Socialism is making a comeback, Time to invest in the Bolivar!
- Thread starter Max E.
- Start date
A fairly good read as to what happened in Venezuela and the parallels to what screwballs like Cortez advocates for here in the U.S.
However, Venezuela’s democratic experiment was doomed from the start, and one needn’t look any further at the political background of its very own founder, Rómulo Betancourt, to understand why it’s entire political system was built on a house of cards.
Rómulo Betancourt was an ex-communist who renounced his Marxist ways in favor of a more gradualist approach of establishing socialism. Despite evolving into more of a social democrat, Betancourt still believed in a very activist role for the State in economic matters.
Betancourt was part of a generation of intellectuals and student activists that aimed to fully nationalize Venezuela’s petroleum sector and use petroleum rents to establish a welfare state of sorts. These political figures firmly believed that for Venezuela to become a truly independent country and free itself from the influence of foreign interests, the government must have complete dominion over the oil sector.
Under this premise, a nationalized oil industry would finance cheap gasoline, “free” education at all levels, healthcare, and a wide array of other public services.
This rhetoric strongly resonated among the lower and middle classes, which would form the bulwark of Betancourt’s party, Acción Democrática, voter base for years to come.
At its core, this vision of economic organization assumed that the government must manage the economy through central planning. Oil would be produced, managed, and administered by the state, while the government would try to phase out the private sector.
https://mises.org/wire/venezuela-chavez-prelude-socialist-failure
However, Venezuela’s democratic experiment was doomed from the start, and one needn’t look any further at the political background of its very own founder, Rómulo Betancourt, to understand why it’s entire political system was built on a house of cards.
Rómulo Betancourt was an ex-communist who renounced his Marxist ways in favor of a more gradualist approach of establishing socialism. Despite evolving into more of a social democrat, Betancourt still believed in a very activist role for the State in economic matters.
Betancourt was part of a generation of intellectuals and student activists that aimed to fully nationalize Venezuela’s petroleum sector and use petroleum rents to establish a welfare state of sorts. These political figures firmly believed that for Venezuela to become a truly independent country and free itself from the influence of foreign interests, the government must have complete dominion over the oil sector.
Under this premise, a nationalized oil industry would finance cheap gasoline, “free” education at all levels, healthcare, and a wide array of other public services.
This rhetoric strongly resonated among the lower and middle classes, which would form the bulwark of Betancourt’s party, Acción Democrática, voter base for years to come.
At its core, this vision of economic organization assumed that the government must manage the economy through central planning. Oil would be produced, managed, and administered by the state, while the government would try to phase out the private sector.
https://mises.org/wire/venezuela-chavez-prelude-socialist-failure
Alexandria is young and cute and pretty and oh, so smart about everything. Why don't we ask her to go run Venezuela for a while since Maduro's giving up? He probably needs a good nap, anyway.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...ng-water-comes-month-cash-machines-empty.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...ng-water-comes-month-cash-machines-empty.html
Works for Norway. Worked for Mexico to an extent. The problem with Venezuela was relying solely on oil (something like 80% of their GDP) instead of diversifying their industry. When oil took a dump, obviously so did the country.
Not really.
https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-serious-problems-concerning-Norway
And the truth about Scandinavian socialism:
While it is true that the Scandinavian countries provide things like a generous social safety net and universal health care, an extensive welfare state is not the same thing as socialism. What Sanders and his supporters confuse as socialism is actually social democracy, a system in which the government aims to promote the public welfare through heavy taxation and spending, within the framework of a capitalist economy. This is what the Scandinavians practice.
https://fee.org/articles/the-myth-of-scandinavian-socialism/
What Sanders and company spout sounds very much like a social democracy to me.
