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Comment by s_y_n_t_a_x | Hacker News Reader

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Please don't take HN threads further into generic ideological flamewar, which is an internet black hole and explicitly against the site guidelines.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22749317 and marked it off topic.

Okay, I sincerely did not mean to start a flamewar, I was trying to explain to the GP why Venezuela fell.

Now that I know talking about socialism, and I assume other economic and political ideologies, is against the rules I will report similar occurrences i.e. when people criticize capitalism when it doesn't relate to the topic.

I apologize for any breakage of the rules, I did read them, but I misunderstood.

Appreciated!

You can't blame every bad thing a country does on how they run markets.

It's especially ridiculous to pretend the markets are more important than democracy vs. oligarchy vs. dictatorship.

Venezuela in 1992 was semi-socialist, it had a state-run oil company, but it wasn't part of the Communist Bloc (for lack of a better term). Chavez aligned his country with China and Russia to the detriment of his own people and his own countries' ability to produce oil.

Communism is basically a political syndicate the masquerades as an economic system. Venezuela's oil production has been collapsing for over two decades and much of what remains is basically Chinese/Sinopec owned production that Chavez sold them back in '06 or so in exchange for _loans_ for their social services programs.

According to a friend of mine who was working down there they were flying workers in to work the rigs and flying them home to spend their money.

Having the government run the markets, even when an emergency dictates it, is a process that attracts the corrupt.

Socialism isn’t simply ‘how markets are run’

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"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.

Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That destroys the curiosity this site exists for."

- https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

This was on topic because the GP was talking about the fall of Venezuela. I expanded on WHY Venezuela fell, because it is tragic.

I had a lot of genuinely new things to say that I'm sure some people didn't know.

It's impossible to keep politics out of the news... I see political debates here all the time.

I didn't pull this out of my ass to bait people, I genuinely wanted everyone to know why Venezuela is in the situation it's in.

If I would have commented in the root thread I could see your point, but I was replying to the GP's topic.

I'm actually glad I did because some people thought Sweden and Norway are socialist countries...

Yes, it's impossible to keep politics out of the topics that get discussed here, but it's eminently possible not to go full generic and to stay out of battle mode. It mostly just requires an intention to follow the rules here. Please follow the rules here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I've written about how this site handles political overlap here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607844, and there's lots more explanation at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que. If, after taking a look at those links, anyone has a question we haven't addressed, I'd be interested to hear it and happy to answer.

I couldn't reply to your higher level comment because I flagged it; "Socialism strikes again. Let's add the death toll to the millions it has killed before." is a total flamewar bait / political ideology topic. I can tell because I was baited into replying before I noticed what I was doing and flagged it instead.

quips like "But yeah, maybe it hasn't been implemented properly yet /s" are bait.

"I see political debates here all the time." - then flag them, they are against the comment guidelines?

If I could remove the quip I would, but I only said it because I feel passionate about the issue.

I sincerely was not trying to bait anyone.

It's possible for 20 serial killers to call themselves Christian, and still "not be following Christ correctly", and pointing that out over and over isn't supporting serial killing, and it shouldn't be the serial killers who get to define what "Christian" means. Analogously, "the struggle of the proletariat isn't "the proletariat want themselves put in mass graves" no matter how many times mass murderers put the the proletariat in mass graves saying "but it's what they wanted!".

That a central planning economy can be badly and inhumanely run is not, in itself, proof that one cannnot be run well run. It might be the case that it can't, even that it's irresponsible to try; but what you're doing is pointing to mass graves as a kind of emotional reasoning "that is a lot of suffering so don't you dare argue, I win" shutdown tactic.

Marx was not famous for saying "The proletariat are looking a bit porky these days, let's get a dictatorship going, kill all the farmers, starve the proles to death and call it utopia"

When Britain directed India's wheat production to Britain and starved 7 million people, or Churchill diverted Bangladesh's crop production to Greece and 4 million Bangladeshis starved, or Britain bought granaries in Iran (Persia) in the early 1900s and 2 million starved, those weren't local people determining their food supply distribution in a free market; you said in another comment that your definition of Socalism was "the only real definiton, when the government controls the market and no capitalism exists"; by your definition were these micro-instances of Communism?

You're arguing a strawman, and you have a one-word panacea answer:

Capitalism.

A one-word explanaton which covers many countries over many decades with many problems and many atrocities, one thing to blame for all ills and a one-word answer for everything good. That is unlikely to be the best possible understanding.

I'm sure you weren't, but it was flamebait because it was predictable that the comment would blow up into a flamewar. The issue is the expected value of the subthread, i.e. the sum of the probability distribution of responses.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

> Point out any socialist/communist country where this hasn't happened.

Socialist Yugoslavia saw some political imprisonments, mostly immediately after the war as Tito tried to limit Stalin’s influence in the country. But there was never collectivization leading to famine, never killings on a massive scale. The genocide in the region was only unleashed after the end of the socialist era. And before you want to rant about crushing poverty: Yugoslavs in the 1960s and 1970s lived well enough on average that they were conspicuous among tourists on the Istanbul-Kathmandu trail and Indonesia, and many international brands were sold in Yugoslavia just like in any Western European country.

Sweden, Norway, etc?

[flagged]

Sweden at one point, had marginal income tax rate EXCEEDING 100% for some people.

Look it up. It is very hard to believe, but true. That exceeds communism.

102% income tax rate, people... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomperipossa_in_Monismania

[flagged]

Your name is syntax, but it seems like you're only arguing semantics. Those countries have lots of properties of both capitalism and socialism.

You can't convince me that welfare services like medicine or food programs aren't part of the "production or distribution of goods and services". The reason you can't convince me is because you're wrong.

[flagged]

And your throwing up of straw men isn't proving your point either. Aside from that, I think I'll avoid getting any opinions on economic freedom from one of the most biased sources possible, The Heritage Foundation.

Algeria, Bangladesh, Guyana, India, Nepal, Nicaragua, Portugal, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Angola, Barbados, Congo, Ecuador, Guinea-Bissau, Mauritius, Mozambique, Mexico, Namibia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Suriname, Uruguay, and Zambia

Mexico is definitively not a communist or socialist country. Although it might be a little to the "left" of the US, it would be considered a capitalistic country in most of Europe.

[flagged]

the problem is the impossible expectation for an entire society to change its fundamental assumptions about how to route value through itself,in a radical way, and within the space of a few years.

This virtually guarantees a dictatorship (and usually a personality cult, whether forced or organically developedl) and all the negatives that accompany one.

Most regimes you mention are dictatorships, not socialistic. Also quite a few of them were actively fought against by the capitalistic United states, contributing to social unrest and even downright organizing coups.

These are complicated systems which cannot be reduced just to "Socialism death toll" or "Capitalism death toll".

[flagged]

The real and only definition, where the government controls the market and no capitalism exists.

Nothing about the workers owning the means of production?

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It depends on how much of the market they control and how it's controlled and distributed.

Simply having a universal healthcare system and high taxes doesn't make you a socialist country if you still have economic freedom in every other industry.

I can't give you a percentage, but if your government is starting to take over many industries, I'd say it's going down the socialist path. Generally inefficiencies in one industry lead the government to take over others to sustain itself.

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