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Relax, I'm not American and the place is full of tourists and happy locals(not all, but it's fine. In which country everyone is happy?). On the bright side, I never went to Saudi Arabia. I really don't like murderous regimes, especially those who suppress and kill journalists and get away with it because all US presidents want to sell them weapons and stuff.
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Modern day Venezuela has a larger amount of private, for profit economic activity and employement than France. It's meaningfully a socialist economy, just an insanely corrupt mixed-market economy with a government pretending to be socialist to keep power.
> Modern day Venezuela has a larger amount of private, for profit economic activity and employement than France. Is that supposed to reflect well on Venezuela or be a slight at France? Because Venezuela isn't exactly doing to hot in the economics department right now.
Here is a source:
https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/venezuela/private-cons...
Compared to:
https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/france/private-consump...
As well as
https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/venezuela/public-consu...
Compared to:
https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/france/public-consumpt...
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I don't necessarily disagree with your comment overall but there are a lot of problems with your list and your methodology. 1: Why isn't france or china on the former or currently socialist list? There are many others. 2: Consider the volatility and violent turmoil, war, genocide, atrocities from those former and present countries from the timeperiod of german unification under bismarck (somewhat arbitrarily chosen d…
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I don't know about DPRK but I have been to Cuba for a 2 weeks vacation, so I had time to go out of the default tourists spots. What I've seen is this: Those who have access to tourists or to the government are rich. Corruption is rampant as I've seen people bribing police right at the airport to have their things sorted out. The mainstream corruption in society revolves around casa particulars and taxis. Essentially,…
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Really interesting article! On a related note, one oddity I often see online (and, once, in person) are the die-hard groups of westerners who insist that North Korea is actually a paradise on earth and any claim to the contrary is some kind of evil capitalist propaganda. Utterly baffling, when there are so many sources like this article indicating otherwise.
One thing I find more odd is how American audiences treat the DPRK while also supporting the continued military puppet state that is the ROK. There were also a "lot of sources" supporting WMDs in Iraq. When what you're saying is the state department narrative it's not going to receive pushback. The US killed 20% of Koreans on the peninsula and reduced it all to rubble. Forgive my skepticism at the "humanitarian inten…
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I don't know about DPRK but I have been to Cuba for a 2 weeks vacation, so I had time to go out of the default tourists spots. What I've seen is this: Those who have access to tourists or to the government are rich. Corruption is rampant as I've seen people bribing police right at the airport to have their things sorted out. The mainstream corruption in society revolves around casa particulars and taxis. Essentially,…
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And besides, I’m not sure if there’s a single case of such actions truly helping the people. Authoritarians thrive when they can point to another country as their source of economic troubles. America’s greatest success came from endlessly pushing its consumer goods and media at other countries.
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> Modern day Venezuela has a larger amount of private, for profit economic activity and employement than France. Is that supposed to reflect well on Venezuela or be a slight at France? Because Venezuela isn't exactly doing to hot in the economics department right now.
It's not supposed to reflect well on Venezuela, nor supposed to be a slight to France. I'm just saying that Venezuela is not an especially socialist economy. Here is a source: https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/venezuela/private-cons... Compared to: https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/france/private-consump... As well as https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/venezuela/public-consu... Compared to: https://www.cei…
I thought you were claiming that the overall dollar amount was larger.
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How many countries has communism been attempted in? 25? And of those, 4 remain officially communist, but whose economies have either transited to free markets or are moving that way. It is safe to say only the dreamers still believe in communism.m And people keep saying that communism hasn't been tried. But it has. It starts with the state trying to be socialist and then "withering away" to full on communism (accordi…
This is too simplified to mean anything. The USSR had many socialist branches, where the bolsheviks ultimately won out in a power struggle. The bolsheviks wanted state control, the citizen working for the state, while others were into having actual soviets where the citizens would've taken control of their means of production. Having a parliament and democracy was important to many of these groups (and the liberals who were also politically active). I wouldn't recommend a dictatorship, regardless if it has "of the proletariat" as a suffix.
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I don't know about DPRK but I have been to Cuba for a 2 weeks vacation, so I had time to go out of the default tourists spots. What I've seen is this: Those who have access to tourists or to the government are rich. Corruption is rampant as I've seen people bribing police right at the airport to have their things sorted out. The mainstream corruption in society revolves around casa particulars and taxis. Essentially,…
You missed to clarify that tourists use pesos convertibles which are artificially tied 1:1 to USD (1USD, 1 convertible) and that are basically what casas and taxi drivers accept. But you can totally go to local restaurants as a tourist (we did it a few times during our 3 weeks stay). And yeah, it can be sad to see how people lives there, and many try to flee but as you said makes you think about the real, deep impact…
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I mean... if you can't believe in something that hasn't yet existed, how does anything come to be at all? Or do you deny that there is any theoretical thought behind communism at all? Is it just something people suddenly found themselves doing, and it failed and that was that? How does someone dream of things that are better? How can you have faith in anything at all? Is not the love you feel towards your friends and…
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