this should not be held up as ANY KIND OF EXAMPLE whatever re: the efficacy of social safety net programs. it's simply a non-sequitur. the fact that you're even attempting to link them at all speaks poorly as to your own understanding of the situation and reveals your ideological agenda.
And also maybe it's an example how power can be purchased with social programs.
Also points. Gotta get those points. I hear someday I'll be able to cash them in for bad karma debt forgiveness.
> an example of why spending big on social programs doesn't produce long-lasting social benefits.
which is not a statement of opinion, but rather, is an unjustified assertion that conforms with your ideological agenda.
an opinion would have been something like "I prefer to vote for politicians that are fiscally conservative because I don't think the government has a good track record of implementing positive social change with spending programs"
but that's now what you said or how you said it. instead, you implied that social programs ANYWHERE AND EVERYWHERE are comparable in some meaningful way with a failed state that collapsed under the weight of corruption and authoritarian dictatorship.
If you want to get into discussions on socialism, one might ask the question whether nationalization of industries presents an opportunity for corruption or if socialist ideology can present a cover for kleptocracy. It looks a lot like that's what happened in Venezuela.
Or are people just equating nationalizing the oil industry and making it illegal to get money out of the country with "social programs"?
I'd agree, though I think you could describe land redistribution as a 'social program.'
Taxation is the more reasonable way to do this. It is also confiscatory but it does so in a way where the level of duress is much reduced, and representation, agency, and participation are possible.
I would offer a provisional definition of a social spending program as a program with humanitarian goals that is funded by taxation. Land redistribution is not taxation (just pure confiscation) and so doesn't meet my definition of social program.
Maybe you think I'm just making a semantics argument and splitting hairs but I think its a meaningful difference. Land redistribution is the classic case of "peasant uprising gone bad".
This is like throwing out a carton of eggs because one of them broke.
There are only roughly 28 nations on earth with a GDP per capita over $20,000 for example.
I happen to find what the six or so best managed welfare states in Europe have accomplished, to be impressive. However, for every Sweden in Europe, there are two Bulgarias. Or there's France, which has seen economic stagnation for nearly a generation. Most of the well-managed welfare states have seen zero or near-zero economic growth for nearly a decade at this point, while their debt has exploded vastly higher as they try to fake-maintain their present standard of living by stealing from the future.
There is a continuum of social systems that can work, and whether it works mainly depends on confounding factors. History, culture fit, geography, neighbours. E.g. Sweden's been an empire most of its history; Bulgaria has been a colony. Check their performance in historical cohort perhaps? Sweden vs Turkey and Bulgaria vs Tajikistan?
Chavez' Venezuela system is well beyond the "habitable range" of governance. To present it as some condemnation of West European welfare states is ridiculous.
And their debts are so high because they had to bail out a deregulated finance sector, which caused a recession and major spike in unemployment, how is that a fault of a welfare state? You might as well argue the financial sector "stole from the future" by creating a decade long downturn. Quite the opportunity cost there.
http://www.cityam.com/article/1394655511/forget-nordic-socia...
We pretend there are clean examples, but everything is pretty messy, and we rarely get any pure test cases for any economic philosophy.
Macro is black arts. "Avoid price controls" and "don't print boatloads of money" seem like reasonable guidelines. Beyond that, who knows? Corruption's bad but hard to stop. Moving risk around is (sometimes)* bad but hard to stop. Shrug and try not to do anything too extreme.
* Insurance is a beneficial example.
The point isn't that the "textbook" definition of socialism is bad. The point is that every single real world attempt at getting to socialism has been bad, so why wouldnt future attempts run into the same problems?
I'll freely admit there have been numerous failed socialist states. Very few self-proclaimed socialist states have even attempted to implement socialism. Many who claimed to be socialist were destroyed by capitalist states[1]. Some attempts for free states have been crushed by other self-identified socialists[2] but it's of course impossible to know if these groups would be socialist in the long term. Socialism is inherently horizontalist, which means it doesn't fit into the model of centrally controlled countries, making it very hard to achieve for any extended period of time.
The only current socialist experiment I'm aware of is Syrian Kurdistan, Rojava, which is trying to promote a co-op based economy based, while reducing the damage private ownership can do.
Imagine you tried to have a capitalist revolution in feudal Europe. Can you imagine that would go very well? Probably not. It's easy to see why capitalism is an improvement over feudalism, but it's hard to comprehend how long it took to get there. Similarly socialism, if it is ever achieved, is probably going to fought against by the established order tooth and nail. This is certainly no excuse for the failures and crimes of vanguard communist parties[3]. All this humble fellow would ask is people take the time to educate themselves on what socialists actually want before presenting critique.
[1] This category is almost beyond enumeration, Reagan Doctrine, Guatemala, domino theory, Vietnam, etc. etc. etc.
[2] My history isn't great but I believe these count: Revolutionary Catalonia, the Black Army, Kronstadt rebellion, there are probably more, especially in relation to the Russian Civil War of 1917-1922
[3] As an aside, I don't believe vanguard parties are the way to go
It's a bit of a straw man to present failed attempts at cold fusion when critiquing cold fusion itself.
Communist revolutionaries genuinely did attempt to implement socialism. The fact that so many failed should make one question the wisdom of attempting their approach. Perhaps the fatal flaw in socialism is only in it's revolutionary nature and a more conservative approach in it's implementation is warranted? Interesting hypothesis, but I'd like to see more data.
"Imagine you tried to have a capitalist revolution in feudal Europe. Can you imagine that would go very well? "
I dunno, I believe that's usually called the Industrial Revolution.
European feudalism was over by about ~1500, the Industrial Revolution started in about ~1750, but it certainly makes for a cute soundbite. People on the left often cite the enclosures[1] in England as the beginnings of capitalism. Laws such as vagrancy[2] laws were in place to force people to work, land which was previously agreed to be communal was taken into private hands. If you consider this to be a 'capitalist revolution' then it could easily be argued
[1] This has a lot to do with the lefts definition of capitalism, which I recognise is not universal so enclosures being the origin of capitalism isn't an argument which is likely to be fruitful, especially on HN.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vagrancy_(people)#United_Kingd...
The problem is that "every single real world attempt at getting to socialism" has been inspired by the same ( bad ) implementors, using the same ( bad ) mechanisms, without anyone trying to implement socialism from scratch by going back to the source of the ideology as opposed to looking at other dictators who used the premise of socialism to get into power without actually caring about socialism itself.
Venezuela is a corrupt place with socialism being implemented as a means to launder money as opposed to implement social safety programs, it's the same as the "Democratic" Republic of Korea or Congo.
Capitalism wouldn't really help a corrupt country like Venezuela, but Socialism was making some good progress in another Latin American country... Nicaragua, weren't it for the Contras. The rest is history.
By comparison the USSR, China, and North Korea all pay / paid some lip service to communism, but if you look at the people at the top it was not even close to communism.
PS: The real world is complicated. If you promote revolution you generally don't get whatever the revolutions talking points where.
Agreed, China has not been communist for some time now.
"It has only failed before so it probably won't succeed" is just a straight up logical fallacy.
But Venezuela's example really tells us nothing about market-oriented welfare states, like the US and much of the EU.
Even Saudi Arabia -- which does redistribute oil wealth like Venezuela and is far from the enlightened Norweigian policy -- is smart enough not to draw down the seed corn.
And are you seriously claiming the only thing stopping West Virginia from this kind of downward spiral, is free highways from Uncle Sam?
You mean like Saudi Aramco? That little company with $380bn of revenue (about 4 times larger than google but with the same number of employees?). /s
edit: meant to reply to parent
Chavez's "Bolivar Revolution" was a farce to get rid of his opponents and seize power as a strongman. In that, he succeeded. When the price of oil was high, it worked. Now, well... His legacy is a once great nation left in ruin, and many desperate people. It is sad stuff.
There's also plenty of history of corrupt right-wing governments with market economies in South American that were just as miserable, so I'm hesitant to say social programs did this. There are plenty of social democratic governments around the world that aren't corrupt failed states.
Different markets have different needs. I disagree with socialism for all things. There are some things, where i think it's the best system we have. Air quality is a good example. Everybody needs air and it's hard to separate mine from yours. So, collective ownership with collective decisions about how much pollution is to be allowed makes sense to me.
http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2010/12/10/131784161/what-...
Remember when the far left held Hugo Chavez up as the paragon of modern socialism? People pleasing in a petro-state is easy when oil is $150+ a barrel.
It's also easy to let "just a little" corruption ride along as a political price for getting things done.
Problem is, "just a little" corruption always becomes "a bit more" corruption and then "way too much" corruption. And while the good and the corrupt engage in battle royale for limited resources, the poor and hungry are soon forgotten.
This is especially true when corruption is rife. In countries with high corruption, it seems the very best thing to do is to limit as much as possible how much money flows from the top, which is another way of saying limit federal government spending.