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Comment by wmil | Hacker News Reader

The fundamental issue is fairly simple. Chavez was pushing a sort of ethnic nationalism for the mestizo majority. But his supporters just didn't have the technical skills to run an advanced economy.

Instead of trying to fix that his government kept appointing people with degrees in Marxist Studies. Bad decisions were chronically made and the country decayed.

The infrastructure will continue to decay unless the voters find technocrats they trust. Eventually buildings are going to start collapsing.

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>Chavez was pushing a sort of ethnic nationalism for the mestizo majority. But his supporters just didn't have the technical skills to run an advanced economy.

It has nothing to do with skills. Chavismo is a fundamentally broken agenda. Socialism (the real deal, not capitalist welfare states) does not work. Nationalizing industries does not work. Price controls do not work. Central planning does not work. The most skilled leader in the world couldn't make this program work.

And no discussion of this monster is complete without mentioning the political prisoners, extrajudicial killings, and pro-government militias spreading terror just like the Brown Shirts. And look at the company they keep. Iran, Cuba, North Korea, Russia, China, and the various Chavez-imitators in Latin America.

Chavez was an evil man.

Central planning clearly works fairly well internally for millions of corporations around the world (see: Theory of the firm, http://www.economist.com/node/17730360). It will never be so simple as "privatize everything for best results".

I wish the discussion here would elevate beyond this libertarian propaganda level.

I've heard it said that central planning in the Soviet Union would have worked with modern communication and information management systems. But on the other hand, planning for one corporation is far simpler than planning for an entire economy.

A big part of the problem is always corruption. But can machines plan for an entire economy?

True. Doing favors for money/gifts is standard in much of the world.

While people live under one government, there are millions of corporations. For every successful corporation, many more have gone out of business. Many of the successful ones today will be dead within a decade. When a corporation's governance structure doesn't work, it dies and frees up resources for other endeavors.

Central planning has worked well for exactly zero countries around the world.

> When a corporation's governance structure doesn't work, it dies and frees up resources for other endeavors.

Yeah, sure. As if we didn't have "too big to fail" in the last years. Maybe a history book could refresh your memory.

> Central planning clearly works fairly well internally for millions of corporations

Can you describe the difference between leaving a broken corporation (as a consumer or employee) and leaving a broken nation state?

I'm not an economist, but governments usually have what is called "monopoly on the physical means of coercion", there's geographic limits on human movement that are much reduced for capital, and governments are more likely than not "too big to fail", a status only few corporations achieve.

My point is not to advocate central planning, I'm a big fan of markets. I just think some defenses of them are very disingenuous and poorly thought-out.

I'd be curious to see how something like private defense agencies [1] would work out in practice.

[1]: http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Libertarian/Machinery_of_Freed...

Corporations have pretty excellent feedback in the form of profits that result from voluntary transactions with customers. The success of a state is measured in many ways, many of which are disagreed upon and/or take decades to measure. On top of that, no one interacts voluntarily with a centrally planned state in the sense that if the state supplies all of something that is necessary, people will buy it, regardless of the government's prowess in delivering the goods. A corporation will quickly go out of business or change tack if it can't sell goods profitably. I'd say to make your analogy work better we'd have to have central planning where citizens can opt out pretty easily and that opting out causes the government to actually change.

Large companies resemble governments in some ways since they have people not directly connected to 'market validation' mechanism: administrators, bureaucrats, people dedicated to keeping thing going etc. Internally, the larger a company is, the more it begins to look state-like and socialistic.

Corporations themselves are also in practice intimately intertwined with government. They depend directly or indirectly on procurement, but also the legal system. The more complex regulations, the bigger the economy of scales a corporation can use. There are also specific laws that make competition illegal in some fields like telcos and friendly tax regimes for big players only.

You may note corporations are the biggest defenders of free markets when it suits them, then quickly turn the page when they require some special subsidies, bail-outs or laws to hobble their competition.

Corporations generally do not have the ability or perceived authority to absolutely determine and enforce rules in a geographic area, which is one of the defining characteristics of government and a primary reason that central planning tends to not work with governments.

> Socialism (the real deal, not capitalist welfare states) does not work. Nationalizing industries does not work. Price controls do not work. Central planning does not work. The most skilled leader in the world couldn't make this program work.

Socialism is not nationalization of industries, price controls and central planning. What you describe is a very specific form of authoritarian socialism which people (as in masses, not individuals) only seek in deep desperation.

Actual socialism, as in workers control of the means of production, ie. workers owning and managing their own workplaces, does not require centralized power.

Chavez was more like the poison pill or the neck around the rope. The next question is how did Venezuela drove itself to a point where people elected him?

They had a lot of money from oil, almost no taxes (or no taxes at all??), and still had a larger poverty rate that similar but oil-less countries of South America (that still had its own issues such as corruption, terrorism and drugs)

Nobody wants to go that far back in history and ask the questions you are asking because if they did they would not be able to arrive to the same conclusion about whatever it is they deem socialism.

Well... He did make a few coup d'ètats precipitating a period of uncertainty which exacerbated a deteriorating economy, dissent and fomenting division, a string of ineffective leaders and voila, the "commandant" to the rescue!

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