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Comment by mc32 | Hacker News Reader

What an utter and complete disaster. More socialist government control is not the answer to this unmitigated managerial disaster. They need to recognize that they will have to let go of command and control of the economy and private property and let the people who know how to run businesses run their businesses. Further nationalization and confiscation will not improve things.

It's a country with enviable natural resources. It's not like they don't have arable land or suffer from prolonged droughts and they did not suffer a civil war recently but they do suffer from government hubris and an economic death spiral. Complete national economic mismanagement.

One can only hope the country does not fundamentally collapse and people try to escape at any cost. It's not like Brazil is economically up to absorbing the exodus.

Of course, this will be blamed on the imperialist gringos and the failure of their "socialist" policies will not be recognized.

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A three year drought actually:

>There has been little rain in Venezuela in the past three years, and a crippling deficit last year in particular—a predictable effect of El Niño, the global climate cycle that periodically warms parts of the Pacific Ocean, causing deluges in Texas and Florida, warm weather in eastern Canada, and desiccation in Indonesia and parts of Latin America. As a result, the water behind Venezuela’s dams, which supply around two-thirds of the country’s electricity, is at a historic low. At the Guri Dam, the nation’s largest hydropower facility, the water is reportedly within five metres of dead pool. At this low level, the worry is that air will get into the dam’s inner workings along with the water, producing vibrations in the metal turbine blades that can rattle the structure to death. If Venezuela’s reservoirs run dry and its dams stop working, its grid will, too.

http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/the-electricity-crisi...

While the drought is not helping, there's no reason the country with the largest oil reserves in the world should have to shut down their economy in a drought; other counties have backup oil plants.

Mismanagement is why oil production drops every year and there is no refining capacity.

The US regularly has droughts, floods, fires, a freeze killing all the oranges, all sorts of natural disasters. Yet it doesn't do much more than ripple the food prices, because the market just routes around the problems.

We're also really large. So those flood and fires only take out a certain portion of our agricultural output at any given time.

Socialism is orthogonal to command and control economics, private property rights, and corruption. There are just as many countries that do it right as do it wrong (same with capitalism). Let's be honest with the root cause: populism, corruption, resource curse, nepotism, military appeasement all play a role in this much much more than socialism.

The two major problems right now are price controls and seizure of private property by the government. Price controls cause shortages, and if anyone does manage to bring good to market, the government seizes them.

It doesn't matter if Ghengis Khan becomes the leader of Venezuela.....if he fixes those two things, the economy will rebound quickly.

Cause and effect.

Cause: corruption, populist uneducated leader, need to satisfy constituents without making any hard choices.

Effect: price controls, private property seizure.

When it comes down to it, the same thing isn't happening in Sweden or Norway.

But Sweden isn't nationalizing/socializing all aspects of the economy nor controlling monetary exchange rates nor demonizing businesspeople as tools of the gringos, etc.

> But Sweden isn't nationalizing/socializing all aspects of the economy nor controlling monetary exchange rates nor demonizing businesspeople as tools of the gringos, etc.

Exactly, so you get what I'm saying?

Yup, they're not that kind of socialists. They're "socialists". Which is to say capitalists with Nordic values.

Ya, the word is kind of arbitrary and meaningless. Does 67% state owned Statoil make Norway socialist? Does universal health care make a country socialist? Do high taxes on the rich make a country socialist?

Venezuela isn't even a self proclaimed socialist country, let alone one without capitalism. All of its dysfunctions are fairly basic...it looks a lot like what happened in Zimbabwe.

I'm sorry, did Norway just yank the oil company from its owners and just take it without compensation? Do they continuously assign any bad news the doings of Americans and the traitors among them who sympathize with Americans?

Zimbabwe has a tortured history with lots of corruption, colonialism, despotism, nepotism, racism, ethnicism etc. The economic system is the least of its problems.

PS who di Venezuela associate with if not Cuba, Bolivia, Ecuador, etc? That should tell you their implicit leanings (if not their explicit rhetoric).

Even if a socialist country yanked a private company away from its owner, it would be "theft", nationalization without compensation is not a core socialist tenant.

> Do they continuously assign any bad news the doings of Americans and the traitors among them who sympathize with Americans?

Again, not something defining or unique to socialism.

> Zimbabwe has a tortured history with lots of corruption, colonialism, despotism, nepotism, racism, ethnicism etc. The economic system is the least of its problems.

Zimbabwe is far from Somalia. Yes, economic system issues were one of their primary problems, arising from problems like corruption, colonialism, etc...:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_Zimbabwe

Yet, Lots of socialist countries nationalize companies or resources without compensation or at ridiculous fractions of value.

A fever in and of itself does not tell you the malady affecting someone, taken in conjunction with other symptoms the individual symptoms inform the cause. Same with nationalization and or price controls, blaming gringos, etc.

> "Do they continuously assign any bad news the doings of Americans and the traitors among them who sympathize with Americans?"

So, by that line of though, most muslim countries in the Middle East are Socialist.

None of those things define socialism any more than forcing the poor to work 16-hour days in deadly factories defines capitalism.

Socialsit have been using this excuse forever. Its never "real" socialism. Nationalising everything is socialism. It has been a major aspect of socialist thought for a very long time.

True, there are other strands of socialsit thought but usually all countries that become socialist try to do command and control and not anarcho syndicalism or something like that.

So maybe go back and inform yourself about the history of socialist tought.

Also stop trying to sell Sweden as Socialist. Those countries are normal capitalist wellfare states, just like France, Germany or any other western state.

Wait...what is your list of socialist countries? You don't include the Nordic model countries of Sweden, Norway, Denmark? Or governments with socialist aspects (Japan, Australia, etc...too many count). Thankfully, Wikipedia maintains a list:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_socialist_states

Venezuela doesn't even make the list since they aren't "officially" socialist (only four countries are, Laos, Vietnam, Cuba, China). So what is your criteria then? What is a socialist state? Is it just anything that nickik declares as socialist? Zimbabwe had price controls and they practiced land redistribution as well as nationalization. Would you try to spin them as socialist? Or just really corrupt?

First of all, anybody can edit wikipedia and on issues like what definitions of words to use its extremely difficult to coordinate. So using wikipedia as a source of authority is actually no very useful. Their are to many definitions and often people with a particular opinion edit, then other people who disagree edit it again.

One of the main issues is that their is the divide between countries that call them selfs socialist, and countries who are attempting a socialist model. Just as we understand that the "Democratic People's Republic of Korea" of North Korea is not actually a democratic or a Republic.

I define purely by economics system. So that means that North Korea actually has a socialist system but they no longer claim to be communist. China in turn calls itself socialist but their economic system has moved pretty far in the last 20 years (China is somewhat special because their are huge internal divides between special economic zones and some of other parts).

So I think that truly socialist in terms of economic policy, you basically only have North Korea and Cuba (Cuba could be different now, Im not very up to date). Venezuela never really went to the end but they certainly when pretty far. I don't know enough about Lao or Vietnam to make an educated comment about their economic policy.

For me a socialist government is one that is actively trying to get full control over the means of production. The more a government tries to attempted this, the more socialist they are. Lenin and co in 1917-1921 probably had the 'best' run. Within a very short time they nationalist banks, all major industry, all export, transportation and many others. The only thing they really failed to nationalise is the farmland because it was to difficult. It took Stalin to do that in 1928.

The definition of socialism as 'worker owned means of production' has been interpreted as 'means of production owned by a worker lead party' from a very early time. The follower of this definition have been by far the most successful socialist. The other interpretations had far less success.

As for Zimbabwe, yes the ZANU is a socialist party and the began to nationalise under the banner of socialism.

It's better to just not use the word 'socialism' because it's too poorly defined.

> "Socialsit have been using this excuse forever. Its never "real" socialism."

> "Also stop trying to sell Sweden as Socialist. Those countries are normal capitalist wellfare states"

Capitalists have been using this excuse forever.

Actually the word 'capitalism' has always been much less defined. It was defined by socialist to define them self against something but it hard to say exactly. The terms usually referred to systems where labor did not own most of the capital. That is definitely true in all western systems right now, and thus they are all capitalist systems.

You can never really say its a real capitalist system. Thats why people use other words such as 'free-market capitalism' or 'welfare capitalism'.

There are many socialist aspects to our government here in Australia - public healthcare, public schooling, etc. People who bang the 'socialism bad hur dur' drum generally don't observe the working socialist policies already doing well in society. As you said, corruption is the issue at play.

I think a few people misunderstand socialism in LatAm. In LatAm socialism pretty much means businesses are American puppets, Americans are bad, being a puppet is bad so let's redistribute business and industry to the people and let the people run it. The professional class are bad (with the exception for physicians who are expected to live like other poor people) and farmworkers and laborers are the ultimate ideal (there is a terrible feudal-agrarian mindset which permeates)

These are welfare aspects, not socialist aspects. Socialism is public ownership of the means of production. When you tax on the high end of the income scale, and distribute those taxes as welfare, healthcare etc on the lower end, that's not socialism - it's welfare with capitalist economy as an engine (actually producing the income that you redistribute). The factories and the service providers are still privately owned.

So Australia, Sweden etc are not socialist in any meaningful way. Venezuela, OTOH, was actually going that way, with an ongoing large-scale nationalization of private businesses:

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-election-nationa...

Seizing the means of production

Which socialist countries?

Please give examples of countries doing socialism right.

Scandinavia seems to be doing all right, so that's Denmark, Finland, Norway, Iceland and Sweden for starters.

They are about as socialist as 1970s Britain

People in America scream "socialism!" whenever they hear the words "universal healthcare", so the standard in the states, at least, is really low. E.g. "Bernie Sanders is a socialist" is a common refrain even if he isn't dressed in a mao suit advocating nationalization of all private industries...that he is advocating taxing the rich more is enough.

Socialists don't support socialism for its track record. So this will not change anyone's opinion.

you need to read something deeply before give an oppinion about socialism, in Colombia 4000 children dies starving in the last 4 years and CNN and FOX dont say anything couse Colombia is a right wing country, and offcourse, this must be pass silent.

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