>>People in US clamoring for leftist populism should take deep look at Venezuela.
I don't see a reason to bring your political leanings into a discussion of straightforward economic cause and effects.
I think it's easier to metabolize the political dimension to the story when you think of "populist/leftism" as something outside of simple "populism" or "leftism". There are plenty of left-leaning thinkers who do not believe you can print money to solve any economic crisis.
Can you source any of this without linking to an "Objectivism"-associated organization?
Besides, if you twist policies and ideologies enough, you can get anything to justify anything. You can find justifications for guaranteed income from socialist and libertarian perspectives, for example.
I'd classify that as "rooted in ideology", but I'll also agree to a large side dish of "mismanagement".
Look at Norway for instance - they've stashed a lot of their oil money in a fund for the future, rather than piss it away.
Venezuela was a terribly run place, whatever sort of economic theories the leadership espoused. Lots of stuff went on that would not have been acceptable in a country with a stronger democracy and a high regard for the rule of law.
It's about management not money or resources.
So, there are elements, like demographics, stability and geographical and geo-political issues casting bigger shadow than we think.
Dubai is 70% non-citizens, and majority from India.
Look at how Chavez took over the oil company, and generally treated businesses.
Sweden, for instance, may have high taxation, but it is applied fairly, and businesses are not considered 'the enemy'. Property rights exist and are taken seriously.
I'm actually a somewhat left-leaning person, but never found Venezuela to be a very compelling example, to be honest.
They are also rigged in my country, but it is a bit more obvious there.
The funny thing is that Norway's system was designed by an Iraqi immigrant engineer.
That policy has been tried across he political spectrum and it's pretty much always ended in tears.
>Look at Norway for instance
Norway wasn't suffering from a massive level of poverty. When Chavez took over, Venezuela was and he cut it significantly. That's what he "pissed" the money away on.
http://reason.com/blog/2015/01/20/venezuelan-fuel-subsidies-... (first link I found, but you can find other less ideological sources as well. I'm not in the reason.com camp, myself).
I'm sure they've done a few good things too, but I think the bad has mostly outweighed the good.
Cheap gasoline is the least of their problems. That is one thing they do have enough of to go around.
>I'm sure they've done a few good things too, but I think the bad has mostly outweighed the good.
Yeah like cutting the poverty rate in half. Something that apparently stops being laudable once the middle classes have to queue for toilet paper.
I saw somewhere (the original article or a comment, I forget which) that people are limited to buying one chicken a week. That's not good... unless you couldn't buy any before, in which case it's a massive step up. Would getting that much protein in your diet (that you never could get before) be worth being unable to get toilet paper (that you also probably couldn't afford before)?
But I'm on your side of this one, because it turned out that chauvismo didn't deliver enough gain to enough people. It promised utopia, but delivered much less, even to the poor, at the price of destroying the economy. But don't minimize the value of what it delivered to the poorest of the poor.
There are much more significant criticisms of Chavez than that, but these are the ones germane to the immediate article.
Whatever you might think about his overt political objectives, it didn't work: there are long lines for toilet paper, and even the lines are now rationed.
Yeah, he nationalized the oil industry and redirected that stream of revenues to poverty reduction programs.
The US establishment was vehemently pissed at this audacity which is why they supported the coup to oust a (whisper it) democratically elected president and also wrote lots of angry articles about him, some of which you apparently read...
>handed control and management of that industry over to political allies who mismanaged it badly
The US oil companies who were carting the vast majority of Venezuela's national wealth out of the country prior to nationalization probably did have a more efficient set up, yes.
>Whatever you might think about his overt political objectives, it didn't work
What part of cutting poverty in half - his overt political objective - was such an abject failure?
What's especially insidious about this logic is the fact that poor people in Venezuela have no international voice; if you're hearing complaints, they must be from the relatively well-off. That much is probably true, but look how that logic works to support the ineffective government of Venezuela: the well-off aren't complaining that it's too hard to buy BMW sedans. They're complaining that they can't fucking buy toilet paper. You think that means the poor people can? Or, what, food and toilet paper are bourgeois concerns?
Are you disputing that poverty rates were cut in half or are you claiming that this is irrelevant because there are queues for toilet paper and TVs?
>What's especially insidious about this logic is the fact that poor people in Venezuela have no international voice; if you're hearing complaints, they must be from the relatively well-off.
I've been to Venezuela and I have met the rich, the middle class and the poor. I'm pretty clear about aware of what each group complains about and why.
It's not any real secret that the (often very violent) protests in Caracas are usually confined to the wealthy white neighborhoods, nor is it any secret that the very poor formed the bulk of Chavez's base (they adored him).
>That much is probably true, but look how that logic works to support the ineffective government of Venezuela: the well-off aren't complaining that it's too hard to buy BMW sedans. They're complaining that they can't fucking buy toilet paper. You think that means the poor people can?
I think that if you think queuing for toilet paper is the apex of poverty then you have no clue what true poverty really is.
>Or, what, food and toilet paper are bourgeois concerns?
Food and medical care is easier to come by these days for the very poor (what on earth did you think I meant by cut poverty in half?).
That's assuredly not a "bourgeois concern" although the obsession with removing price controls in order to eliminate queues most certainly is.
Really? Can't you really step out a little and try to think why oil represents 95% of Venezuela's export earnings? Are you really sure that pointing the cause of Venezuela's collapse on leftist policies is just a fruit of "policial leanings"? Is there anything you would you consider as reasonable argument against "leftist populism"?
Yes, and it has nothing to do with leftist populism (just as the dominance of oil among Saudi Arabia's exports has nothing to do with leftist populism, and the dominance of copper among Chile's exports -- which is true now, and was under both the Allende and Pinochet regimes in the past -- has nothing to do with leftist populism.)
There have been whole shelves of books written on how the dominant international trade regime locks countries whose existing comparative advantage is in extractive industries to those sources of income in international trade and makes it difficult for most of them to successfully diversify; this problem is independent of whether the local government is left- or right-leaning, and whether it is populist or not.
> Are you really sure that pointing the cause of Venezuela's collapse on leftist policies is just a fruit of "policial leanings"?
Pointing with significant evidence to specific effects of specific policies might not be, blaming it generically on leftism or leftist populism is, OTOH, a different story.
So asking for an argument against "leftist populism" is a waste of everyone's time because nobody will agree on what those words mean, they'll all talk past each other, and it's missing 99% of the interesting things to discuss about Venezuela as compared to other countries.
Similarly, Ecuador is pretty leftist. It just has a substantially better run economy.
The Saudis realise that setting a high price allows for artifically high shale investment which would eventually disenfranchise the Saudis. They rather take some pain now than sponsor their own demise.
There is more than that. In 90's when the Venezuelan crude was as low as $11 per barrel, the business was still profitable. Now with a price $20 per barrel it is dangerously close to the price of production (when you include refinement which is not an option for Venezuelan oil), so it is not just because the market bump, but also for being inefficient in the business.
>I don't see a reason to bring your political leanings into a discussion of straightforward economic cause and effects.
Because it is relevant, it is not only because economic causes but also because the government policies made this situation particularly terrible. Should Venezuela had better economical policies this would has been just a mere crisis and not a bankrupt scenario.
That means, when they were going well, they shouldn't be boasting the "Leftist" government and so, right?
But what did we see? they and their leftist supporters kept on chanting "Chavez, Chavez" and "Left, Left". Did they ever consider the so "straightforward" economics then??
Because political leanings are leading to economic policy decisions.