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Comment by seibelj | Hacker News Reader

When the solution to every problem is more government, more redistribution, and higher taxes, this is the inevitable result. A tragedy caused 100% by politics

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Cuba is a socialist country, and while they have plenty of problems, you don't see the kind of situation we're seeing in Venezuela. I don't think socialism is a good system, but we should at least try to honestly understand the reasons for what is happening in Venezuela, rather than blindly chalking it up to some loosely understood specter of "socialism".

Cuba has had terrible shortages and starvation, including one especially bad situation in the 90's.

> I would leave my house at 8:30 in the morning with a pathetic excuse for a breakfast in my stomach: a bread roll and a glass of sugared water (milk was a luxury at the time, and all food was expensive). The dollar, which was illegal at the time, came to be valued at 120 Cuban pesos. Anyone caught carrying that currency risked a long time behind bars.

http://www.havanatimes.org/?p=102373

It takes a special kind of talent to impoverish countries as blessed with natural resources as Venezuela and Argentina.

Countries with massive natural resources generally have a poor redistribution of money, it's not always a disaster like Venezuela but it's more a curse than a blessing.

The richness in natural resources is kind of part of the problem though? It allowed a small group of rulers to maintain control without caring that much about the country as a whole.

Well, that's my interpretation of the situation? It seems like the common way for this kind of situations to arise. The political ideology that the rulers choose as costume for their kleptocracy seems only marginally relevant.

Not really. Most resource-rich countries are terribly governed. Google “the resource curse.”

Argentina isn't even resource-rich, it's just large. Great for ranching, few mineral or energy resources. And it's not exactly a secret that petro states like Venezuela have fallen on hard times in the past decade.

There was once a saying "as rich as an Argentine"

And Venezuela was among the richest countries in south America not too long ago (early 20th century). This is a cautionary tale.

Every socialist country is or will be a cautionary tale.

How are you defining socialist country, here?

I'll let whistlecrackers make his own definition, but I'd say:

- problem is not that a country has some socialist policies

- problem is not that a country has a party with "socialism" in its name in the government

- problems definitely start to appear when a country has an autocratic government, whether it was originally "socialist" or "bolivarian" or whatever; an autocratic government then typically adapts some sort of "socialism" in its name in order to justify the autocracy, the choking of free markets, the political redistribution of resources, ad-hoc top-down responses to the economic problems that eventually come up, and the suppression of free media to hide the increasing problems.

Yet we still don't learn the lesson after all the countries that have bit the dust.

Generic ideological tangents may not destroy countries but they sure make internet forums suck. This is not what we want here, so please don't post like this.

The thing is, having a great economy when over half of the population is living in misery (even worse than now), it's not a great alternative. That's why lots of people still support Maduro.

Venezuela is a cautionary tale of a wide spectrum of economic policies, not only the recent ones as the media would like us to think.

Nah, this is the result of corruption. We should be worried in the US, this could be our future.

Corruption can only harm you to the extent that corrupt organizations have power over you.

e.g. You worry about the cops being corrupt; you don't worry much about a local restaurant owner being corrupt because you can just eat somewhere else.

This is why small government, freedom and individualism are very simple and effective antidotes to corruption.

Small in size doesn't imply small in power to me. The smallest kind of government only governs the military and nothing else.

In which case you probably won't even encounter them unless either you walk/drive/travel near to a military asset/base, or your government's territory gets invaded.

Unless, you mean to describe juntas as "small"? (I wouldn't, since in those cases the military takes on many more tasks than it normally would...)

Sorry, this is a result of socialism. Chavez undercut the middle class by giving or selling staple goods to the poor voting class, subsidized by the oil wealth. This undercut the middle class and anyone who sold things based on market supply and demand.

Source: I studied abroad there in 2001-2002 and I witnessed the overthrow of Chavez and learned a lot from the people in addition to studying the economics of the situation afterwards.

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