly named it.
It's like buying a product that says "high quality" something on it.
I was born in the Socialist Republic of Romania (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_Republic_of_Romania) in the early 1980s, which was ruled by the Romanian Communist Party (which was the only allowed party). The situation was pretty much the same in all the former Eastern Block countries, with socialism being used interchangeably with communism, there were no debates in our local press about which one was which. I think "communism is different than socialism" is a Western-countries' thing, where Obama is called a socialist because he tried to make sense of the US health-care system (long story short: he's not).
And on a more general level of discussion, I'm not sure there really is a difference between the two. I've read some left-leaning literature (Marx's Capital I, his "German Ideology" and other younger writings of his, Lenin's "What Is to Be Done?", Kołakowski's 3-volume "Main Currents of Marxism", some Lukács, Jacques Rancière's "Nights of Labor: The Workers Dream in Nineteenth Century France") and no-where in those volumes there was a clear distinction made between "communism" and "socialism". The only nuance I can think of is Lenin's insistence that trade-unionist communism was a bad thing, because that involved making a pact with the "enemy" (the capitalists) and only settling for small gains, ignoring the bigger picture. He was of course right, from a workers' point of view perspective, you either control all means of productions or you risk still depending on the capitalists. 100+ or so years since his early writings the European working class is basically dead.
Well, yeah, authoritarian (Leninist-Stalinist) Communist regimes weren't particularly eager to highlight that Leninist vanguardism was a sharp repudiation of central elements of Marxist Communism (and one that, after making some early marks, was singularly unsuccessful in establishing itself any place where capitalism and the elements Marx saw as necessary for moving on to socialism had ever existed, as opposed to other strands of socialism, both Marxist-derived and otherwise), and that Marxist Communism itself was one of many strands of socialist theory, and that all of the advanced "capitalist" economies of the West had -- largely as a result of non-Marxist, or at least non-Leninist, socialist forces -- long since departed from the "capitalism" critiqued by Marx for what the modern mixed economy, which is neither strictly capitalist nor socialist by 19th or early 20th century standards, keeping superficially the property structure of the former, with many structures inspired by the latter.
> I think "communism is different than socialism" is a Western-countries' thing
Well, yes, seeing socialism as broader than Communism is probably more common in places where the successful forms of socialism absolutely weren't Leninist Communism, often weren't other derivations of Marxist Communism -- and, in some cases, characterized Leninist Communist as "state capitalism" -- and had to deal with domestic opponents that wanted to paint them with the brush of Leninism-Stalinism and its atrocities than in one-party Leninist-Stalinist states.
In Belgium we pay: - 50% income taxes - 21% VAT (a kind of sales tax) - 14% Social security
50+21+14 = %85 Socialist.
Any taxes you pay above 50% brings you into the communist area [myself et al] so we are 35% communist.
(this was just for laughs)
The PRC just surpassed US GDP on some measures, whereas in the 1940s it was a western and Japanese occupied backwards basket case. Is that the downfall you mean?
Or do you mean Russia, which couldn't win a war with the Japanese in 1905, never mind Germany a decade later? The New York Times columns of 1918 said Mr. Lenin's government would fall any day now. What actually happened is as Europe and the US fell into depression in the 1930s, Russia was surging ahead and industrializing. It repelled an attack by a military alliance of virtually all of continental Europe in 1941 and Red Army soldiers planted the red flag in 1945. Then it launched the first satellite, man in space etc. After becoming a superpower, the central committee of the CPSU decided to pack it in in the late 1980s, and attune itself to the economic and political system of the rest of the world. Even Molotov never believed in "socialism in one country", and he was the one proclaiming it.
Some downfall, foreign-dominated backwaters rose to become world superpowers.
It (The USSR) was also busy having famines that claimed millions of lives. Because it was too busy selling gold and wheat to buy industry from Americans (that's who built all those plants).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
I think I'd skip an industrialization like that.
Then you could enjoy Holodomor every day thanks to the unfortunate fact that you happened to occupy some prime Lebensraum.
Stalin was a mass murderer, but he ultimately made or allowed the correct strategy to put the USSR in a position to defeat Germany, which was a pretty good trick (to put it lightly).
Anyway, USSR lost the most lives fighting Germany and gained least benefits out of that. Just check:
https://www.ifitweremyhome.com/compare/RU/DE
They'll still have massive debt and huge costs of security and investments in freshly acquired "lebensraum". Honestly I think they'll crumble anyway.
I agree with the second one. The "spoils" claimed weren't much compared to the destruction inflicted on their country and people. That has nothing to do with my original comment though.
I see rapid decolonization. Japanese leave rural areas and northern territories. Russians fled Central Asia, pushed off Caucasus, large swaths of land become anthropic deserts. French in no position to colonize Africa anymore, if anything they're getting colonized. Chinese flock to Southern coast and no longer push that hard demographically on Uighurs/Tibetans.
Germans don't even seem to flock to their Northern, Baltic shore. And it has better climate than absolute most of their supposed "sraum".
Arguable, Polish and Balts skip their countries for greener pastures. If anybody in EU will be lacking room they can move there any minute.
The main example of "old school" colonization (other than the Chinese example mentioned below) I can think of in 2016 is the Israeli colonization of the occupied territories.
Colonies provided wealth and a logistical advantage to their owners. UK and France both fought hard to hold onto theirs well past the end of WWII. More recently, Russia considered Crimea important enough to accept the economic punishment annexing it entailed.
> Chinese flock to Southern coast and no longer push that hard demographically on Uighurs/Tibetans.
Do you have a good source or book that I can read about this? I would like to know more.
> Germans don't even seem to flock to their Northern, Baltic shore. And it has better climate than absolute most of their supposed "scram".
The Nazis are not known for paying careful attention to the climate when drawing up their grand plans. Lebensraum was their official policy, and I doubt they would have left the local population alone, considering what they did to other undesirables.
Anyway, there's no reason to think that Germans would easily defeat post-Imperial Russian Republic (given no Bolsheviks and therefore no civil wars, no mass emigration, famines or murders). Soviets basically lost half of pre-WWII years on chaos.
Russia without Soviets would look more like 350M strong Norway than like 140M strong Nigeria how it ended up.
Also, all of Europe had a bad crop that year, I guess the Soviets were controlling the weather?
Of course this is a point too subtle to work on Hacker News.
The data on both sides is wobbly to the point of being undependable. Until modern social security systems kicked in the number of people living in the US was largely a hypothetical quantity, especially in far-flung rural areas, the very sort of which were impacted by the Dust Bowl.
The 1930 census https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1930_United_States_Census seems to be fairly comprehensive, but you have to wonder how far into the wilderness these people were willing to go to tabulate who was living in the extreme edges of the American frontier.
I haven't seen much talk of large scale deaths(>10,000)due to the dust bowl. In fact I can't really find much on dust bowl deaths (other then an uptick in the suicide rate) except in places that seem to be excusing the Holodomor.
People and nations can buy and beg food, its political and economic systems which turn crop failure into famine. Hell sometimes you don't even need a crop failure.
> If there was a "deliberate campaign of genocide by starvation" happening, I'm sure I could look in the New York Times archives of the period and read about that. If I consult the archives, the reporters going through the Ukraine said reports of that were false.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Duranty
> "Lying was Duranty's stock in trade," commented Alsop. In his memoirs British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, then The Manchester Guardian's correspondent in Moscow, talked of Duranty's "persistent lying" [20] and elsewhere called him "the greatest liar I ever knew.".[21]
> It was clear, meanwhile, from Duranty's personal exchanges that he was fully aware at the time of the scale of the calamity. In 1934 he privately reported to the British embassy in Moscow that as many as 10 million people may have died, directly or indirectly, from famine in the Soviet Union in the previous year. Both British intelligence[22][clarification needed] and American engineer Zara Witkin (1900–1940),[23] who worked in the USSR from 1932 to 1934,[24] confirmed that Duranty knowingly misrepresented information about the nature and scale of the famine.
---
In contrast
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gareth_Jones_(journalist)
> he travelled to the Soviet Union and eluded authorities to slip into Ukraine, where he kept diaries of the man-made starvation he witnessed
> > I walked along through villages and twelve collective farms. Everywhere was the cry, 'There is no bread. We are dying'. This cry came from every part of Russia, from the Volga, Siberia, White Russia, the North Caucasus, and Central Asia. I tramped through the black earth region because that was once the richest farmland in Russia and because the correspondents have been forbidden to go there to see for themselves what is happening.
> > In the train a Communist denied to me that there was a famine. I flung a crust of bread which I had been eating from my own supply into a spittoon. A peasant fellow-passenger fished it out and ravenously ate it. I threw an orange peel into the spittoon and the peasant again grabbed it and devoured it. The Communist subsided. I stayed overnight in a village where there used to be two hundred oxen and where there now are six. The peasants were eating the cattle fodder and had only a month's supply left. They told me that many had already died of hunger. Two soldiers came to arrest a thief. They warned me against travel by night, as there were too many 'starving' desperate men.
> > 'We are waiting for death' was my welcome, but see, we still, have our cattle fodder. Go farther south. There they have nothing. Many houses are empty of people already dead,' they cried.
Muggeridge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm_Muggeridge "a forceful anti-communist. During World War II, he worked for the British government as a soldier and a spy."
Jones: (from your link) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gareth_Jones_(journalist)#Life... "In 1931 he was offered employment in New York City by Dr Ivy Lee, public relations advisor to organisations such as the Rockefeller Institute, the Chrysler Foundation, and Standard Oil, to research a book about the Soviet Union. In the summer of 1931 he toured the Soviet Union with H. J. Heinz II of the food company dynasty, producing a diary published by Heinz as Experiences in Russia 1931, a diary which probably contains the first usage of the word "starve" in relation to the collectivisation of Soviet agriculture. In 1932 Jones returned to work for Lloyd George and helped the wartime Prime Minister write his War Memoirs.
During the 1930s, he was a reporter for the Western Mail.[2] In late January and early February 1933 Jones was in Germany covering the accession to power of the Nazi Party, and was in Leipzig on the day Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor. A few days later on February 23 in the Richthofen, the fastest and most powerful three-motored aeroplane in Germany, he became the first foreign journalist to fly with Hitler as Jones accompanied Hitler and Joseph Goebbels to Frankfurt where Jones reported for the Western Mail on the new Chancellor's tumultuous acclamation in that city."
It's called the Cold War. Liars lied about liars. All of your sources are committed anti-communists willing to do whatever it took to bring down the USSR. Do you really think they wouldn't lie about this stuff?
A famine is different from a crop failure. Crop failures can help cause famines,but typically famines happen because political and/or economic failures. For example in cases of extreme authoritarianism(like the USSR and China - PRC) and colonialism(Ireland, Nepal).
see http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/01/arts/does-democracy-avert-...
That's how the British empire industrialized (in India, Ireland) etc.
The western countries bordering Ukraine had food shortages the same year the Ukraine did, no mention of that.
Also if you read New York Times during this period, the reporters travelling the Ukraine said there were no famine conditions - the Times said this, not Pravda.
It was the pro-capitalist reforms that turned China into the success it is today, and as China starts to falter with it's unmanageable debt and unproductive, government-directed parts of the economy, the reforms will inevitably be capitalist, pro-market solutions that remove the state and promote competition.
So yes, some economies can succeed despite their socialist, government-controlled economic policies, but when things start to fail, solutions all point to the markets.
It's amazing how this merry-go-round of meaningless and misleading language gets echoed in an echo chamber unquestioned.
The USSR had markets just like the US did. You go to the store, you see radishes and milk, you buy radishes with your rubles at this market, you go to another store, you buy the blue shirt instead of the tan one with your rubles. The markets are the same. What do I have to twist my thought process around to think they are not the same.
Not to go off on another tangent, but that store could be privately or state owned in Russia. Just like liquor stores and post offices can be state owned in the US. The transistor and Internet was created in the US by government spending and government granting of monopolies (read the MCI lawsuit papers) The ARPAnet and NSFnet were not allowed commercial traffic until the 1990s. Then there is the Federal Reserve, NSF, DARPA, bank bailouts - the US economy has been government-directed since WWII, as Warren Buffett's father pointed out in Congress back when that all started.
That was one out a few countries where all business was tightly state-owned.
You could grow some radishes and sell them at farmer's market, but that's it.
First ones began to appear around 1987 I think in the form of КООП.
You keep using this word market. A market in the US was the same as a USSR market. Yes, other things varied, but markets were the same.
Also you are attributing and inferring some statements to me that I did not say.
It is perfectly reasonable to use the term "market" that way. After all, what else would you call a place where radishes are stored with price tags? But that's not what the person arguing with you is saying, and trying to rebut them based on an alternate definition is unproductive.
There is no being coy at all, I can't even twist my head around how these similar places in the US and Russia are not the same. What is his "alternate definition" where such a place in Russia is stripped of the word market?
That's a minor point as you answered the question, sort of. But not to satisfaction. A market in the US or USSR sells commodities at a set price. People buy goods or they don't. The markets operate exactly the same.
As you're attempting to make a rational argument unlike others, I will get to the point. The markets in the US and USSR were the same, despite you following some US ideological line and calling the US one a "free" one. It is production that was different, and control of production. Misdirecting the difference from control of production to "free" markets is just more misdirection and sophistry (which is widespread, not particularly pertaining to you).
https://www.amazon.com/Steeltown-USSR-Soviet-Society-Gorbach...
The factory was producing substandard steel. Often they'd ship it to customers and it would arrive in an unusable condition because it had been stored outside and was more rust than steel. But they'd try and use it anyway, because if they complained the bureaucrats in Moscow would brand them troublemakers and route the next shipment to someone else and then they wouldn't meet their production goals, which meant their pay would be drastically cut, and their family would starve.
Your "blue shirt vs. tan shirt" is absurdly simplistic, and makes enormous incorrect assumptions, like "Is there even a shirt there to buy that day?"
Some other reading for you would be about Krushchev's visit to the US in the 1950's. He visited a few supermarkets and assumed that they had been set up just for his visit (Potemkin villages) as that was what the Soviet Union would have done. Because having that much product on the shelves was absurd.
http://media3.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/photo/gallery/090611...
"During a visit to the United States in 1989 he became more convinced than ever that Russia had been ruinously damaged by its centralized, state-run economic system, where people stood in long lines to buy the most basic needs of life and more often than not found the shelves bare. He was overwhelmed by what he saw at a Houston supermarket, by the kaleidoscopic variety of meats and vegetables available to ordinary Americans.
Leon Aron, quoting a Yeltsin associate, wrote in his biography, “Yeltsin, A Revolutionary Life” (St. Martin’s Press, 2000): “For a long time, on the plane to Miami, he sat motionless, his head in his hands. ‘What have they done to our poor people?’ he said after a long silence.” He added, “On his return to Moscow, Yeltsin would confess the pain he had felt after the Houston excursion: the ‘pain for all of us, for our country so rich, so talented and so exhausted by incessant experiments.’ ”"(1)
Capitalism has many evils - most notably the tendency to eat its own young - but it does do most things very very well.
(1)- http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/23/world/europe/23cnd-yeltsin...
The light industry and consumer good sectors of the Soviet Economy were woefully underdeveloped - the Brezhnev Stagnation, didn't improve matters and robbed the Soviet economy of much hard currency that could have been used to invest in the economy - but to an extent just like us - the elephant in the room was the amount of GDP spent on the Military - there is a report of a perhaps apocryphal conversation between Gorbachev and Reagan about how each of their respective generals are always demanding more money, more for planes, missiles, tanks, and more.
The soviets lost the cold war not due to any inherent moral issues with their system (where there were many) - but due to economic collapse.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse
In my opinion, whether they are "necessary" is irrelevant (by objective measures, most things aren't) and simplicity is not a meaningful goal in itself.
As a species, we're drastically better off today than we have ever been. That includes calorie counts globally. The human population of earth has far more food than it needs. There are radically fewer famines today, not more.
The suffering that is happening in Venezuela wasn't caused by 'complications of modern life,' much less apps.
I completely disagree with the base premise, and do not believe our lives are more complex. I believe our lives are drastically simplified versus the concerns of just a few hundred years ago: near total lack of any rights, serious fear of starvation or exposure, constant war, a life filled with non-stop violence and death, almost total poverty, extreme majority illiteracy, constant risk of premature death by unknown illnesses, extraordinarily horrible hygiene and living standards, no stable / functional / trustworthy systems of savings or retirement (meaning a constant fear of not making it through the next year), and on it goes.
We do however face grave environmental issues so it's not all a feel-good story.
It's entirely possible to democratically decide to steal the means of production from the capitalists — and thus experience exactly these consequences.
He was elected democratically to behave like a dictator. Most dictatorships advertise quite clearly what they intend to do.
https://www.cartercenter.org/documents/297.pdf
http://eeas.europa.eu/eueom/missions/2006/venezuela/index_en...
Of course democracy is not incompatible with Communism. How could it be when the people are enthusiastic supporters of Communism?
But please, continue lecturing me on my country's electoral and voting system.
That's after two Chavez elections. Then the people were voting for Communism well before the elections were rigged in an observable way
Clearly, the world has always been filled with idiots full of resentment towards people that made better decisions and became more successful.
There were/are enthusiastic supporters for some of the worst causes.[1]
Also, historically, comunism did not support occidental democracy systems.[2]
[1]http://heavy.com/news/2016/07/new-isis-islamic-state-daesh-a...
[2] https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1918/xx/principles....
Likewise a socialist state does not necessarily limit individual freedoms. Communist regimes have, but they're also totalitarian, so which philosophy is to blame is sometimes hard to pin down.
Modern communist societies have also relaxed these restrictions significantly, though there were times when everything was forced communal.
Venezuela has for years had a full-on centrally planned economy with the state setting the prices for goods independent of their costs of production, all as a tool to continue winning electoral support from the poor. That is a very, very nasty aspect of a socialist system, which is avoided by successful socialist nations.
Edit: This was meant to be a reply to the parent comment.
How many more examples do you need before you recognize the obvious pattern?
We were a functioning democracy, in fact we were the most stable and rich country in latin america.
Socialism has led to a non–functioning democracy, shortages, massive crime and violence.
What's hitting them now is a decade of mismanagement of their petro-business... Combined with a collapse in oil prices. If Colombia's exports dropped in price by 60%, things would not be pretty. Fortunately, unlike Venezuela, its economy is far more diverse.
Corruption is a parasite which adds costs to every resource flow it can find, but this is a wholly different scenario of resources being too scarce due to systemic degradation due to central planning misallocation combined with the drop in oil prices that had sustained it.
Having somebody in charge of the economy that does not understand that he doesn't understand how the economy works.
Since Venezuela was a democracy you could also argue that democracies wreak havoc in the economy.
Well having the US send $1 billion a year, year after year to prop your country up ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_Colombia ) helps.
And American aid does not come in cash, the money can only be spent in shiny new American-made military hardware. That's why the Colombian army has lots of Humvees and Black Hawks, paid for the U.S. taxpayer.
It really is a poorly disguised subsidy to the American military industrial complex.
In any case, considering Colombia has the second largest GDP in South America (after Brazil) at about $300 billion a year, receiving even $1 billion a year would be statistically speaking, noise.
> I head out early to a farmers’ market near my house. Before dawn each Saturday, the farmers truck in their produce from the surrounding mountains. Everything’s sold at free-market prices. This is, technically speaking, illegal but essentially goes unenforced nowadays.
http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2016/07/13/venezu...
http://www.wsj.com/articles/crime-wave-lashes-venezuelas-alr...
http://www.latinpost.com/articles/71424/20150812/maria-gabri...
Which country?
"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year-old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." - John Rogers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_Shrugged
The book is a hilarious caricature of reality.
And of course since the US/CIA loved to plot overthrows and juntas, how could the country trust aid offers? And the wire recordings of Henry Kissinger trying to deliberately collapse the Argentinian economy before their takeover...
I get that this is site is often a huge capitalistic libertarian O-jerk, and I'm not naive to the logistical failings of authoritarian socialism, but I wonder what the full story is here...
At the core of the libertarian philosophy is non-intervention.
I'm not a proponent of anything Authoritarian, but communism on a small scale does fascinate me.
This is an important distinction. Humans evolved in tribes, and many of our instinctual responses to how we think we should work together are optimized for such a setting. But these things just can't scale upwards. There are many things that work well at a community level that fall apart with larger groups. So when we see a problem in the world and feel our heart-strings tugged, we should be suspicious that our emotional response is something that can really make sense in the big picture.
I do agree that such things might be able to work at small scales. But I suspect that the threshold is well below the size that you're citing here.
Markets work because they are irrational, and move with people as situations change - like a subconscious reflex - planned economies require conscious effort to reapportion their efforts in the face of change.
The solution to socialism is collectives - lots of little ones from 50-500 people, which then interact with each other using market settlement and price adjustment mechanisms.
Venezuela has been very heavily dependent on oil for decades and this happens every time oil's price plunges for a long period in Venezuela, look at its history since WWII. The same is happening to every oil-dependent region in the world (except Saudi Arabia, which is doing the market flooding).
The article opening lines talking about how unique the situation is without mentioning what is happening in Honduras this moment is a laugh.
But why talk about that when we can have silly ideological arguments over the merits of communism and capitalism instead
So sad. At some point it will flip again and the cycle will repeat itself.
Meanwhile the US continues to pressure the socialist government through sanctions in order to break a government that they don't approve of. Whilst the oil price remains low, the socialist government can't profit enough to get back on track.
The innocents, including children are going to starve, because the USA refuses have any kind of socialist leaning government in its back yard. it's been going on for decades. Rinse and repeat. Meanwhile the socialist "elite" make sure that they have good on their tables and punish the middle classes for their refusal to accept their ideology, happily lining their own bank accounts.
It is somewhat ironic that their neighbour Colombia, that for years was the black sheep of the region, has swapped roles with its previously rich sibling.
BS. The system was always open enough that you could make something of yourself.
>Now the boot is on the other foot and the socialists are starving out the middle and upper classes.
Except the upper and middle classes still have money to buy products at exorbitant prices. Who do you think are the people who are starving to death, having to kill wild dogs and pigeons to be able to eat something?
>Meanwhile the US continues to pressure the socialist government through sanctions in order to break a government that they don't approve of. Whilst the oil price remains low, the socialist government can't profit enough to get back on track.
There is no track to get back to, Chavez,his XXI century revolution and his cronies have always been about stealing as much as they can.
>The innocents, including children are going to starve.
Pero tienen "Patria" (but they have "Homeland").
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/13-years-after-foi...
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/04/20/venezuelas-opposition...
But 40 years ago, someone like my father,who came from a very modest and tiny town in the east of the country managed to go to school, study and buy a house and a car with my mom who also came from modest upbringing.
They managed to buy an apartment with their salary and put my sister and I through school and college. And just like them, thousands of venezuelans had some hope to get ahead through work.
Right now, I'm an electrical engineer thanks to them and I could work my whole life and never be able to afford the tiniest house. I'm scraping by with less than $100 a month and I already make more money than most people.
Why do you think most young people here have plans or have left the country? Because they have ZERO hope of ever moving out of their parent's house or buying a car. That was not a reality before Chavez came to power.
http://www.presstv.com/Detail/2016/03/06/454168/national-eme...
Venezuela didn't wake up last year and decided it wanted a particularly messed up form of socialism. This started much longer ago..
(I'll hijack my own comment: socialism != social democracy, as practiced by a few northern European countries.)
The best "preparation" is looking ahead and living in a place that isn't about to go to shit. Having a plane ticket and a passport is infinitely more valuable than a bucket of bullets and a gun.
Rwanda is another example of what happens when The Shit Hits The Fan where unless your bunker is invisible or utterly impregnable you're not going to survive for long. When word gets out about a huge stash of weapons and food guess who's first on the hit-list of an angry mob?
Does being a prepper save you from an ISIS-like take-over of your town? What about when the Russians role in and assume control like they've done in Georgia and Ukraine and you're now living in a whole different environment?
Anyone who hoards food and bullets is thinking that when society collapses it will be a little bit of chaos and then they can go back outdoors and carry on.
I'd challenge anyone to show when such a thing has happened in history.
However to play Devil's Advocate I expect you could survive Argentina/Rwanda/Georgia/Ukraine with sufficient preparation e.g. growing food underground.
It just takes an ungodly amount of money to make it work.
> I'd challenge anyone to show when such a thing has happened in history.
That's the interesting problem because I'd say (let's call it) 'cannibal holocaust' does happen with some frequency on a historical scale. It happened in my country and Russia more recently. It's rare but it does happen.
The key element I think isn't so much resources as secrecy of preparations. With sufficient resources and thought you should be able to hole up for the rest of your life.
Whether you'd want to is another issue!
You have to remember that the people who do go fully off the grid aren't all that likely to advertise themselves. I'm thinking they will mostly be dissidents or the military (for deadman's switches, secret bioweapon programs and the like). So your appeal for challengers might come up empty for reasons other than non-existence. People who do this are always going to be pretty extreme.
Here's one example: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/for-40-years-this-russ...
I wouldn't say they were prepared with bullets and MREs per se but they certainly got off the grid. Also it is an interesting story.
Finally I offer you an example of (intellectual) survival from ancient times in my own country.
The majority of Greek texts you've heard of used to be stored in a small island off the Irish coast, protected against invaders by monks and most likely extreme isolation. If the Carolingian empire hadn't copied them from the monks you'd know next to nothing about the most major figures and events in world history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_of_the_Greek_Clas...
When the Roman empire fell, knowledge of it and its predecessors was really in danger of being lost, despite what modern day hipster hun-apologists will tell you. From literacy to ... not-literacy. Without that backup beyond the furthest corner of the Empire, we'd know nothing about major figures like Seneca and Cicero.
Kenneth Clark did an excellent documentary on the subject if you're interested.
The episode is: Civilisation (1969) Episode 1 "The Skin of Our Teeth", from 13:35.
I don't know if you're familiar with Neal Stephenson's Anathem but I imagine he got a lot of inspiration from this.
You can buy MREs that last five to ten years.
They won't solve all problems but they will certainly give you time to react appropriately e.g. escaping an area or growing food for the following year.
Does anybody remember James Burke's Connections? The very first episode on how to live in a global downturn?
I do think many Americans are too far to the unprepared extreme, where a two-day interruption of normal services caused by e.g. a tropical storm sends everyone panicking, because they in some cases literally don't even have one day's worth of food in their house.
I think for most people having 1 to 3 months of food is ample but if you're in a political troublespot you should triple or quintuple that. It's all about using your wits while not going over the top.
If you don't remember it or want to see it again, look here [1] with the HN discussion here [2].
[1] https://archive.org/search.php?query=subject%3A%22Series%3A+...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11075430
Edit: Changed [1] to the current link, old link that [2] refers to doesn't work
http://www.cnbc.com/2016/02/29/venezuela-is-making-surreal-s...
Venezuela has been in a disastrous economic situation for years, but nowhere as bad what we are seeing these days.
Just yesterday their government opened the border with Colombia for 12 hours (they have kept it closed for a year) and about 125 thousand people crossed into Colombia to buy basic groceries and medicines. 30% did not cross back.
> 30% did not cross back.
Not surprisingly. It can easily become a humanitarian problem for Colombia. What is the political sentiment in Colombia about this ?
It's not easy for them to leave because their currency is basically worthless and access to hard currency is restricted to the well-connected.
Also the Venezuelan government closed the border about one year ago. They also kicked out all Colombians from Venezuela. According to the Venezuelan government everything bad that happens there is consequence of the vast Colombian-American right wing conspiracy.
Colombians are generally cool about Venezuelans, as the two countries are very similar to each other and have a long history together (at one point they were part of the same country). Neither the people nor the government opposes Venezuelan immigration, as far as I can tell.
But Colombia ain't exactly the land of milk and honey and Venezuelans know it. If they are not rushing in greater numbers to the border is because they know that, while there may not be any shortages or blackouts here, jobs are also few and far between.
Sounds like it's time for new elections or executions of the assholes in power.
Elections were won with ~70% of the votes, and I also recall various referendum-like votes which Chavez won easily as well. Another fact that surprised me was that every Sunday he would give these 4h long speeches, and a crowd would invariably go to the streets/TV to watch him speak.
Later on I am aware that this scenario changed drastically, but in my layman's eyes the first years of Chavismo seemed very democratic, and of course also very populist (e.g. housing for the poor), which only made the governments approval rates soar.
I'm not saying I'm pro-communism, but before pointing a finger at communism, maybe the democratically elected Venezuelan government's incompetence, especially regarding spending all the revenue from it's single main natural resource on unsustainable populist programs with little ROI, should be blamed.
[Edit] Typo
His government was very successful by most economic metrics during his time in his office. It is his successor that has dropped the ball with his bungling of the currency mess. And that's the root cause of all this suffering, a bad currency system, and low oil prices.
You call them populist programs with little ROI, but they were investments and initiatives that were improving the lives of giant swathes of the nation's citizens.
If the price of oil was still $100 per barrel the country wouldn't be in this situation, and we wouldn't have all this gnashing of teeth over the inevitable downfall of socialism.
From my position, capitalist economies shouldn't be so arrogant right now. Instead of blaming the economic system of the country, take it as a warning for what happens when natural resource assets stop producing bounty, or currency exchange moves against being in your favor.
American Capitalism would not be immune from an ecological recession caused by plausible threats like warming and ocean acidification and biodiversity loss, and America might not always have the subsidy of the petrodollar. The dollar's status as reserve currency is equal to a finger on the scale in all American's economic favor.
Venezuela's present could be our future.
My point originally was intended at NOT blaming communism, or capitalism as well. IMHO this seems more like a problem involving a government spending all of it's USD100-a-barrel income like a lottery winner, and when the prices fall to less than half of that (which by the way, most countries would welcome happily the amount of petro Venezuela has even at USD40 a barrel) and no other significant investments were made in alternative sources of revenue, they act as if it was solely a natural disaster and absolve themselves of all responsibility.
This isn't in tension, because communism and democracy aren't opposites. In fact, they are logically independent (even if anti-correlated in practice).
We didn't have so much crime (definitely no violent stuff like kidnaping), and cellphone was still big grey brick Fox Mulder would pull out of his jacket ... So sharing knowledge you've found bread or milk was spreading slower.
For those asking how come farmers aren't making huge money in such cases - they still need to buy other stuff and that's equally/proportionally expensive.
In case of Yugoslavia, I think pretty much all petrol/gas was smuggled in (because international sanctions) from nearby countries.
Once you consider that mass producing food means you need to power machines (like tractor) and ultimately transport it somehow to consumers ... Imagine how many jerry cans had to be smuggled ...
And IMHO you're mixing cause and effect when you mention state-controlled economies as a cause of this. It mostly fails because (for one reason or another) country is effectively blocked from trading with the rest of the world, and doesn't have enough variety in materials/resources to be on it's own.
And IMHO you're mixing causation and correlation when you mention state-controlled economies as a cause of this. It mostly fails because (for one reason or another) country is effectively blocked from trading with the rest of the world, and doesn't have enough variety in materials/resources to be on it's own.
I am in a privileged position, though, I understand the situation of 'common people' as I work closely with them as a local business owner.
This journal is really close to the reality.
To those wondering about 'side markets' and 'farmers marking a killing', let me explain.
There is a black market for food and any other good. Shortages are real, especially when it comes to medicines. It's easy to find pasta or rice comparatively. People with chronic diseases are dying - the patients that have the medicines they need require foreign help either from family or friends.
About 5 years ago the minimum wage was about $300. Today it's $40. You can find in any major city people looking for food in the dumpsters. [1]
Why are farmers and producers not making a killing? It's not that simple, but there's definitely people making a killing: black market traffickers which are mostly politicians and military men in strategic positions.
I know a few farmers, so I will speak from experience. This farmer friend I have - let's call him Jose, produces milk and his family has been doing so for more than 40 years.
Jose is the vet in the farm. Venezuela was suffering a long drought due "El Nino" that also affected the electric service. Cows were producing less milk due this - medicines for cows are really hard to get (probiotics, antibiotics, etc), food for animals is mostly imported - just like medicines. The biggest problem, though, is what's brought us here: The government economic policies.
The market for foreign currencies is regulated. Only the government and through the government currencies can be exchanged. Since the government depends heavily on oil for foreign currency we've seen quite a dip in imports. In other words, the government lacks liquidity. Which is why it's really hard to legally obtain imported goods, so if you produce in Venezuela and sell your product in Bolivares (local currency) you would have to get Dollars (foreign currency) to import anything - the government is basically saying no to 95% of requests for currency exchange.
The market for [most] producers is highly regulated. No milk producer can produce milk higher than the fixed price given by the government. For most, there's no incentive.
The government is printing money like crazy making inflation soar (we have the highest inflation in the world! [2])
As you can see, most producers have no incentive as they will not see profit in their ventures since they have a cap for what they can sell the product for.
Imagine that the U.S government says by law "1 pound of rice will cost $1 or less" and anyone selling for more is breaking the law. If the cost of producing rice is $0.1c this would be fine, however, for the rice producer each pound of rice costs $1.5 - how many people do you think are going to produce rice? This happens in Venezuela in almost all product categories (milk, coffee, beans, rice, pasta, flour, and I could keep going, the list is really long).
What has the government done to fix the issue? Basically, nothing since their policy "fixes" is to control more and more our economy.
The government solution to the food shortages and I must say, this is really hard to explain, is to give out bags of food with goods distributed by the "own people in the community". I don't see how will this ever work, since while it's not free they're giving out a bag for $1 that in the black market can easily go for $10, a golden goose for the corrupt. The government is completely ignoring, what in my opinion is far worse, which is, the lack of medicines of any kind for the most part.
The government controls the media, the military, and all forces but one - the legislative power, though through political tricks they've found ways to mostly neutralize it. This year - 2016 - we could potentially have a referendum, though the government is making everything it can...
Why can't they just drop the price controls?
I expect it is ideological, but surely being alive trumps ideology (in that you'll starve or else people who have decided to become more flexible will kill you).
I think there's a lot of internal problems within the ruling party in regards to what should be done. Unfortunately, the president is the one unwilling to see differently or "betray" his ideology (or so it seems).
There are also subsidies to most products (as the government solution to some of the price caps) and last thing that has been said (in an informal setting by the VP) was that "the subsidies have been a mistake" and that they will try to fix it with some sort of "basic income" but only for the poor rather than for everyone - which opens another HUGE opportunity for white collar corruption - something the government seems to love and cherish.
In short, the president preaches a radicalism that would go against taking "neo-liberal economic policies" and by doing so he (I assume), perceives that the public will find him weak. Which, paradoxically, he already is. In my view, Nicolas Maduro (our president) is in an impossible situation in which the best he can do is to step away - but this opens another pandora box that he seems unwilling to go for, as such he's doing everything in his power to avoid a referendum or any sort of democratic solution.
However if this is something within your possibilities, I'd love to pass this offer to anyone who needs it.
Sounds like a good idea.
> However if this is something within your possibilities, I'd love to pass this offer to anyone who needs it.
You have my permission to pass the offer onto somebody else who needs it. Send details to my email.
In their sick political games, the venezuelan government is not receiving any foreign aid because they say we don't need it. I'm not sure if there are any private organizations receiving donations. I know some of the door-to-door shipping companies the_vzlan mentions are receiving medicine and food packages but I really don't know if they are to be trusted.
Sure, just pass on some information to my email address.
Economics in one lesson is available for free from the Ludwig von Mises institute. https://mises.org/files/henry-hazlitt-economics-one-lessonpd...
No groceries (deficit on everything worth buying), no money to by anything in reasonable quantities, extreme inflation, state-issued coupons for different amounts of items (you still had to pay for them, these were used for rationing).
We were large family, so we got a right to stand for a few hours in line every few weeks at a distant shop where families with four or more children could shop for items not available elsewhere.
Crime rates were through the roof, but not kidnappings. Muggings, burglaries, extortion, plain and simple beating up because you looked the wrong way. These were the days when gangs started forming, so old rules (stand up and fight even if you'll lose) did not work.
This story gives me shivers. It was extremely hard to provide for your children back then. I cannot imagine how people from countries with much worse conditions can manage.
Edit adds this paragraph. I was a child then. I thought that everything around was a norm. I, actually, did not care much. Now I do.
All apparently doing pretty well.
The only real insight I've found is that colonialism is a bad idea and you shouldn't do it anymore.