my heart goes out to all Venezuelans right now. Their poorly run government pretty much bet the entire farm on oil and with the depreciation in recent years it was already tough living there. At a price close to 0, it can not be good.
And sadly they can't quickly grow tourism due to the crime rate and instability (and now coronavirus). The country has incredible opportunities for tourism but it will take years first to solve its problems and then overcome its reputation.
And like most places who try to swap resource extraction for tourism they will find that it pays a lot less. States like West Virginia still haven't recovered from the collapse of coal jobs starting in the 1980s, even with tourism. Even in states like Colorado, being a liftie doesn't pay nearly as well as being a hard rock miner.
Covid-19 can't be helping things but oversimplifying Venezulea geopolitical situation as "a poorly run government" ignores the fact that there are multiple state-level actors (internally and externally) working against their best interests.
Hrm....and why do those state actors work against Venezuelas interest? Perhaps they have aligned themselves with other other oppressive global regimes which nationalize resources to be managed by friends and family rather than competitive enterprises? And who did that alignment? Yep, poorly run government.
Point out any socialist/communist country where this hasn't happened.
Oil was pretty much their only market, you can definitely blame how the country turned out based on how the government ran it's market, and btw the Venezuelan government committed much worse atrocities than just running their market into the ground. They even killed their own people trying to get aid from other countries.
Algeria, Bangladesh, Guyana, India, Nepal, Nicaragua, Portugal, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Angola, Barbados, Congo, Ecuador, Guinea-Bissau, Mauritius, Mozambique, Mexico, Namibia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Suriname, Uruguay, and Zambia
The economies of those countries doesn't disagree with my point.
While most of those haven't committed any atrocities, people have died due to the poverty socialism creates. It's only a matter of time until the regimes in power are questioned and more blood is shed.
Ideally you want democracy (for freedom) and capitalism (for money).
If you don't have capitalism, you will crumble, China found that out the hard way and corrected itself (though never added the democracy part).
Keep in mind, poverty kills people too. Most of the countries you listed are extremely poor.
India who has been practicing socialism since '47 has the largest slums in the world.
the problem is the impossible expectation for an entire society to change its fundamental assumptions about how to route value through itself,in a radical way, and within the space of a few years.
This virtually guarantees a dictatorship (and usually a personality cult, whether forced or organically developedl) and all the negatives that accompany one.
To create your list you just grabbed a bunch of countries that claimed they were socialist/communist (some of whom weren't and didn't claim to be such as Rwanda). The above is a list of countries that claim to be socialist or are run by a socialist party that hadn't committed any atrocities. It's unreasonable to discount the above list because "it's only a matter of time until ... more blood is shed" because you can't predict the future.
Mexico is definitively not a communist or socialist country. Although it might be a little to the "left" of the US, it would be considered a capitalistic country in most of Europe.
You can't convince me that welfare services like medicine or food programs aren't part of the "production or distribution of goods and services". The reason you can't convince me is because you're wrong.
And your throwing up of straw men isn't proving your point either. Aside from that, I think I'll avoid getting any opinions on economic freedom from one of the most biased sources possible, The Heritage Foundation.
Yes, Sweden was a socialist country for awhile (1960-1994), it no longer is because the experiment failed.
They've been reversing their welfare programs and are rated highly on the economic freedom index.
Taxes are still high to pay for the welfare programs, but as they are reformed I'd assume the government will lower them.
Even so, America once had a 70% income tax, that didn't make us socialist, though it made us economically weak (thanks for the cuts Reagan, you saved us) .
> Between 1870 and 1950, Sweden had the highest per capita income growth in the world and became one of the richest countries, behind only Switzerland, the U.S., and Denmark.
> In the 1960s, Sweden started to redistribute wealth, which brought wealth creation to a halt.
> By the mid-1990s, the country had growing economic problems because it continued to redistribute wealth it wasn’t creating.
> In 1994, Sweden began implementing the following measures designed to reverse this trend
- Reduce Regulation
- Reduce Government Spending
- Reform their Welfare Programs
- Shrink their Government
tldr: socialism is like crack, you only need to try it once and it'll destroy your life/country.
> Point out any socialist/communist country where this hasn't happened.
Socialist Yugoslavia saw some political imprisonments, mostly immediately after the war as Tito tried to limit Stalin’s influence in the country. But there was never collectivization leading to famine, never killings on a massive scale. The genocide in the region was only unleashed after the end of the socialist era. And before you want to rant about crushing poverty: Yugoslavs in the 1960s and 1970s lived well enough on average that they were conspicuous among tourists on the Istanbul-Kathmandu trail and Indonesia, and many international brands were sold in Yugoslavia just like in any Western European country.
I couldn't reply to your higher level comment because I flagged it; "Socialism strikes again. Let's add the death toll to the millions it has killed before." is a total flamewar bait / political ideology topic. I can tell because I was baited into replying before I noticed what I was doing and flagged it instead.
quips like "But yeah, maybe it hasn't been implemented properly yet /s" are bait.
"I see political debates here all the time." - then flag them, they are against the comment guidelines?
I'm sure you weren't, but it was flamebait because it was predictable that the comment would blow up into a flamewar. The issue is the expected value of the subthread, i.e. the sum of the probability distribution of responses.
It's possible for 20 serial killers to call themselves Christian, and still "not be following Christ correctly", and pointing that out over and over isn't supporting serial killing, and it shouldn't be the serial killers who get to define what "Christian" means. Analogously, "the struggle of the proletariat isn't "the proletariat want themselves put in mass graves" no matter how many times mass murderers put the the proletariat in mass graves saying "but it's what they wanted!".
That a central planning economy can be badly and inhumanely run is not, in itself, proof that one cannnot be run well run. It might be the case that it can't, even that it's irresponsible to try; but what you're doing is pointing to mass graves as a kind of emotional reasoning "that is a lot of suffering so don't you dare argue, I win" shutdown tactic.
Marx was not famous for saying "The proletariat are looking a bit porky these days, let's get a dictatorship going, kill all the farmers, starve the proles to death and call it utopia"
When Britain directed India's wheat production to Britain and starved 7 million people, or Churchill diverted Bangladesh's crop production to Greece and 4 million Bangladeshis starved, or Britain bought granaries in Iran (Persia) in the early 1900s and 2 million starved, those weren't local people determining their food supply distribution in a free market; you said in another comment that your definition of Socalism was "the only real definiton, when the government controls the market and no capitalism exists"; by your definition were these micro-instances of Communism?
You're arguing a strawman, and you have a one-word panacea answer:
Capitalism.
A one-word explanaton which covers many countries over many decades with many problems and many atrocities, one thing to blame for all ills and a one-word answer for everything good. That is unlikely to be the best possible understanding.
Yes, it's impossible to keep politics out of the topics that get discussed here, but it's eminently possible not to go full generic and to stay out of battle mode. It mostly just requires an intention to follow the rules here. Please follow the rules here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Venezuela in 1992 was semi-socialist, it had a state-run oil company, but it wasn't part of the Communist Bloc (for lack of a better term). Chavez aligned his country with China and Russia to the detriment of his own people and his own countries' ability to produce oil.
Communism is basically a political syndicate the masquerades as an economic system. Venezuela's oil production has been collapsing for over two decades and much of what remains is basically Chinese/Sinopec owned production that Chavez sold them back in '06 or so in exchange for _loans_ for their social services programs.
According to a friend of mine who was working down there they were flying workers in to work the rigs and flying them home to spend their money.
Having the government run the markets, even when an emergency dictates it, is a process that attracts the corrupt.
Most regimes you mention are dictatorships, not socialistic. Also quite a few of them were actively fought against by the capitalistic United states, contributing to social unrest and even downright organizing coups.
These are complicated systems which cannot be reduced just to "Socialism death toll" or "Capitalism death toll".
Ok, is it binary? The country has to control all markets or none at all?
Exemple, In my region, the government controls healthcare and alcohol stores (both essential services now!), among other things, but otherwise the markets are free. Does that make us a socialist country?
It depends on how much of the market they control and how it's controlled and distributed.
Simply having a universal healthcare system and high taxes doesn't make you a socialist country if you still have economic freedom in every other industry.
I can't give you a percentage, but if your government is starting to take over many industries, I'd say it's going down the socialist path. Generally inefficiencies in one industry lead the government to take over others to sustain itself.
Okay, I sincerely did not mean to start a flamewar, I was trying to explain to the GP why Venezuela fell.
Now that I know talking about socialism, and I assume other economic and political ideologies, is against the rules I will report similar occurrences i.e. when people criticize capitalism when it doesn't relate to the topic.
I apologize for any breakage of the rules, I did read them, but I misunderstood.
Any speculation about what this will mean for electrification efforts? Specifically for cars. I thought high prices were good for that, but if the oil market collapses entirely it could drive some suppliers out of business.
Battery and electric vehicle lifetime costs (including electricity) are rapidly approaching the manufacturing and maintenance costs of internal combustion engine vehicles. That means that even if the fuel is free, it will be cheaper to operate an electric vehicle.
Low oil prices can delay that cost intersection, but won't prevent it from eventually happening because internal combustion vehicles are more complex and costly to maintain even without taking into account fuel costs. So as long as EV manufacturing costs continue to decline and electricity continues to get cheaper from low cost renewables, ICE vehicles will eventually become obsolete no matter the oil price.
The price is trying to go to a level to force companies to keep the oil in the ground. If it has to go negative to incentivize that behavior, then it will.
Depends heavily on the location, but just expanding a crude tank farm in the US is a multi-year design and permitting job, even when you can just throw money at it. There's also significant ongoing regulatory costs of keeping them, even if they're just sitting idled.
Plus much of storage that exists isn't really for storage, but is a needed buffer on the supply line for steady-state infrastructure, like pipelines and refineries. Some amount of empty is required (both practical and by regulation) to absorb surplus, like in the event of an emergency refinery shut down due to fire.
Other cases are for when pipelined supply isn't single product, or is shared by multiple users... Your plant might need 500k bbl/day, but you only get the pipeline every other day at 1000k bbl/day. Or you get different products on different days.
Part of the US strategic oil reserve's purpose is for what's happening right now, and they've been using it to absorb excess capacity for a few weeks, with a few more weeks to go before full. And this is filling entire underground salt domes with oil, at a scale way beyond any manufactured tank capacity.
We'll probably see more tankers and even rail car tankers repurposed for storage, but I don't see anyone justifying the need to build more fixed storage, unless there's some existing/ contributing need for storage that was already permitted and is suddenly cost justified. But even that is at tiny scales compared to the current surplus.
It's just easier and cheaper to start shutting in the more isolated and/or expensive wells. Which is just storing it in the ground, anyway.
Regular 87-octane gasoline has dropped almost seventy cents per gallon in price in central Texas since this madness started. Oil producers in the state are getting squeezed hard right now.
54 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 108 ms ] threadThat aside, their monetary policy has also been a train wreck from the 70's, and compounded with more bad decisions in the early 2000's. https://mises.org/wire/venezuelas-economic-collapse-was-enab...
Until they fix core issues in their central government/bank, they will continue to struggle in a global economy.
The Venezuela government bet their citizens lives on socialism and lost.
- 40-70 million killed. China under Chairman Mao. Single Party Socialism. 1958-61 “The Great Leap Forward”.
- 20 million killed. USSR under Joseph “socialism in one country” Stalin. 1936-52 “The Great Purge”.
- 40 million killed. USSR under all other leaders.
- 4 million killed. Cambodia under Pol Pot. Communist. 1975-79.
- 1.6 million murdered; 4 million killed in hard labor. North Korea under Kim Il Sung. Independent socialist State.
- 1.15 million killed. Yugoslavia under Josip ” socialist federation President” Tito. 1945-65.
- 1 million total killed. Ethiopia under Menghistu. Communist. 1975-1978 “The Red Terror.”
- 1 million killed. Indonesia under Suharto. Communist. 1966.
- 1 million killed from genocide; this does not include war casualties. Afghanistan under Brezhnev. Communist. 1979 – 1981.
- 800,000 killed. Rwanda under Jean Kambanda. 1994. Socialist.
It's especially ridiculous to pretend the markets are more important than democracy vs. oligarchy vs. dictatorship.
Oil was pretty much their only market, you can definitely blame how the country turned out based on how the government ran it's market, and btw the Venezuelan government committed much worse atrocities than just running their market into the ground. They even killed their own people trying to get aid from other countries.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/5287-people-killed-during...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2019/feb/23/venezuela...
https://www.foxnews.com/world/venezuela-uprising-turns-viole...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/22/world/americas/brazil-ven...
But yeah, maybe it hasn't been implemented properly yet /s
While most of those haven't committed any atrocities, people have died due to the poverty socialism creates. It's only a matter of time until the regimes in power are questioned and more blood is shed.
Ideally you want democracy (for freedom) and capitalism (for money).
If you don't have capitalism, you will crumble, China found that out the hard way and corrected itself (though never added the democracy part).
Keep in mind, poverty kills people too. Most of the countries you listed are extremely poor.
India who has been practicing socialism since '47 has the largest slums in the world.
Bad leaders with total power will often commit atrocities, even if they embrace capitalistic money-making.
This virtually guarantees a dictatorship (and usually a personality cult, whether forced or organically developedl) and all the negatives that accompany one.
Both do have great welfare services, but they are very capitalistic and had great wealth before implementing the services.
Norway can thank that oil for their great welfare.
edit: to the user below, you're arguing semantics. I know the definition of socialism and it cannot exist with capitalism. I suggest you read up.
You're conflating socialism with welfare services and arguing about the semantics of the two to reach your point.
tldr: I'm being critical of socialism, not "democratic socialism".
https://www.forbes.com/sites/rainerzitelmann/2019/11/11/bern...
Being a socialist country involves much more than the "production or distribution of goods and services".
You're overplaying even that because it's only one industry (healthcare).
Both Sweden and Norway are rated highly on the economic freedom index https://www.heritage.org/index/ranking.
Look it up. It is very hard to believe, but true. That exceeds communism.
102% income tax rate, people... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomperipossa_in_Monismania
They've been reversing their welfare programs and are rated highly on the economic freedom index.
Taxes are still high to pay for the welfare programs, but as they are reformed I'd assume the government will lower them.
Even so, America once had a 70% income tax, that didn't make us socialist, though it made us economically weak (thanks for the cuts Reagan, you saved us) .
https://fee.org/articles/is-sweden-socialist-no-but/
> Between 1870 and 1950, Sweden had the highest per capita income growth in the world and became one of the richest countries, behind only Switzerland, the U.S., and Denmark.
> In the 1960s, Sweden started to redistribute wealth, which brought wealth creation to a halt.
> By the mid-1990s, the country had growing economic problems because it continued to redistribute wealth it wasn’t creating.
> In 1994, Sweden began implementing the following measures designed to reverse this trend - Reduce Regulation - Reduce Government Spending - Reform their Welfare Programs - Shrink their Government
tldr: socialism is like crack, you only need to try it once and it'll destroy your life/country.
Socialist Yugoslavia saw some political imprisonments, mostly immediately after the war as Tito tried to limit Stalin’s influence in the country. But there was never collectivization leading to famine, never killings on a massive scale. The genocide in the region was only unleashed after the end of the socialist era. And before you want to rant about crushing poverty: Yugoslavs in the 1960s and 1970s lived well enough on average that they were conspicuous among tourists on the Istanbul-Kathmandu trail and Indonesia, and many international brands were sold in Yugoslavia just like in any Western European country.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That destroys the curiosity this site exists for."
- https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I had a lot of genuinely new things to say that I'm sure some people didn't know.
It's impossible to keep politics out of the news... I see political debates here all the time.
I didn't pull this out of my ass to bait people, I genuinely wanted everyone to know why Venezuela is in the situation it's in.
If I would have commented in the root thread I could see your point, but I was replying to the GP's topic.
I'm actually glad I did because some people thought Sweden and Norway are socialist countries...
quips like "But yeah, maybe it hasn't been implemented properly yet /s" are bait.
"I see political debates here all the time." - then flag them, they are against the comment guidelines?
I sincerely was not trying to bait anyone.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
That a central planning economy can be badly and inhumanely run is not, in itself, proof that one cannnot be run well run. It might be the case that it can't, even that it's irresponsible to try; but what you're doing is pointing to mass graves as a kind of emotional reasoning "that is a lot of suffering so don't you dare argue, I win" shutdown tactic.
Marx was not famous for saying "The proletariat are looking a bit porky these days, let's get a dictatorship going, kill all the farmers, starve the proles to death and call it utopia"
When Britain directed India's wheat production to Britain and starved 7 million people, or Churchill diverted Bangladesh's crop production to Greece and 4 million Bangladeshis starved, or Britain bought granaries in Iran (Persia) in the early 1900s and 2 million starved, those weren't local people determining their food supply distribution in a free market; you said in another comment that your definition of Socalism was "the only real definiton, when the government controls the market and no capitalism exists"; by your definition were these micro-instances of Communism?
You're arguing a strawman, and you have a one-word panacea answer:
Capitalism.
A one-word explanaton which covers many countries over many decades with many problems and many atrocities, one thing to blame for all ills and a one-word answer for everything good. That is unlikely to be the best possible understanding.
I've written about how this site handles political overlap here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607844, and there's lots more explanation at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que. If, after taking a look at those links, anyone has a question we haven't addressed, I'd be interested to hear it and happy to answer.
Communism is basically a political syndicate the masquerades as an economic system. Venezuela's oil production has been collapsing for over two decades and much of what remains is basically Chinese/Sinopec owned production that Chavez sold them back in '06 or so in exchange for _loans_ for their social services programs.
According to a friend of mine who was working down there they were flying workers in to work the rigs and flying them home to spend their money.
Having the government run the markets, even when an emergency dictates it, is a process that attracts the corrupt.
These are complicated systems which cannot be reduced just to "Socialism death toll" or "Capitalism death toll".
Simply having a universal healthcare system and high taxes doesn't make you a socialist country if you still have economic freedom in every other industry.
I can't give you a percentage, but if your government is starting to take over many industries, I'd say it's going down the socialist path. Generally inefficiencies in one industry lead the government to take over others to sustain itself.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22749317 and marked it off topic.
Now that I know talking about socialism, and I assume other economic and political ideologies, is against the rules I will report similar occurrences i.e. when people criticize capitalism when it doesn't relate to the topic.
I apologize for any breakage of the rules, I did read them, but I misunderstood.
Low oil prices can delay that cost intersection, but won't prevent it from eventually happening because internal combustion vehicles are more complex and costly to maintain even without taking into account fuel costs. So as long as EV manufacturing costs continue to decline and electricity continues to get cheaper from low cost renewables, ICE vehicles will eventually become obsolete no matter the oil price.
The price is trying to go to a level to force companies to keep the oil in the ground. If it has to go negative to incentivize that behavior, then it will.
Plus much of storage that exists isn't really for storage, but is a needed buffer on the supply line for steady-state infrastructure, like pipelines and refineries. Some amount of empty is required (both practical and by regulation) to absorb surplus, like in the event of an emergency refinery shut down due to fire.
Other cases are for when pipelined supply isn't single product, or is shared by multiple users... Your plant might need 500k bbl/day, but you only get the pipeline every other day at 1000k bbl/day. Or you get different products on different days.
Part of the US strategic oil reserve's purpose is for what's happening right now, and they've been using it to absorb excess capacity for a few weeks, with a few more weeks to go before full. And this is filling entire underground salt domes with oil, at a scale way beyond any manufactured tank capacity.
We'll probably see more tankers and even rail car tankers repurposed for storage, but I don't see anyone justifying the need to build more fixed storage, unless there's some existing/ contributing need for storage that was already permitted and is suddenly cost justified. But even that is at tiny scales compared to the current surplus.
It's just easier and cheaper to start shutting in the more isolated and/or expensive wells. Which is just storing it in the ground, anyway.
And, this is on top of it happening once before 2 years ago. I'm now pocketing over $500 a month that I used to spend on fuel.
Put Texas railroad commission back in charge of oil and gas production to set domestic prices above the cost of production.