Venezuela Declares Every Friday a Holiday to Save Electricity
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
They need to just start charging more for electricity. There will be less waste for sure. If people still use a lot and pay more, it means they need it and the money goes to building power generation. Very, very basic capitalism.
This isn't about socialism. This is about what is a dictatorship in all but name.
Socialism is the workers controlling the means of production, not anything deemed vaguely left wing by American standards.
I'd also re-examine the degree to which our representative democracies centralise power.
In most countries in Europe, for example, it's nearly impossible to start a company without lots of capital. This is because of the crippling amount of taxes and restrictions, which results in an economy comprising of near government and big corporation monopolies. You can see this in most of the nordic countries.
The problem with going the socialism route is that the system will need to take more and more income as new generations completely rely on it. At some point, you don't have enough money to fund it, and it collapses.
With the ability for any company to move to any country, there is also the real possibility that companies will just go elsewhere.
http://www.amazon.com/Why-Not-Capitalism-Jason-Brennan/dp/04...
http://www.amazon.com/Why-Not-Socialism-G-Cohen/dp/069114361...
Along with the usual social programs they use a very decentralized goverment and are or were thinking of a guaranteed basic income.
The term socialism has no clear meaning, and trying to group failures together is just as unhelpful as trying to group successes.
The key is to find a balance. Europe has had some success with socialising things that make moral sense (e.g. healthcare) while leaving everything else to the private industry. That's still socialism, it just isn't absolute socialism.
Even China is experimenting with the levels of socialism they want. They've been moving towards a more capitalist-style market and they've found a more workable balance.
Socialism is a dirty word in the US, but is a complex word everywhere else. Hopefully with a self-proclaimed "democratic socialist" running for your highest office we'll see people's understanding of socialism expand.
That's an exaggeration. Serious countries (France, Germany, even the US) employ "socialist" industrial policies in sectors that have nothing to do with morality (aviation, defense, tech research etc). Countries that don't do it at all are extremely rare in this day and age and usually don't end up well.
I agree with your overall point though.
I don't know where tech research is socialised. Government pay for it all over the world, sometimes in-house, sometimes externally, but I've never heard of a country banning tech research unless it is government ran.
http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Columns/2016/01/26/Bernie-Sand...
Heck, in the US, the government accounts for over 40% of GDP, and a higher figure than Venezuela...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_spending
Yes, some states run socialism worse than others. And some states run capitalism worse than others. Characterizing some states as 'socialist' but not ours (which does contain some socialist elements) isn't useful, because it's not always accurate.
I have a hard time calling the US' spending efficient (mostly military) so I think it's more complex than that we're doing socialism 'well'. But the US hasn't fallen apart yet. If both countries are doing it so badly with such a large part of our revenue, why are they failing? Maybe it's less about waste and more about making sure you don't screw up specific critical industries? The situation with California's cheap water even as they're running out is quite a bit like Venezuela's power. Why are we not rocked by such things more often? I'll have to think about this.
Venezuela's economy after the revolution wasn't really a great example of a 'planned' economy. More like:
1) Nationalize oil companies
2) Give free shit to all the people who they promised free shit to
3) Profit?
There's doesn't seem to have been a real direction, no attempt at developing the economy, just Zimbabwe-style redistribution.
At least in the case of the US, the 'waste' generally finds its way into the US economy (through the military industrial complex, the prison system, subsidies to farmers, etc..)
Here's Noam Chomsky talking about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfdnbMd9BiE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsC0q3CO6lM
Many socialists are critical of Leninist style socialism because it's not representative of socialism and it tarnishes the name.
This the economics equivalent of a spherical cow [1].
I'm not naive enough to assert that socialism is a big bad evil straight out of the cold war.
At least it states the reason why in the first paragraph: hydro-generation is at risk because of a prolonged drought.
The chief reasons are artificially low pricing (it's almost free, so people have no incentive to conserve power, and the utilities are starved of funds for maintenance) and poor administration (this has been a long time coming -- brown outs and black outs have been endemic for some time).
They are simply running the country into the ground thru mismanagement and negligence.
The option to let things happen (by removing regulation / price-controls, etc), or for scrapping and starting fresh appear to never be on the table in any meaningful respect.
It's like they try to run the country on ideals alone and that ideals will carry the day.
We're not a basket case economy in any stretch of the imagination. Compare and contrast.
That's all it is, tbh, without resorting to hyperbole. This happens even in capitalist economies -- companies have little incentive for maintenance at the best of times.
IMHO, when 40% of energy for the whole country is provided by one single plant (regardless of plant type), things will go wrong at some point. To overcome a situation like that you need money and vision to build a redundant system. Clearly the Venezuelan government lacked them.
Have you actually looked at the maintenance budget of US utility companies?
We all need to view our natural resources as a fixed and limited asset, to be used to boost ourselves up to sustainable energy production methods. But that is not politically expedient.
If they have good credit, which Venezuela doesn't.
The country is communist, so the government has direct control over prices, and of course set them this low because it was politically expedient, not because it was sane.
That' cannot be emphasized enough. This isn't the type of oil coming out of Texas or ND. It requires more money, infrastructure, and expertise to refine properly. Canada has this problem with the oil sands, but they have all three to deal with it.
When I consulted up there, most of the reliability engineering organizations were Venezuelans. Canada should send Venezuela a big thank you card for the amazing people they got due to Chavez driving out professionals.
Eventually they ran out of other people's money. While not the fault of socialist policies no government ever really executes them because those in power still see themselves above the people and refuse to live under the same conditions.
This is not a socialism issue, any government run by the corrupt can end up here. It is more a failed form of fascism which also occurs in the US
If the price of oil extraction in Venezuela for a barrel is 60 dollars and the market price is 40(the price in Saudi Arabia is very low), you have a serious problem.
You will even have to LOOSE money in order to sustain a regular extraction, hoping the price returns to higher levels.
If you stop production, sometimes it is very expensive to restart it again, as geological forces over time close the things that you open, so you need to maintain some activity.