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.
It's especially ridiculous to pretend the markets are more important than democracy vs. oligarchy vs. dictatorship.
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.
Oil was pretty much their only market, you can definitely blame how the country turned out based on how the government ran it's market, and btw the Venezuelan government committed much worse atrocities than just running their market into the ground. They even killed their own people trying to get aid from other countries.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/5287-people-killed-during...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2019/feb/23/venezuela...
https://www.foxnews.com/world/venezuela-uprising-turns-viole...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/22/world/americas/brazil-ven...
But yeah, maybe it hasn't been implemented properly yet /s
While most of those haven't committed any atrocities, people have died due to the poverty socialism creates. It's only a matter of time until the regimes in power are questioned and more blood is shed.
Ideally you want democracy (for freedom) and capitalism (for money).
If you don't have capitalism, you will crumble, China found that out the hard way and corrected itself (though never added the democracy part).
Keep in mind, poverty kills people too. Most of the countries you listed are extremely poor.
India who has been practicing socialism since '47 has the largest slums in the world.
Bad leaders with total power will often commit atrocities, even if they embrace capitalistic money-making.
This virtually guarantees a dictatorship (and usually a personality cult, whether forced or organically developedl) and all the negatives that accompany one.
Both do have great welfare services, but they are very capitalistic and had great wealth before implementing the services.
Norway can thank that oil for their great welfare.
edit: to the user below, you're arguing semantics. I know the definition of socialism and it cannot exist with capitalism. I suggest you read up.
You're conflating socialism with welfare services and arguing about the semantics of the two to reach your point.
tldr: I'm being critical of socialism, not "democratic socialism".
https://www.forbes.com/sites/rainerzitelmann/2019/11/11/bern...
Being a socialist country involves much more than the "production or distribution of goods and services".
You're overplaying even that because it's only one industry (healthcare).
Both Sweden and Norway are rated highly on the economic freedom index https://www.heritage.org/index/ranking.
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
They've been reversing their welfare programs and are rated highly on the economic freedom index.
Taxes are still high to pay for the welfare programs, but as they are reformed I'd assume the government will lower them.
Even so, America once had a 70% income tax, that didn't make us socialist, though it made us economically weak (thanks for the cuts Reagan, you saved us) .
https://fee.org/articles/is-sweden-socialist-no-but/
> Between 1870 and 1950, Sweden had the highest per capita income growth in the world and became one of the richest countries, behind only Switzerland, the U.S., and Denmark.
> In the 1960s, Sweden started to redistribute wealth, which brought wealth creation to a halt.
> By the mid-1990s, the country had growing economic problems because it continued to redistribute wealth it wasn’t creating.
> In 1994, Sweden began implementing the following measures designed to reverse this trend - Reduce Regulation - Reduce Government Spending - Reform their Welfare Programs - Shrink their Government
tldr: socialism is like crack, you only need to try it once and it'll destroy your life/country.
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.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That destroys the curiosity this site exists for."
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...
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?
I sincerely was not trying to bait anyone.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
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'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.