12 Replies to “Great Moments In Socialism”

  1. DEBT?
    Watched Ron Paul on Sun TV, his message, “Never mind your ideology, can you add?”

  2. http://data.worldbank.org/country/venezuela-rb
    http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2012/oct/04/venezuela-hugo-chavez-election-data
    https://www.google.co.uk/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&met_y=ny_gdp_mktp_cd&idim=country:VEN&dl=en&hl=en&q=venezuela%20gdp#!ctype=l&strail=false&bcs=d&nselm=h&met_y=ny_gdp_pcap_cd&scale_y=lin&ind_y=false&rdim=region&idim=country:VEN:COL:CHL:PER:ECU&ifdim=region&tstart=762912000000&tend=1299369600000&hl=en_US&dl=en&ind=false
    and most importantly: http://akarlin.com/2013/03/09/a-few-myths-about-chavezs-venezuela/ especially the epic comment by Alexander.

  3. Yeah in Venuzuela gasoline is cheaper than water….but cars are mucho expensive.
    I cannot recall the precise numbers for various Venuzuelan cities but the homocides per 100,000 are 150-200…just nuts…making Chicongo safe as houses by contrast.

  4. “Chavez, as Gabriel Garcia Marquez once clairvoyantly said, was a man who had the chance of changing our country for the better, and decided instead to gallop like the deranged and resentful megalomaniac he was in the complete opposite direction. And after 14 years and the largest income that our petro state has ever seen, Ronald Reagan’s poignant question becomes all too relevant: are Venezuelans better off today than they were 14 years ago?
    The answer is: absolutely not.
    There’s more crime, there’s more violence, there’s hardly an institution capable of dispensing justice, there are no places to go get redress, there are fewer businesses so finding work is much more difficult, the country’s infrastructure is crumbling, the state is heavily indebted, the value of our currency is lower, the inflation is out of control, the country is perilously dependent on imports as local businesses have been persecuted to the point of near extinction, there are thousands of Cubans in strategic positions, drug dealing has permeated the top echelons of military power, our country under Chavez has but broken relations with every democratic and advanced state and has forged instead relations with pariah states and leaders whose relationships have cost us billions, in sum, for every positive thing Chavez may have done, there are dozens of negative actions that leaves us in the red.
    Had Chavez not taken over PDVSA it would be producing in excess of 3.3 MBD with about 40,000 employees. Instead, it is producing less than 2.5 MBD -even importing gasoline to meet local demand- and its staff has increased to over 100,000 employees, ergo less money to get out from the hole.”
    … and more, included at Alek Boyd’s site is the vivisection of The Guardian’s Mark Weisbrot.
    http://alekboyd.blogspot.ca/2013/03/chavezs-legacy-utter-failure.html
    “Chavez singlehandedly lost perhaps the best opportunity our country has ever had to develop.”

  5. The effort to buff and polish Mr Chavez’s legacy is full court press.
    The left needs a hero and a martyr.
    Cant admit that Hugo blew it. Because if you cant create socialist nirvanna in oil rich Venezuala, where exporting the resource generates lots of OPM, where will it ever work?

  6. The rampant inflation is the killer. Wages never come close to keeping up with inflation, particularly when it’s at high levels. Hence, Venezuelans have been taking large pay cuts across the board since Chavez’s policies really started taking hold about 2002.
    And as Mark rightly points out, the situation will only get worse with the declining output from PDVSA. The state oil company is on the same downward spiral of decaying assets caused by undercapitalization as Mexico’s state oil company.
    And there’s no way to fix it. Chavez chased all of the foreign capital out of the country, so no bank is going to invest large amounts in loans to Venezuelan development without massive, and expensive, loan guarantees.

  7. So much drivel in some of those links, particularly akarlin. Makes much of the fact that GDP has gone up from about $4100 to about $11,000 since 1999. However, inflation has gone up by a factor of 20, or approximately 10 times the GDP growth.
    Think about it for a minute. Every day, say, you make $1 more. But also every day it costs you $10 more to buy what you bought yesterday. Pretty soon, you can’t eat.
    So much for the Chavez socialist revolution.

  8. I think the only reason PVDSA hasn’t collapsed is Chinese loans. What is China thinking? Do Venezuelan leaders sometimes wake up with a horse’s head to remind them who’s first in line for repayment?
    On the bright side, Chile is getting closer to free-market Nirvana. Not quite there for a lot of reasons, but it’s easily the easiest place to start up a business. It used to only take a couple weeks and few hundred dollars to get government clearance but some imminent reform means it will take no time or money very soon.

  9. The food inflation in Venezuela is somewhat attributable to the importation of more than 70% of food products into the country at world prices, a third of that from the USA. They devalue their currency every so often, leading to food price shocks regularly.
    Each time they devalue, the gas price at the pumps remains the same, it’s about $0.06 / US gallon now, but who cares? when the price of bottled water is almost the same as in Canada… Gas at about 1.5 cents per litre.
    An interesting comparison by “Island Canuck” here: Has anything happened in the past 2 years to indicate that this inflation has ceased? … ja! just a note here on the Vice President Maduro, prior to Chavez naming him VP, he was a union rep / bus driver. Not that I don’t like bus drivers… The point is more that, the Wall Street Journal once touted him as Chavez’ most capable minister. I’m not going to dispute that. 😉
    http://devilsexcrement.com/2011/01/23/island-canuck-inflation-index-closes-at-59-7-in-2010/food-pricesa-jan-15-2011/

  11. Gotta love these dictatorships. In North Korea, their glorious leader is surrounded by military types wearing hats that the US air force could land fighter jets on! And the funeral for Chavez, looked like a really bad production of The Music Man! Of course, the usual idiots prevail – Rodman for N. Korea and Sean Penn and Oliver Stone for this monkey!

  12. Inflation, other than in time of war, is usually conscious theft from the
    professions, business class, middle class and the working poor, usually by
    evil leftist rulers and their crony capitalist friends.

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