Many countries have "tried to stave off decline by decreeing how the economy would work." Including the US.

Eg, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incomes_policy .

In the US, Truman placed the railroad under US military control in 1950, and I recall at least threats of having military take over coal mines both in the US and UK, because of worker strikes.

What Venezuela has in common with the late Empire is that economic controls are pervasive, without the sort of punitive completeness you'd find in the USSR, or China under Mao. While few controls works, and being a police state sort of works (if there are free-market economies whose products you can copy), this middle strategy doesn't work well at all.

> this middle strategy doesn't work well at all

I will translate your suggestion like this:

-Either be a full-on dictatorship OR

-Be a modern democratic state

Yup, that’s how it is. CGP Grey has a good video on that, “The Rules For Rulers”: https://youtu.be/rStL7niR7gs

Yes, it's dangerous trying to cross between those poles of stability on the J Curve.

It's been a while, but I think Venezuela was one of Ian Bremmer's prime examples.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0743274725/

And thats basically what we have in the world in terms of relatively stable regimes. Nothing in between.

If "stable" merely means "persisting over time", then all kinds of between regimes have been very stable...

Such as what kind of regimes?

All of Latin America, Eastern Europe, etc has been having such regimes for ages...

China that infinite8s mentions in his comment could also be considered as such.

Heck, Franco's Spain lasted for 30+ years...

China is in the middle.

China has only been in the middle for very, very short time. Let's see where they are 50 years from now.

>and being a police state sort of works (if there are free-market economies whose products you can copy)

That's an ideological statement. One can be a "police state" and has advanced technology and products -- free market not required.

In fact most of the technical and product developments in 18th and 19th century took place in markets quite far from "free", and of course Nazi Germany (the de fact "police state") was quite competent technologically.

> Many countries have "tried to stave off decline by decreeing how the economy would work." Including the US.

> Truman placed the railroad under US military control in 1950

These seem like non-sequiturs to me. The economy in the 50s was booming. Truman took control of the trains to mitigate the effects of a worker strike during wartime, when it was important that the trains be running efficiently.

I found the original comment to be a non-sequitur. I gave examples of other historical cases which fit that description to suggest that there wasn't enough detail for it to be useful or insightful.

>Many countries have "tried to stave off decline by decreeing how the economy would work." Including the US...In the US, Truman placed the railroad under US military control in 1950

You're using this as an example of fending off economic decline?

> GDP Growth Rate in the United States...[reached] an all time high of 16.90 percent in the first quarter of 1950...

https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gdp-growth

No. The link I gave lists examples of countries which tried to impose nation-wide economic controls, including revolutionary France, Nixon's price controls in the 1970s, and Zimbabwe's price freeze in 2007.

The referenced article concerns oil mining placed under military control, so I thought it was relevant to point out that the US has also placed privately owned critical infrastructure under military control.

If there's any meaning to my comment, it's the suggestion to look to more recent history for compelling analogies, rather than ancient Rome.

You explicitly quoted the part about economic decline, and indeed this was critical to the sort of scenario Montrose was referring to. His comment isn't suggesting that Rome be taken as the best historical case study for understanding Venezuela today, but rather that Venezuala might give us a sense of the on-the-ground human element during the decline of Rome.

We can look to the troubles of almost any country to look for something which "might give us a sense of the on-the-ground human element during the decline of Rome."

Where is there notable about Venezuela which makes this comparison insightful? Wouldn't it be more insightful to compare it to, say, the decline of the British Empire?

Has Venezuela, like Rome, had a long series of costly wars (including civil wars) which took money out of the government coffers?

Has Venezuela, like Rome, lost a revenue source by no longer being able to expand into new territory?

Does Venezuela have anything like the Vandal pirates which disrupted Roman trade?

Has it undergone a partition like that of the Eastern and Western Roman Empires, where the money diverted into strengthening Constantinople meant that Rome was less defended against invasion?

Is the Venezuelan military increasingly peopled by foreign soldiers of fortune who have little loyalty to the country and might instead attack it?

Because all I get from the comparison is that there's hyperinflation going on caused by poor government and a loss of income. Which has been true of a lot of countries.

The thing that is notable about the decline of Venezuela is that it's happening now, when we can make direct observations rather than reconstructing things from the historical records.

If I am betrayed by a friend and say "this is what Caesar must have felt like", I am not saying that my friend's betrayal is the most like that of Caesar's, nor that Caesar's betrayal is the most similar historical betrayal to my mine. It just means "oh, now I know more about what that feels like".

Which is a trite comparison for almost all cases.

I lost a glove. What I felt must be like what Luke Skywalker felt when he lost his hand.

I set a PR of 7:15 on running a mile. That must be like what Bannister felt when he broke the 4 minute mile.

But montrose made more than a simple comparison. The implication is that high-level government attempts to control economic policy is what lead to the similarity.

I disagree that assessment, and pointed to other attempts at high-level government control of economic policy, with a variety of results, to show that there isn't a strongly causal connection.

Plus, there are other factors which are involved. Why should we think that the views of Romans in the late Western Roman Empire were similar to what's going on in Venezuela now?

Hey, never let the facts get in the way of a good bit of whataboutism...

Never get looking at all the facts and having a perspective go in the way of complaining against whataboutism...

>tried to stave off decline by decreeing how the economy would work.

So, a tried and tested way (from the ancient Greek loan relief [1], to laws to suppress the Great Depression, to all kinds of monetary policies used worldwide), except in periods of cultural and political decline.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seisachtheia

>decreeing how the economy would work

Every country decrees how their economy should work. That's what central banks, laws, regulatory bodies and fiscal spending are all about.

Venezuela's economy is tanking because it was so heavily dependent upon oil revenue and because oil prices collapsed. That really is it. This isn't about socialism or capitalism or central planning or markets. This is all about oil, dutch disease caused by oil and political and economic instability caused by the fight over those resources.

The same thing happened in the 90s when Venezuela could hardly be called socialist and the resulting economic and political turmoil propelled Chavez in to power. Back then it was all "capitalism's fault".

Of the countries 'blessed' with massive natural resources - relative to the size of the economy, I can think of precisely one that hasn't been fucked up by it.

Edit: -2 points and 0 counter-arguments. Apparently the idea that Venezuela (along with African and Middle Eastern countries), with vast natural resources get screwed up politically and economically by them is not a popular one, but nobody really wants to say why they think that...

Whilst "Dutch disease" is a well established if not uncontentious theory, Venezuela has suffered notably worse effects in response to oil price downturns to every other oil-dependent country, and it's difficult not to see a link between that and the government's extreme antagonism to non-oil businesses and longstanding currency mismanagement (as well as the less-unusual corrupt control of the oil itself by regime-linked kleptocrats)

>Venezuela has suffered notably worse effects in response to oil price downturns to every other oil-dependent country

Largely because there are few countries that are quite that oil dependent. Russia's a screw up but even they aren't as oil dominated as Venezuela, for instance.

I suppose there's Iraq...

>the government's extreme antagonism to non-oil businesses

This antagonism dates back to the 2001 coup in which the leaders of those non-oil businesses banded together in an attempt to unseat Chavez and replace the democratically elected government with tanks.

Generally this kind of behavior is strongly frowned upon, when it's done against a government that is friendly to the US. But, when it is done against a government that nationalized US oil interests, the propaganda wheel spins the other way: as you said, "it's not them that were hostile to him, it's him that is too hostile to them".

Anyways, can point fingers all you like in that conflict (and all sides do), but the fact remains that the conflict simply would not have happened without the spoils of the oil resources to fight over.

Corruption was similarly driven by the vast natural resources, just as happens in Africa, in the Middle East, in Russia... in every country in the world with vast economy-dominating natural resources except that sole unafflicted country - Norway.

There's plenty of countries which derive as much or more income per capita from oil as Venezuela, and few of them are known for having other sources of income (though with the possible exception of wartorn Libya they've certainly done more to encourage them and less to discourage them than the Venezuelan government). For the most part they are (like their non-oil rich neighbours) not exactly bywords for good governance or equitable wealth distribution, but large segments of their population are not on the brink of starvation as a result of oil prices being below early 2014 levels whilst still high by historic standards.

It stretches credulity even further to believe that Venezuela's disastrous economic policies were the necessary and unavoidable consequence of a oil company strikes and short-lived military coup 16 years ago which was as unsuccessful as Castro's own attempts to overthrow an elected government with tanks a decade earlier. Especially not with periodic coup attempts and more regular mass strikes being an occupational hazard of being a Latam president regardless of oil wealth or lack thereof.

>Of the countries 'blessed' with massive natural resources - relative to the size of the economy, I can think of precisely one that hasn't been fucked up by it.

Norway ?

What about Australia, although as an Australian we do manage to mess us quite a lot of the natural bounty we inherited.

Australia's economy is not even close to being dominated by natural resources. Your mining boom also isn't that old (only about 10 years).

Nonetheless, it doesn't appear to be having a positive effect on your politics. Imagine if people like Gina Rinehart started to dominate.

Yes, Norway.

And managed to do it for 1000 years until religious extremists destroyed Constantinople in a terrorist attack.

While the Ottomans were far from perfect (and I learned a lot about the bad things they did back in school in Romania), you might want to crack open a history book.

Here, let me get you started: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mehmed_the_Conqueror#Administr...

I'm talking about the 4th Crusade: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Constantinople_(1204)

Look back at your comment and tell me with a straight face that it was reasonable for anyone to figure that out on his own :)