Seems to me like the failure of Venezuela was a lack of command and control. They should never have allowed domestic industries to go away simply because they could not compete on a global market. Their highest and best use in the world market has been oil and that's what the free market would lead them to. If they had a bunch of not super efficient manufacturing for like toilet paper and agriculture instead of just always importing that stuff they would have work and stuff right now.

If you're really a libertarian and just don't believe in borders and countries at all, maybe that's all fine. Oil industry suffers and the people who live there can freely move somewhere that has work, but the countries that have jobs are building walls.

They needed to borrow money. Like I posted, they didn't have especially high debt to gdp or government spending to gdp ratios. I may be wrong, but isn't the problem that the government met budget shortfalls by just printing more money and that snowballs inflation? If they could borrow money during a recession they should have been able to keep the money supply and thus prices stable.

And anyway, if Venezuela didn't have unusually high spending/gdp or debt/gdp and they weren't unusually kleptocratic then what's all the LOL SOCIALISM about??? Does it all really just boil down to LOL YOU DON'T HAVE A FLOATING EXCHANGE RATE!!!!

Because it sure seems like the real point is that hyper-inflation was caused by free college, universal health care and $15/hr minimum wage.

One issue that Venezuela has had to deal with is that, starting in about 2008, there was a massive exodus from the country of its richest people.

I think they saw the writing on the wall, and moved a lot of their assets abroad. I live in Central America, and when I arrived in 2007, there weren't any Venezuelans, and by 2010 they were buying every luxury apartment/house they could find, at a time when no one else was buying.

I am not sure that this would have been enough to wreck the economy on its own, but I imagine it had some impact. And my guess is that it was pretty significant, namely due to the fact that wealth in the country was highly concentrated.

No.

It started with price controls and nationalization of industry to be ran by incompetent and corrupt Chavez cronies. Which had the effect of killing local production of goods. When the government decides that the price of eggs is suddenly lower than the farmers cost of producing eggs... it bankrupts the farmer. But Chavez and Maduro don't care, setting the price of goods and food at low prices is temporarily popular... until the shelves stay empty because who in their right mind would raise chickens at a loss.

When oil made up 90% of Venezuela's exports, it took oil dropping from 140$ to 40$ to bankrupt the country with no other industry to rely on for revenues.

So without oil money to pay for imports of basic necessities (since they devastated their own local producers of food and goods), the Bus Driver had to print money to buy those products. Bus Driver doesn't believe in inflation as an economic concept so he can just keep printing endless money to pay for food ( for himself and his circle of cronies) without consequences! Inflation is at 80 000% for last year! Blame US sanctions though.

Sanctions made it worst, but the problem started when Chavez assumed power. All his failed economic reforms came to roost when he didn't have high oil prices to bail his failed economic reforms.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/mobile..../idUSKCN1GK0IV

Good article on price controls and how it effects companies operating. Companies simply close down, reduce production, idle the plant when they are hit with mandatory price controls.

Believing in price controls as an economic tool is simply not understanding how to actually govern a country!

As a way to solve inflation, Maduro deleted like 2-3 zeroes off the currency a few months ago, preventing ridiculous denominations.

He's also tried to convert his oil reserves into a crypto currency.

Quite the powerful mind.

a dumb internet poster became a congresswoman!

forgetting for a second that she is tacitly supporting one of the world's worst dictators by saying there must be a "dialogue"...

and the fact that the US is not backing a coup, but instead a democratic transition as outlined by the Venezuelan constitution (which Maduro dispensed with)...

there's also the fact that she labels them a "far right opposition" when they're like ever so slightly to the right of straight up communism.

Just so ****ing stupid. And we now have a new leader in the clubhouse for dumbest Congressional tweet this year, displacing this braindead one from a couple weeks ago.

So maybe it's just poor decisions by the economic central planners. In the US when egg producers can't make it, the government just buys up tons of eggs or billions of pounds of cheese. And then they give it to needy families. Too bad the Venezuelan central planners weren't as good as ours.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart...ese-180960296/

When the US government decides the price of an agricultural product is too high it just subsidizes the farmers.

By the way, why did all the corn growers in Mexico go broke?

Venezuela honestly needs a civil war to work itself out.

Either you starve to death or get shot by bullets.

The US doesn't subject its egg producers to price controls because it doesn't think egg producers are the economic enemy.

You have to protect your national industries, that means being pro business to a certain extent. Businesses are like crops, if you give it fertile soil it will grow. If you drain the soil of all the nutrients for short term gain, crops don't grow. Once in a while you have to subsidize the businesses to float it through the tough seasons.

She's not the only one!


https://twitter.com/SenSanders/statu...73771395596293


https://twitter.com/RoKhanna/status/1088302692001300480


I am not fully on their side, but watching a former climate change denier talk down to anyone who doesn't have total faith in the United States and their history of regime change sure is making me want to be!

I guess there have been a lot of tough seasons for agriculture in the US in the last 70 years.

The US is terrible at deciding what should be done in international conflicts and 100% we should defer to like the UN, Mexico, The Vatican, the International Association of Lighthouse Keepers or something like that.

"A US backed coup is a bad idea" sounds like a good idea!

Sander's statement is obviously fine, Khana's post is ridiculously stupid, but neither one approach the idiocy of Ilhan. Oh and by the way, the dictator she wants to have a dialogue with killed 20 of his own people during the protests earlier this week according to the UN -- his latest foray into killing or imprisoning people who disagree with him. A dialogue, indeed.

And it's not about disagreeing (which is why the Sanders statement is fine to me), it's about saying ridiculously stupid things that are not true or are incredibly misleading. Like, for instance, someone posting "former climate change denier" as if I have ever denied it, which I have not ever done.

Do you get the difference between stupid and wrong things, and laying out the facts/disagreeing like Sanders did?

Domer,

Should the US invade Venezuela?

Are there any of our medical students there in jeopardy?

No basis for that.

The next lever the US has to pull is halting all business with Maduro. 75% of the cash that Maduro receives from outside of Venezuela is from exporting oil to the United States. If the US cut them off, rerouting this oil for cash elsewhere would be a cumbersome and possibly impossible task, due to the nature of their type of oil.

CITGO is also in the hands of Maduro, and could theoretically be transferred to Guaido.

Telling people to "google it" for non-obvious claims is a sign you are losing the argument and are bad at arguing.

Part of the problem is that the US's voice (for better or worse) carries more weight, generally speaking, than that of most/any other nation. If people cared about the US recognizing whomever as much as when, say, Senegal recognizes whomever, that would make this less of a problem. That sounds like a better system to aspire to, anyway.

We have a President who has literally ripped children from their parents, some of whom have then died in our custody, who refused to condemn literal nazis running over and killing peaceful protesters, not to mention enabling of genocide in Yemen and apartheid in Palestine -- should the international community be supporting a coup in the US? Should they refuse to recognize the President as our leader and declare the leader to be whom is most aligned with their business interests?

I would aspire to the UN taking the lead and the US just being member state, or in this case perhaps the Union of South American Nations or something. Not Senegal; maybe the International Association of Lighthouse Keepers. The US doesn't have to be completely out of it, but needs to stop being the absolute world leader - for the good of the world.

They did that already and it was Trump. That's why Venezuela paid $500k to help put on his inauguration.

Trump, the EC, Canada etc have declared a man president, a man who has received precisely zero votes from the Venezuelan people. The objective of this is to restart the coup attempt of 2002 precisely because the country holds the largest oil reserves and will not play fiddle to US diktats. If the coup is successful there will be a massacre followed by the installation of yet another far right government on the continent.
Also much hypocrisy from the eu when macron has 20% favourability and is tear gassing and locking up demonstrators. I hereby recognise only melanchon as the French president.