131–140 of 143 posts
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Yep. Chavez started as a proletariat leader. I believe some liberal leaders like Sean Penn publicly supported Chavez (? someone fact check me here).
Sean Penn is a movie actor, not a "liberal leader," what are you on?
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And Venezuela was among the richest countries in south America not too long ago (early 20th century). This is a cautionary tale.
Every socialist country is or will be a cautionary tale.
I hate to also add to the cliche, but I think the description of one of the pictures in this article really emphasizes that perhaps it's not just a cliche: "Over 100 people lined up in Caracas to purchase price-controlled chicken. Chicken is highly sought after, yet very difficult to find for sale at affordable prices in Venezuela." Chickens are absurdly easy to farm. They're basically meat grass. Put them in a fence…
Q. How can we eliminate the Sahara desert?
A. Establish a socialist republic in the area and wait a bit for the shortages of sand.
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Sean Penn is a movie actor, not a "liberal leader," what are you on?
Commenting like this will get you banned here. If you want to keep commenting on HN, please don't vandalize it, even when other comments are wrong and annoying.
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/8540/what-is-wha...
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No, I didn't say "at any cost to anyone". I specifically outlined the system and the cost. You are again attacking straw men, this time by adding clauses. So can you stop beating around the bush and admit you don't think humans should survive if they don't have enough wealth, even if their society has more than enough wealth for them to do so? That's the fundamental point.
That is correct. It ought be no-one else's fault if someone cannot produce anything of value greater-than-or-equal-to that required to sustain their own life. Such people are as vestigial to society as an appendix is vestigial to the human body. (And yet, annoyingly, we still have appendices. sigh .) Of course, I do believe it possible that the other person who was replying to you in this thread, may have different v…
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That's again inflationary - because each unit of currency is worth less. Money is not wealth, its a token of exchange for wealth. Your proposal is akin to educating a country by "issuing" degree certificates at a certain rate, completely ignoring if anyone is learning anything.
I didn't argue that it wasn't inflationary . Right at the outset I described inflation. Did you actually read the rest of my post? I asked about something completely different. You seem to be saying people who don't have enough money at a given moment should starve. The difference with your example of degree certificates is that they are not basic necessities needed for survival.
No, I'm saying that if the food (wealth) doesn't exist, no amount of money (tokens) can buy it. You are postulating that the problem is lack if tokens.
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> rich for the wrong reasons Bingo! I hear that being the state-appointed redistributors-of-wealth (or maybe their friends and relatives, too?) is important, and that actually doing or making anything of value ... isn't. For instance, they otherwise wouldn't have shortages of price-controlled chicken. (It's apparently a very easy animal to raise; cf another comment-thread here.) The living conditions are a consequenc…
The poor in Venezuela, then, are getting what they deserve in correspondence to the value they produce. The economic system is failing only the rich
The poor being poor is indeed a consequence of their preference to queue-up for handouts rather than do anything productive e.g. raise their own chickens. Which is to say they are indeed getting exactly what they deserve. I'm puzzled+frustrated at having to repeatedly state the obvious throughout this comment-section.
Whenever socialism goes awry there’s this True Scotsman argument: “Well, that’s not true socialism.” According to those standards there probably hasn’t been a true socialist society or state yet. The often mentioned Nordic model isn’t socialism by any narrow definition because it still involves free market capitalism and private ownership of the means of production.
Hmm, I just did a quick google search... this Quora question [1] seems to have some consensus that Venezuela is actually closer to a dictatorship that has some socialist aspects and some capitalist aspects.
I don't know many details about the Venezuela situation, so I can't say too much more at this time.
[1] https://www.quora.com/Is-Venezuela-a-socialist-or-communist-...
Whenever socialism goes awry there’s this True Scotsman argument: “Well, that’s not true socialism.” According to those standards there probably hasn’t been a true socialist society or state yet. The often mentioned Nordic model isn’t socialism by any narrow definition because it still involves free market capitalism and private ownership of the means of production.
Well, clearly, there is something going on very differently in the European socialist democracies, at the very least. Hmm, I just did a quick google search... this Quora question [1] seems to have some consensus that Venezuela is actually closer to a dictatorship that has some socialist aspects and some capitalist aspects. I don't know many details about the Venezuela situation, so I can't say too much more at this t…
Every real-world implementation of socialism (in the true sense of the word, not the Nordic / social democracy kind of system) to this day seems to either have had some features of a dictatorship right from the start or devolved into a dictatorship over time.
The only instance of socialism I can think of where this wasn't the case is the Allende government in Chile and that unfortunately didn't last long enough (less than 3 years) to see how it would've evolved in the long run.
The amount of comments on this thread decrying 'socialism' with very pithy comments is concerning. I guess the whole internet is infected with trolls now, especially political ones...