
Venezuela Is Collapsing. Could a civil war be next? - smacktoward
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/interrogation/2017/08/venezuela_is_collapsing_and_no_one_seems_to_care.html
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crdoconnor
>For Venezuelans who remember ’89, the party system was the enemy, and Chávez
was the hero, because things got better under him first of all. The price of
oil went up. He started opening free clinics, and primary education, and
universal health care, and subsidized food, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera,
but he acted as if there was enough money to sustain all this.

In fairness, he acted as if Venezuela wasn't going to become the bystander in
a proxy fight between Saudi Arabia and US shale oil & renewable energy.

Venezuelan exports have always been largely oil based so whomever was in
power, the plunge in oil price was going to cause disaster and a crisis of
legitimacy.

~~~
troisx
I'd say that Chavez and his family doing more to enrich themselves than plan
for the country's future when oil prices inevitably dropped played a large
part.

~~~
jim-jim-jim
You can say what you want. Doesn't change the fact that Chavez helped bring
many of Venezuela's poor towards something approaching a dignified standard of
living.

~~~
gozur88
Sure, by stealing money from the people who have it and giving it to poor
people, for a short time you make the lot of the poor better.

Now where there were few jobs there are none, and crime has gone from a big
problem to a terrible problem. Soon there will be war.

These are not policies that benefit the poor.

~~~
jim-jim-jim
Capitalism is theft. It's mathematically impossible for the holder of capital
to generate profit if he pays workers wages equal to the value their labor
produces. Somebody has to be shortchanged somewhere along the line. The rich
in Venezuela should be thankful they only have to deal with mild social
democratic wealth redistribution policies.

~~~
apk-d
Everything _except_ capitalism is theft. In a free market every good exchange
is voluntary - made because both parties have decided they're slightly better
off with it (else, they wouldn't participate). Therefore, everything _but_ a
free market implies deals that are non-voluntary for at least one of the
parties.

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stmfreak
> The myth in Venezuela is that there’s enough oil revenues there to support
> whatever government is in power and whatever that government wants to do.

This is the myth of Socialism: that there is enough money to support whatever
the people require to permit the government to do whatever it wants to do.

~~~
ivcha
What are you talking about? What myth? There is no myth whatsoever. As the
previous comment noted, the plunge in oil price was going to cause disaster
and a crisis of legitimacy, regardless of who was in power. Please stop making
such senseless, irresponsible, and even downright dangerous connections.

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giantwolf2017
An entire article that sidesteps the fact that yet another socialist country
has failed.

"We will end poverty as we know it"

Nope, sorry....... try again.

~~~
secstate
In all fairness, the corrupting influence of big money interests from
federalist countries does not help here. One can hardly argue that socialist
reformers in Central America were the reason those governments failed.
Political assassinations driven by the policies of capitalist nations caused
those instabilities.

Not trying to argue that Chavez and now Maduro are not demagogues, but let's
not throw the baby out with the bath water here. No one ever said pure
socialism worked, just like pure capitalism is a pipe dream. The world catches
it's breath when moderates of both sides of the spectrum are in power.

~~~
bassman9000
Yet another _but it wasn 't socialism_ episode. Nationalization of strategic
sectors and currency manipulation had nothing to do I guess.

~~~
secstate
No, it's not that simple. Scandinavia has had a pretty good run with
socialism. But Norway does the old college-educated trick of investing 10% of
it's oil income. And Sweden has a much more diversified economy. In South and
Central America, what we have are dirt poor countries with enormous export
income. For sixty years the wealthy of these countries have been siphoning off
the export income to make themselves rich at the expense of everyone else.
When a charismatic demagogue steps up and offers to make you feel as rich as
the countries export bank account suggests you should be, what are you
supposed to do? Politely decline and tell them to invest in infrastructure and
a rainy day fund?

Socialism in the extreme is a hazard to stable government. But so is
capitalism, federalism, militarism, and any other -ism.

~~~
mc32
Brazil has a wealth of resources --unbelievable, more than Mexico perh but yet
they continue to do worse than middling -socialists didn't improve Brazil one
bit despite being in power over two decades.

They should look to Chile. A can do country. One which almost went socialist
but avoided it and came out doing pretty well for itself.

The problem with those counties is that the whether they go communist or
socialist or any dictatorship is that the caudilo mentality permeates
everything. Same behavior in the Caucasus region. Mexico has been ravaged by
this mentality --their economy was pretty much on par with European countries
outside the big five in the early 1900s --but caudiloes happened.

~~~
secstate
Chile is ruled by their socialist party at the moment. The originator of the
modern Chilean Socialist Party, Lagos, actually took the traditional Marxist
socialist platform and moderated it to much success. Turns out moderation and
not a black and white _this OR that_ platform is more resilient. Who knew?

~~~
mc32
I think it's helped they are all pretty much centrists who favor free
enterprise and don't go about nationalizing domestic or foreign companies
--and don't engage in typical caudilo practices much of the southern cone
suffers from. Bachelet resisted calls from her coalition to "redistribute"
moneys from their copper mining ops to close income differences --something a
certain bolivian would do no question for a little income "high" today.

