Democratic Socialism In Venezuela

That State didn't even exist for the first hundred years of slavery in the US. Slavery came first, wealthy and powerful for a hundred years, and then governmental accommodation.

Nonsense. The plantation owners of the Confederacy, for example, had few such problems. Neither did the slaveowners of the Caribbean and South America - they didn't need a State, and they objected strongly to State interference in their business. Even now slavery is especially common in places with weak States, not strong ones.

Of course even small States will commonly enforce contract and property rights, as circumstance and free market capitalism demands. But the bulk of the actual slave catching in the Americas - even in Brazil, where the wilderness was close at hand and escape much easier than in the US - was handled privately.

That is not what happened even in Brazil, uniquely provided with a wilderness for escapees to hide in, let alone anywhere else. Again - an entire world view completely dependent on you not getting your facts straight.

You are not thinking clearly. Slavery can be entered into "voluntarily", and the circumstances are not that difficult to arrange by the sufficiently wealthy and powerful. In very few cases does slavery require a government - slave owners given a free hand are traditionally quite capable of handling their own contract enforcement etc, and traditionally (as in the US, Brazil, North Africa, Middle East, parts of Asia, etc) favor small government that does not meddle in their free market arrangements.

And the history of Venezuela, including not only slavery but an entire managerie of the common violations of economic fundamentals by the capitalist investors and predatory corporations that dominated the Venezuelan economy for centuries, illustrates that as well as many other lessons of real life economics.

 

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Have any of you big thinkers lived in Venezuela, or any of you have relatives in venezuela

 

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Nope. It's too late, for Sweden (already a non-dump for 150 years - no train is that slow), and too early for Venezuela (already a dump before).

btw: Why do you keep confusing central planning with Democratic Socialism? Is that part of your general all-terms-interchangeable word salad approach to political analysis, or is there some kind of specific confusion about how countries like Sweden set themselves up?

 

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Sweden was a monoculture of hardworking, honest, slightly higher than average IQ people for 150 years. Let's see how they do with multiculturalism. They're already beginning to privatize public pools to keep out 'undesirables' / non-Swedish ethnicity. Nevertheless, let's keep checking in on Sweden. My prediction is they'll end up looking just like the USA, for the exact same reasons. Up to and including welfare ghettos, no-go zones and functional illiteracy rates around 20 - 25%. I predict they'll be privatizing much more than just their public pools while concurrently cutting social benefits.

The question is, why have Sweden and Germany run out of children to sell bonded labor on? Why have so many Citizens, in both of these 'Socialistic' utopias (according to Bernie), inappropriately planned for their economic future such that they cannot afford the benefits they pulled the magic 'democratic' voting lever for? It's as if there's something more to the economy than pulling a magic lever to get free-shit. It's as if goods and services require productive capacity. As if the very people voting for 'free-shit' didn't have the economic information, generally presented in the price mechanism, to make informed decisions about their economic future. Kind of like what the Baby's did to (are doing) GenX and the Millenials (given their size and predilections, this'll be interesting to see play out, once they see what their grandparents did to them).

Welcome to why you have no idea what the price of my coffee cup is and the failure of centralization. The future is here

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The same thing happened in Japan BTW. Luckily for Japanese, the Swedes are going to make an example of themselves. Isn't that nice of them? So that the world can see the folly of 'Democratic' Socialistic Welfare States. What happens when basing the economy on the initiation of violence against morally innocent citizens.

The economic end result of Socialism (Democratic or otherwise) is Venezuela.

Think of it as Karma.

Socialism is only achievable through economic centralization due to the reliance on State violence and coercion. We'll watch as socialism destroys another society. Well, not 'destroy' per say. Change. Change to look like the mess that is the USA. I suppose, if you think the USA is a great place, then destroys isn't the right word, aspires to become maybe? It's all a matter of perspective. Aspires to be our Idiocracy ... lolz

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And for 150 years before that. Only not so prosperous.

I don't think the Japanese are going to learn the lesson you seem to think they should, from an example of 150 years of world leading prosperity that only ran into trouble when it admitted immigrants from non-socialist and undemocratic centers of capitalism and market trade.

Venezuela is beginning, not ending, its trial of Democratic Socialism. If they follow Sweden's path (and it proves as disastrous as predicted by the people who think the US ghettos were recent creations of government charity), they will run out of free shit and see their world leading prosperity collapse back to US poverty levels in about the year 2170.

A lesson to us all.

 

Indeed

Scandinavian Unexceptionalism: Culture, Markets and the Failure of Third-Way Socialism

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Swedish author Nima Sanandaji dispels many of the popular conceptions about the Nordic countries. Scandinavia’s success came before the welfare state, not after it. Between 1936 and 2008, when much of the welfare expansion occurred, Sweden’s growth rate dropped to being the 13th highest out of 28 industrialized countries.

During the decades before, between 1870 and 1936, Sweden had enjoyed the highest economic growth in the entire industrialized world. Moreover, in the most intense period of “third-way” policies of market socialism, between the 1970s and 1990s, Sweden’s economic performance was exceptionally low. This period, however, was an exception: for most of its modern history, Sweden has been anything but a socialist mecca. The government has usually pursued free-market policies and free trade. If anything, high taxes and extensive social policies have hindered Scandinavian economic performance, which would most likely have been much higher without them.

Instead, Sanandaji shows, the root of Scandinavian success can largely be found in culture. These countries, and Sweden in particular, have historically had remarkably high levels of social trust, family values, a strong sense of work ethic, and social cohesion. The notion of the “Protestant work ethic” goes back far longer than the modern welfare state. Scholars like Max Weber, Sanandaji shows, long ago noted that the Protestant countries of northern Europe had an overall higher living standard and economic success than most. The often-celebrated equality of Scandinavian countries, too, began well before the welfare state was developed.

--o--

You'll see.

 

Which did not bring prosperity until the 1870s - beginning with the establishment of a government run central bank, and the consequent amelioration of boom and bust cycle moneylending with its associated poverty and non-development.

Alternative universe hypotheticals are of course interesting to speculate about. Meanwhile, in the world we have, Venezuela would be crazy to turn down the possibility of 150 years of Swedish economic development.

 

Wrong, see linked article for details on your erroneous reasoning.

 

Venezuelan apocalypse: Some updates on the epic failure of socialism in oil-rich Venezuela

Despite having more oil reserves than Saudi Arabia, and in fact more proven oil reserves than any country in the world (8 times more than the US), oil-rich Venezuela’s economy is imploding and collapsing under the burden of socialism, and economic conditions there have deteriorated so dramatically that they probably now qualify as the “economic apocalypse” that some left-leaning economists were predicting just a few years ago would never happen in Venezuela. Some links and updates about Venezuela’s economic apocalypse appear below (a few new items have been added to the original post)

(see linked article for the horrific outcomes of Socialism / State Authoritarianism in Venezuela).


"If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand."
- Milton Friedman

Today, oil-rich Venezuela imports oil.

 

WSJ
What’s Socialism, Dad?
Venezuela provides a lesson to anyone tempted to feel the Bern.

According to the DoED, in America, >20% of the Certified "graduates", with a Government school 'high' school diploma, cannot functionally read or write. This is after 12 YEARS of Government 'education' at roughly 8 hours a day.

To put this in comparison, Japan (which spends LESS than the USA per student) leads the word in both literacy (in four different written alphabets - one that includes a minimum of 2800 Chinese characters) and numeracy (Guardian Article here).


Frederick Douglass an American Slave, during a time when it was illegal to learn to read, paid the working poor kids around his plantation (in his measly food rations) to teach him to read and write. Guess what, even those kids did better than Government School Teachers! How do we know? Because he could read and write with competence!


"If you put the federal government in charge of Education, in 100 years there'll be a functional illiteracy rate of around 20% of the high school graduates."
- Some teacher in the 1800s

But who would believe them? No one. No one could imagine you could give Government Teachers access to so much, everything from printed books, pencils, paper, computers, etc... AND still end up with 1 in 5 graduates unable to read and write in ONE language after 12 years education. Yet here we are. Who'd of thought Venezuela would import oil. Yet here we are.

 

All the oil-based economies are in trouble - except the ones that nationalized their oil production from the beginning, and even a couple of them.

Venezuela's economic problems date back to the initial discovery of oil and its capitalist, corporate exploitation - long before Venezuela became even slightly socialistic, let alone recently when Chavez came along. From Wiki, in standard neutral description:

Venezuela's current major problem is a severe drought, that has revealed their dependence on hydropower to be vulnerable in ways their former rightwing dictatorships and corporate friendly administrations, or the bankers and contractors who got paid to install it, never envisioned: http://www.businessinsider.com/the-...a-look-at-whats-happening-now-in-china-2011-6

So US city and town and State schools don't work, but everybody else's National Government run schools do. Your point?

Maybe that's why the US never put its Federal Government in charge of education - still hasn't, even with the examples of all those excellent National Government run schools all over the planet.

But I doubt it. Because I don't believe any teacher in the 1800s said that.

Any more than I believe the recent consequences of Venezuela's centuries of violence and trouble, or the consequences of its being targeted by global capitalism before WWI and ever since, were brought about by Hugo Chavez starting in 2002.

 

I already made this point a millions times. When you live in a monoculture of honest hard working people, Government generally aligns with what those people would have chosen to support in a free-market. You can take Japanese schooling and pluck it down into a monocultureal area of Pakistan or multicultreal USA, you're not going to get the same outcomes as in Japan. What works in one place, works in that place, because of the people living in that place - and the way in which they think. Which is why you'll find Pakistani burrows around London, where people live and believe similarly to the way they would have in Pakistan. Even to the point of wearing a burka. Transplanting them into London doesn't magically change them into the English.

What works best for us is private competing goods and services. As a matter of fact, it works BETTER than Japan. Sadly, instead of free-market choice, we have DoED Centrally Planned Government-run 'education'. Which, admittedly, is probably doing what it was designed to do: produce compliant nearly-illiterate labor-cogs that will raise their hands to ask permission to go pee. You know, because excusing yourself to go to the bathroom without permission is crazy thinking.

So, it seems the DoED is getting that much right.

 

National Government schooling works in multicultural Switzerland, and France, and Denmark, and a bunch of other places where they have multiple languages and religions and what-all. All over Europe, actually.

But town and city and State government schools don't work in monocultural areas in the US. Says you, anyway.

And they don't work in monocultural areas of South and Central America, Mexico, etc.

So what gives?

Private competition only works well in free market exchange. You can't educate the children of lower economic classes that way, because you can't set up a free market exchange - education is too expensive, the recipient is not paying for the service, the benefits accrue to others outside the exchange, the service cannot be evaluated by most of the buyers, etc.

No we don't. We don't even have a national curriculum, or national standards for teachers, in the government schools. And we have private schools all over the place - especially in the white neighborhoods of the Confederacy.

 

The idea that all should go to college, is both making huge debts and inferior schools. In many Europeancountries they have some sort of qualifying exam that high school graduates take to see if they are intelligent (may not be the right word) enough to go to college.


Sunday was the first day of China's two day long Goakoa exam. Don't pass it and you don't go to university*, but to trade school. US badly needs something like that to stem the "grade inflation" and degrading of college eduction standards.

* Even if you pass it which university you can go to is fixed by it. Better than 99% of the others taking it and passing, is required for entrance to China's top universities. Only 7 of the every 9 taking the exam will be able to get into ANY Chinese university. Money, recommendation letters, etc. don't matter. ONLY the GaoKao results do. It is very tightly policed, even drones flying over head watch for cheating.

 

Via Forbes: Venezuelan People Feel The 'Bern' As Real Socialism Destroys Their Country

It should be noted here, Bernie "I endorse Hillary Clinton for POTUS" Sanders, who's made a living as a Statist peddleing 'Democratic' Socialism (who, incidentally, lied when he called Hugo Chavez a Communist Dictator - Chavez was elected through popular election three times (the "Democratic" part of B.Sanders 'Socialism' / State Authoritarianism) - you know, because: Free-Shit.

The State is in the process of instituting human Slavery (Via the National Review: Venezuela Reaches the End of the Road to Serfdom).

Violence is always at the end of the socialist enterprise, as the poor people of Venezuela are discovering. Our friends on the Left assured us for many years that Boss Hugo and his epigones in the regime of Nicolás Maduro were democratic socialists, not the mean Stalinist type, and the praises of that so-called democratic-socialist regime were sung by everyone from Democratic congressmen such as Chaka Fattah of Philadelphia to progressive celebrities such as Sean Penn. The democratic socialists in Venezuela have just introduced slavery into their workers’ paradise.

The food shortage is especially severe right now, so the Maduro government has just passed a decree empowering itself to conscript workers — public-sector or private — into the state’s collectively run farming, food-processing, and food-distribution businesses. The pattern here will be familiar to those familiar with the history of socialism in Russia and China.

--o--

But hey, that's okay. Why? Because it's FREE. You know, like our K-12 (soon to be K-14 Government owned and Government run Government Schools). Or our FREE Government owned and run "Welfare Estates" / Ghettos. Or our soon to be FREE Government owned and run "Healthcare".

Gee? Who'd of thunk it?

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Note 2: Nice to know Ron Paul NEVER endorsed the GOP candidate. Of course, what would that racist liber-Tard know? I mean, come on, feeeeeeel THE BERN: Free-Shit.

 

Sanders never endorsed the GOP candidate either. And Sanders - unlike Ron Paul - is doing what he can to prevent the election of the GOP candidate.

In this lies the expectation that the US will not go the way of the charismatic strongman, centralized economic control, track to ruin.

 

No, he just spent a year arguing for why Hillary Clinton was unfit to be POTUS - and then endorsed her. You know, because B.Sanders is consistent. At least as a politician. He'll say whatever he has to say, to get elected. For the most part he plays off people's jealousy. Well, thanks to people just like Sanders, Venezuelan children are dying of starvation - in a manner really no different to the way in which Chinese socialists starved 30 million Chinese to death, or Russian Socialists starved their populations - thanks to Socialism, the average American reads at Grade 6 level, and the average North Korean fails to reach their full physical potential in terms of height.

Yaay Socialism, because you know, one time, once a hundred years ago, someone got rich scamming someone else. F*cking Steve Jobs - the arse hole. He should Pay His Fair Share! He uses The Roads..... the jerk!!!


Don't worry iceaura, someday in the future we'll get our Hugo The "Democratic Socialist", we'll call him: Redistributor The Great. Between bouts of religious euphoria where Statists / Nationalists wreath on the ground in front of the Holy Capital, we'll spend our time doing our part 'educating' the next generation to love the flag and support Dear Leader for the "Good of Society".

 

Hey, look here, some iconic imagery from the Age of Progressive Socialism: Government Schools, getting one thing right, for well over 100 years.

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At some point the sheer childishness of your posting becomes its dominant feature.

Did it cross your mind, in the middle of typing that, that Sanders is not saying anything to get elected any more? Or that his objections to Clinton's ideology and past record had nothing to do with jealousy? Or that this campaign is not taking place on the playground of your childhood traumas?

If they learned the difference between Socialism and Fascism, they're one up on you to this day. If they learned what "Progressive" means, they're two up.

If they learned some basic statistics - such as why this from your post above

means the opposite of what you think it means, they're three up.