It doesn't matter if Ghengis Khan becomes the leader of Venezuela.....if he fixes those two things, the economy will rebound quickly.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> "Also stop trying to sell Sweden as Socialist. Those countries are normal capitalist wellfare states"
Capitalists have been using this excuse forever.
You can never really say its a real capitalist system. Thats why people use other words such as 'free-market capitalism' or 'welfare capitalism'.
Exactly, so you get what I'm saying?
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.
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).
> 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...:
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.
So, by that line of though, most muslim countries in the Middle East are Socialist.
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...