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Comment by calibraxis | Hacker News Reader

Venezuela is the happiest country in South America, according to the World Happiness Index published last week by the U.N. Sustainable Development Solutions Network. (http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/the-americas-blog/you-pr...)

The BBC article portrays a country reacting quickly and aggressively to "avoid any scarcity of the product". And US critics (who view Venezuela as an enemy for disobeying their ideology) are reduced to writing articles about toilet paper.

BTW, Krugman and even Greenspan actually advocated nationalizing US banks as a condition of the bailout. (They advocated selling the banks to private investors after cleaning them up. But we could imagine the US public owning the banks rather than wealthy elites.) A bit bigger than toilet paper. (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/23/opinion/23krugman.html)

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Paragraph 1 is a non sequitur in the purest sense of the term.

Paragraph 2 mentions US critics, but unless the link changed, the article is a link to the BBC which: 1. is British and 2. a reporting of fact with no judgement expressed. In any case, your comment reveals more than any op-ed ever could.

Paragraph 3 is again bizarre assuming we're reading the same article (I double checked as I've read this story before- the news here seems to be the nationalization part).

So I'll conclude with this: there's a lot of criticism of the US sharedand discussed on this site, but I never notice anyone get so defensive about it, whether they agree with it or not. Why is this article so troubling to you? Especially if it's something you claim is so insignificant.

Paragraph 1: The Foreign Policy article decries "the Venezuelan economic model of excessive meddling". The Happiness Index report puts this in perspective.

Furthermore, the CEPR link points out: "It is perhaps not surprising that media outlets that regularly try to convince their audiences that the social democratic policies being pursued in countries in Scandinavia, South America and elsewhere are a failure don’t want to report the contentment of citizens living in these countries."

So, there is a propaganda aspect to such weird articles about... toilet paper. Particularly since Venezuela is such an enemy nation that Jimmy Carter publicly claims the US was "likely behind" the Venezuelan coup. (http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Carter:_US_%22likely_behind%22_V...)

Paragraph 2 responded to a post which merely quoted Foreign Policy, a US magazine owned by a mass media company.

Your paragraph 3 is unclear to me.

Your paragraph 4 is ad hominem and ironic.

Paraphrasing some recent studies, it turns out that the largest determinant of one's 'happiness' is how well one is doing compared to one's peers. The happiness of individual members of a peer group doesn't say much about how that group compares to its own peer groups at the next level up, which in this case would be other national economies and economic schools of thought.

Put another way, I imagine the World Happiness Index published last week by the U.N. Sustainable Development Solutions Network would have been impressed with the "progress" made in places such as Jonestown, Guyana.

Yeah, right. Just like the Soviet Union was the happiest country when their people sat in line for toilet paper.

I'm sure Krugman would fit right in Venezuela.

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