And how many average Venezuelans have money in the stock market? If the government can run the electric and telephone companies better as public utilities and if the users have to pay less, that will be good for them. Or do you think the private sector always does it better? [cough]Enron[cough]
What, that? There’s nothing profound about it – it’s just the sort of asservation you or Sam might have made, minus the cites and arguments, and rendered into Press Secretarese.
It’s an accurate and pithy description of events. If I lived in Venezuela I’d be buying a plane ticket right about now if I hadn’t already.
Cite? How do you know he’s “plundering” the oil industry by spending its revenue on infrastructure and social programs? And why would he need to “attract investment” in the nationalized oil industry? If it needs upgrading or maintenance, he can simply take less of its revenue for other projects and reinvest the remainder in the oil industry. And since they’re now collecting the income tax seriously for the first time in Venezuelan history, he’ll be able to afford it.
And you should take a lesson from that. Sometimes there’s a very real need for something for which there is no market demand.
Ever driven on the American Interstate Highway System? Mostly well-designed, useful, and something that the private sector never would have built.
It was, in case you’ve forgotten.
Would the U.S. Postal Service ever have been created by the private sector? Each has its place.
I expect business to be corrupt when the government isn’t watching. When the government itself is corrupt, that’s a much bigger problem. OTOH, the Venezuelan business community doesn’t seem to mind. From “Hugo Chavez and Petro Populism,” by Christian Parenti, The Nation, 4/11/05:
That said, I really hope the leaders of the MVR (Chavez’ party, the Movement for a Fifth Republic) keep their enthusiastic post-election promises to crack down on corruption. At present, Transparency International assigns Venezuela a “Corruption Perceptions Index” of 2.3, putting it at the 138th rank (along with Ecuador, Cameroon, and Niger). (For comparison, the U.S. is in the 20th rank with a CPI of 7.3; Canada is in the 14th rank with a PCI of 8.5.)
:rolleyes: Oh, come on! By “too authoritarian for my taste,” I meant stuff like suppressing opposition radio stations. That’s bad, but it ain’t Joe Stalin bad. There are no purges, show trials or gulags in Venezuela, and you won’t live to see any. You probably won’t even see private property expropriated without some kind of compensation. I don’t like the tinkering with press freedom one little bit, but take him all around, Chavez is an apostle of civil liberties compared to, say, Alvaro Uribe, the right-wing president of Colombia:
That wouldn’t be the whole truth, but it wouldn’t be a lie, either. (Never forget that Chile’s economic woes under Salvador Allende were at least partly, and probably largely, the fault of the U.S.)
Where?! Most of SA is on his side now. If he sticks his nose into Colombia’s interminable civil war he’ll probably get it bloodied; if he doesn’t, so much the better. But he won’t. He’s trying to build unity in SA.
It made sense when the Europeans did it. And they didn’t cut themselves off from American imports, markets or capital; they merely worked themselves into a position to trade with the U.S. on their terms. And Latin America needs some solid protectionism if it’s going to nurture its own “infant industries” wihtout American competition for the domestic market. Exactly the same reason the U.S. needed tariff protection in the 19th Century (and stopped needing it when the infant industries had grown up). As Henry Clay or Abe Lincoln might have told you.
BTW, Sam, what would an NDP-governed Canada be like? 
But it’s not true. Sure, there have been “failures” of some nationalized industries. OTOH, lots of countries have done very well by nationalization – especially, nationalization of natural resources like oil and natural gas. That’s why Saudi Arabians pay no taxes, IIRC.
Are you seriously holding up S.A. as an example of a successful state? What would you say if Bush nationalized the US oil industry, eliminated income taxes, and kept 2/3 of the oil revenues for his consumption and that of his closest 1,000 relatives? Success?
I’d call it impossible. The U.S. domestic oil industry isn’t nearly profitable enough to pay for the federal budget. As for the privileged status of the SA princes, that’s another matter. Certainly I don’t approve of the Saudi monarchy, but we’re talking here about industry nationalization as such.
They currently hold the Premierships of Manitoba and Saskatchewan.
And have governed several provinces for periods in the past, I know. But they’ve never held the premiership of Canada, have they?
Then just nationalize more industries, and only elimiate income tax on incomes of less than, say, $200k/year (or whatever works).
[shrug] I don’t think you’ll find anything like that on the SPUSA’s platform . . . All I’m saying is, sometimes nationalization works out for the best, and Tony Snow is flatly and predictably wrong on that point.
No, there’s never been an NDP Prime Minister. They’re not big enough for that. Their main role in Parliament has been as spoilers propping up minority governments.
I think we can. From the SPUSA’s principles page:
It sounds like they want to nationalize everything to me. As to taxes, it’s hard to tell what they want. The principles page doesn’t mention taxes at all except to complain about the current system.
Will there be taxes in a SPUSA state? What will they be? Do we even need them since we’re all just working for eachother? Do we need money at all?
Whatever they mean by all the broad brushstrokes on the SPUSA page, I think it’s fair to say that their version of government is drastically different than the current system.
If the government (acting as proxy for “the people”) don’t control the means of production, how is that “Socialism”? As **Debaser **pointed out, it looks like all industry would be nationalized. From their “platform” page (click on “economics” link):
What a recipe for disaster!!!
Nevermind. I’ve answered my own question. In another area of their page, they mention taxes in a description of the 2006-7 party platform. cite
This isn’t very specific, but I suspect that by eliminating “regressive” taxes and making other taxes steeply graduated, they mean that the poor will be paying very little taxes if any at all.
Here’s some more fun stuff from the SPUSA page:
Uh-oh. Sounds like the economy is going to be in trouble.
Wow. That solves that. I thought we would be in trouble for a minute there with the small businesses going under by the thousand, nobody working because you get paid even if you don’t and those few who do work spending half their time laying on a beach. But, nope. They’ve just decided that we won’t have any unemployment. Brilliant!
My whole problem with this is this sentence:
“The primary goal of economic activity is to provide the necessities of life, including food, shelter, health care, education, child care, cultural opportunities, and social services.”
It seems to imply a belief that taking care of the necessities of life would take up all or most of the output of the American economy. Whereas my suspicion is that taking care of the necessities of life would only take up a fraction of the American economy, and that eventually this will be true of the world economy as well under a wide open capitalist regime.
My only real problem with capitalism – and it’s a REALLY HUGE problem – is that capitalist societies tend to do a piss-poor job of taking care of the necessities of life for those at the bottom of the economic pile.
Now, you conservatives may hate the old Soviet Union all you like. But one thing they did, inefficient as their system was, was take care of the necessities of life for those who survive Stalin. Everybody had a job (maybe one they hated) a place to live (a crummy cement block apartment) and food to eat (let’s not get into Russian food). And there wasn’t a lot of crime. That’s because, for all their other failings, and Og knows there were plenty of them, they had the will to take care of their people.
I’m not seeing that in the good 'ol US of A. I find that diminishes my respect for the people in charge. A lot.
If capitalists were to say, “Hey, it’ll cost us money but it’s important that everybody have enough food and stuff, so let’s allocate a portion of our budget for this and get it done” I’d feel a lot better about them. But I don’t.
So, you’re saying the bottom tier of the USSR society had it better than the bottom tier in the US wrt “the necessities of life”? Cite?
We could solve the housing problem (to the extent that there is one) by forcing people to share apartments, just like the Soviets did. Are you seriously proposing that as a policy?
And there wasn’t a lot of crime because it was a freakin’ police state, for crying out loud!!
Yeah. It’s the worst system, except for all the others.
Yeah. The Soviet Union took great care of it’s citizens, if we don’t consider the millions that it butchered and starved to death.
I just don’t know what you’re talking about here. Maybe I read my history books backwards but I seem to recall millions of people starving to death under Soviet rule. In America, how many people starved to death in 2006? (In millions, please.)
Evil Captor, the problem with the USSR was that it used the power of the goverment to feed these people, and it did so with gross thugishness and inefficiency.
In the US, there are plenty of non-governmental charities to feed and house the needy. If you feel that the needy aren’t receiving enough help, start a media campaign, and raise public awareness of the issue.
The 9/11 charities, the Katrina charities, and the Tsunami charities all demonstrate (to me) that the average American is still a compassionate person, and is willing to help those in need.
Using the power of the government to “level the playing field” between the rich and the poor, to the extent described as Pres. Chavez is doing, has historically led to oppressive authoritarian regimes. And then, it’s the poor that always suffer the most, not those in control of the system.
I don’t think you mean to be saying this, but by the way you worded your response you are implicitly acknowledging that the US doesn’t feed its people. That is simply wrong. No one starves in the US. (And I’m sure we all know what I mean by “no one”. I’m sure you can find the odd starvation in the US, but it’s essetially nonexistent).