To all those who would lay a claim that what we are seeing in Venezuela is just the inevitable collapse of socialism, I have a counter argument for your consideration.
Imagine you are living in your home. You have your own ideas and practices about caring and providing for your family. You have an established method for providing food, heat, lights, medical care, and anything you and your family might need to be comfortable, healthy, and happy.
Then one day, some of your neighbors decide they want to control your home. They want you to paint it a certain way, do your lawn a certain way, raise your family in a certain way. And they want to tell you what kind of a job you can and cannot have. What kind of religion you need to have. What kind of schools are acceptable. This is similar to an HOA, but far more invasive.
So, naturally, you tell them all to go to hell.
Then, they start isolating you. They block off your road access. When you try to leave your home to go to work, or the store, they confront you with threats and guns. They even threaten some neighbors you were friendly with, saying if they help you, it will be really bad for them. They block off your mail, so you can't even shop online for things you and your family need.
After a short time of being isolated like this, you and your family are starting to go hungry. Bills are going unpaid and debt is piling up. Maybe even 1 or 2 neighbors try to help you in secret, but there is only so much they can do without confronting the mean neighbors directly.
Then, to top it off, after going without for so long, even your own kids start begging you to just do what the neighbors tell you, anything to just make this mess end. They start talking about kicking you out and putting the drunk Uncle in charge of your household.
Is this something that can accurately be called a failure of your household policies? Did you go into extreme debt and poverty because of your management insufficiencies? No. Everything you did for your family and household was perfectly fine until some bad neighbors got together and orchestrated your downfall on purpose.
Calling Venezuela an example of a failed socialist state is a lie. The only thing they did wrong was not let US mining and oil interests corrupt and ruin their country. For that, they were sanctioned, isolated, and cut off from the vast majority of the world's financial and trade markets. And now the drunk Uncle is being propped up as a presidential surrogate.
If we were to start openly involving ourselves, our wealth, our resources, our labor, and the lives of our military service members, towards the goal of global regime changes, then I would propose that we make a list of the worst human rights offenders in the world, then start with number 1. That would be Saudi Arabia. Not Venezuela, which would probably rank around #50. And the USA would be cutting it close with Israel for the #2 spot.
I live with a profound happiness that can only be achieved by being hated by Mr.Veritis
Venezuela's oil industry fell apart when it nationalized foreign oil companies in the country and chased the talent away.
ΜOΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ
The people of Venezuela have every expectation to own the rights to their own resources. Just as we do ours. Nationalization of their oil wasn't the problem. The problem was that they took back their resources, out of the hands of powerful corporations. Those corporations also establish our foreign policies. They are interwoven in our government at every level. Pissing them off is, in fact, pissing off the US government.
If it were me, I would have started thinking about the repercussions from day one. How will our people eat, work, get resources, and sell things? With obvious sanctions in the future, do we transition our economy away from relying on foreign trade, and just work on developing our economy internally for the things we need to prosper?
The only real mistake that the government of Venezuela made is that they just plowed ahead with international oil trade, even though they knew that would be cut off with sanctions. Oh, and repaying their national debt should have been a priority, since all refinancing would be halted too under the sanctions.
I live with a profound happiness that can only be achieved by being hated by Mr.Veritis
1) One of the things I laugh at is people who remember the "cold war": a period in time where Russia's actions or fear of their actions dictated so much of what we did ( from nuclear proliferation, to having kids dive under wooden desk in air raid drills, to whom we elected ) then claiming that socialism can not work over time economically. But the nation we feared for 40 years was socialist. LOL
2) I am a capitalist. Real price competition driven capitalism which is not what the megacorps do today and pass off as capitalism. However, believing in capitalism does not give me the strange desire to call all other systems complete failures all the time.
3) Almost all countries are managed by hybrid systems. We are no exception. And one of the pieces of the hybrid is whatever you call megacorps who buy influence and manipulate markets rather than compete within them .
4) In short, terms meant to describe economic systems have been turned into weapons in the divisive war against common sense , compromise and the Constitution.
RadioGod (02-21-2019)
Captdon (02-21-2019)
MisterVeritis (02-22-2019)