Comment by htaunay | Hacker News Reader

Comment by htaunay | Hacker News Reader

I'm reading a lot of comments exclusively blaming communism, but when I lived in Caracas during the first years of the Chavez presidency, I witnessed an overwhelming public support in his favor.

Elections were won with ~70% of the votes, and I also recall various referendum-like votes which Chavez won easily as well. Another fact that surprised me was that every Sunday he would give these 4h long speeches, and a crowd would invariably go to the streets/TV to watch him speak.

Later on I am aware that this scenario changed drastically, but in my layman's eyes the first years of Chavismo seemed very democratic, and of course also very populist (e.g. housing for the poor), which only made the governments approval rates soar.

I'm not saying I'm pro-communism, but before pointing a finger at communism, maybe the democratically elected Venezuelan government's incompetence, especially regarding spending all the revenue from it's single main natural resource on unsustainable populist programs with little ROI, should be blamed.

[Edit] Typo

Chavez was immensely popular. A coup by the army was overturned by mass protests.

His government was very successful by most economic metrics during his time in his office. It is his successor that has dropped the ball with his bungling of the currency mess. And that's the root cause of all this suffering, a bad currency system, and low oil prices.

You call them populist programs with little ROI, but they were investments and initiatives that were improving the lives of giant swathes of the nation's citizens.

If the price of oil was still $100 per barrel the country wouldn't be in this situation, and we wouldn't have all this gnashing of teeth over the inevitable downfall of socialism.

From my position, capitalist economies shouldn't be so arrogant right now. Instead of blaming the economic system of the country, take it as a warning for what happens when natural resource assets stop producing bounty, or currency exchange moves against being in your favor.

American Capitalism would not be immune from an ecological recession caused by plausible threats like warming and ocean acidification and biodiversity loss, and America might not always have the subsidy of the petrodollar. The dollar's status as reserve currency is equal to a finger on the scale in all American's economic favor.

Venezuela's present could be our future.

Maybe I didn't express myself clearly. I am not against populist programs to aid humans in deplorable life conditions. But these have to be sustainable, and in 3rd world South American countries, this probably and unfortunately involves not being able to help everyone on the short term. Otherwise, you end up inflating government spending leaving little space for maneuvering when facing an economical crisis.

My point originally was intended at NOT blaming communism, or capitalism as well. IMHO this seems more like a problem involving a government spending all of it's USD100-a-barrel income like a lottery winner, and when the prices fall to less than half of that (which by the way, most countries would welcome happily the amount of petro Venezuela has even at USD40 a barrel) and no other significant investments were made in alternative sources of revenue, they act as if it was solely a natural disaster and absolve themselves of all responsibility.

I didn't express myself clearly, running on very low sleep, I was trying to agree with you and elaborate on your point, except for the one statement about the low ROI of the programs.

> I'm reading a lot of comments exclusively blaming communism, but when I lived in Caracas during the first years of the Chavez presidency, I witnessed an overwhelming public support in his favor.

This isn't in tension, because communism and democracy aren't opposites. In fact, they are logically independent (even if anti-correlated in practice).

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