Ever since Chavez imposed complete controls on the food and agriculture sector of his nation, there have been more and more and more shortages of food than ever.
Hugo Chavez does not understand! Why doesn’t his industrial policy in agriculture not work?! Why did his price controls leave his country starved?!
So he did the only thing he could and blamed private businesses who barely exist in the food and agriculture sector anymore, accusing them of “hoarding and smuggling”. It’s the unfalsifiability of his anti-imperial agenda.
If I had to estimate the IQ of South American leaders, I doubt it would go beyond two digits. Interestingly, politicians who opposed the Office of Price Administration in the US were people without economics education, but with simple common sense. This is the difference between evil Americans and noble Venezuelans.
I always scratched my head when I would hear my Political Science professor tell us that we should look up to the leadership of men like Hugo Chavez because their policies work (post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy) and they are popular with the people. The professor also doubted that the world was better off today with globalisation than 100 years ago.
Honestly, it frustrates me to no end how most of these “educators” are impervious to not only reality, but to being laid off as well. But, then again experiences such as this one were the driving force into pushing me towards finance, so everything happens for a reason.
We assume Chavez is a man with an ulterior motive.
He has unfortunately conducted public actions that would not have made a man popular, powerful, or liked - the truth is that he is an idealist.
If he weren’t an idealist, he wouldn’t have expelled the entire Israeli embassy over Palestinian human rights issue. He is a typical college protester leftist hippy grown old.
He is simply cubanizing Venezuela. Don’t forget that hunger is a powerful weapon, as his own created food shortage increases he blames it on the greedy capitalist and incompetent government officials.
What Castro did in 2 years he will accomplish in less than 2 decades.
He is a funny guy anyways, I love listening to his nonsense speeches.
It’s a shame that so many innocent people must be mired in poverty because of his moronic policies, while we have brain dead professors cheering him on in America.
We assume Chavez is a man with an ulterior motive.
He has unfortunately conducted public actions that would not have made a man popular, powerful, or liked - the truth is that he is an idealist.
If he weren’t an idealist, he wouldn’t have expelled the entire Israeli embassy over Palestinian human rights issue. He is a typical college protester leftist hippy grown old."
Of course, conveniently for him, all of his solutions for improving his nation involve appropriating more authority for himself.
Are you suggesting that if Chavez were to read up on AE and realized that a free market would vastly improve the lives of his citizens, he would relinquish his control? Not sure if I buy that. In fact I would bet that someone who’s smart enough to exhibit Chavez’s political cunning is fully aware of the deficiencies of central planning. He just prefers a relatively less prosperous dictatorship where he’s the dictator to a relatively more prosperous market economy in which he would have no power over others.
He really is an idealist… he’s even proposed the unpopular move to allow gays to serve in the military. He let the people vote on it, they voted it down, but he supported it.
Its been discussed in another thread, but Venezuela gets tons of bad press. Much is justified, but I believe there is a lot of political motivation behind his opponents. Just focusing on the American media, they blast him non sequitur all the time. Every american thinks hugo chavez is as bad as saddam. Venezuela also has larger unconventional oil reserves than saudi arabia. You do the math. South America could become the new middle east in the next 20 years. At the risk of being a conspiracy theorist, it makes it a lot easier to go to war with venezuela if our citizens have been hating on him for decades.
Thank god he’s limited himself to, albeit destructive, economic policies. He hasn’t massacred hundreds of thousands of people or fought any stupid wars. His hands a relatively clean. If there’s one thing a state can do to undermine its credibility, it is to attack a peaceful nation.
Chavez calls himself a “socialist”, but his policies wouldn’t really win him love from socialists.
Socialists, like Marx, at least believed in industrial efficiency and opposed third-party interventions. Socialists, at least, also condemn price controls.
Because socialists see such actions as capitalist bourgeoisie doing populist things to throw a bone to the masses, instead of actually taking charge of industrial production and creating abundance for everybody.
It’s why Marxists used to call a heavily regulated mixed economy like India “capitalist”.
Perhaps Hugo Chavez plans his revolutionary socialism in the manner of James Burnham - Burnham once said that implementing labour laws and welfare state would not help the workers, but as popular leaders, they must drive to implement these things to show that they won’t work, so that they’ll accept the plans of revolutionary socialists.
Or perhaps not - perhaps Chavez is a statist who is simply a soi-disant socialist. Perhaps the rest here are correct that he just wants power.
I am not sure - the man just comes from many worlds.
No one gets stuck with policies they don’t like. Chaves is the typical Castoite tough anti-American ape that appeals to the frustrated communistic aspirations of Latin Americans. Trust me, my fellow citizens consigned us all to communism on similar grounds 60 years ago, I know about the mentality. Guys like him would have sprung up in every LA country hadn’t it been for US intervention. The rise of Chaves is only a sign of declining power.
If the rise of Chavez is a sign of declining US power, then US power hasn’t fallen enough.
The United States still treats South America as its little fiefdom, and still does whatever wants with it: including sending down its scouting planes down to their countries to spy on drug smugglers. I get that the state is supposed to be a monopoly of violence for the sake of enforcing law, but US could at least do that in its own specified jurisdiction, lest it condemn others for violating its borders, while violating theirs.
I wonder why all these charismatic nationalists in Ecuador, Argentina, Boliva, and Venezuela still are so soft on actually doing anything about American bullying of South American nations, while talking so much about it.
Because, you know, most of this bullying is crap that nobody really cares in their day by day. People rather do business and prosper then freaking out if some american plane is taking pictures of a coca plantation. And how the hell is Argentina bullied by the USA? They are a sub-tropical country without any major drug production, not all south america is a jungle, you know =P.
Actually the biggest agression that the USA do against SA countries is subsides. And that is a real bitch.
Hugo Chavez is hands down one the dumbest human beings on the face of the earth; no, that’s not an exaggeration. His price controls in agriculture and energy have caused food shortages and rolling blackouts, he’s imprisoning political rivals, he has the army police stores to ensure they don’t raise prices (which is why they just have empty shelves), he’s created a ridiculous and complicated means of devaluing the bolivar, worst inflation in south america for which there is some stiff competition with the morons running Argentina, Ecuador, Bolivia, etc. I have been saying this for quite some time and I will say it again: I truly believe within the next few years Venezuela will all out collapse; violent revolution, total chaos and destruction, hyperinflation, whatever it is - the country as we know it will be gone. I feel bad for the people down there that didn’t vote for that clown and now live in misery and poverty.
Apparently there are 4 million internal refugees in Colombia. I assume they care. Also if no one cares about Washington’s imperial influence in the region, how do you explain the extent of anti-American sentiment there?
Surely he has to come second, after whoever is running Colombia. There are 200,000 Colombian refugees in Venezuela. How many Venezuelan refugees in Colombia? However bad job he is doing of it, somebody across the border is making him look good in comparison.
Don’t buy for a second that your image of him is correct. Western media misrepresents him over and over again. There’s bad blood between America and Venezuela because the old government used to sell us oil at below market prices. Chavez doesn’t. He’s not in the pockets of our elites the way other south american leaders have been bribed by foreign “aid” organizations or threatened by our cia.
I don’t think Chavez’ policies are good for the country. Im most cases, they are downright stupid. My claims amount to saying that Chavez is merely better than the insular mercantilism run for the benefit of a small group of elites.
Corporate state < the majority’s state <<<<<< free market.
he’s already at price controls and currency devaluation… even with oil prices rising there will be a runaway boom soon or later… society is going to regurgitate the state once again…
Your claims involved quoting wikipedia to claim that Venezuela was growing in the double digits every year and poverty was decreasing which is honestly just delusional. It baffles me that in such a robustly growing economy there are massive food and energy shortages, empty store shelves, the military in the streets (and stores), imprisonment of political rivals, taking over the media, etc. This isn’t really a matter of some type of media “bias” - those are just facts, whether or not you think the aforementioned things are good is your opinion. I dislike the fascism here in the US but there is just simply almost no market whatsoever in Venezuela, let alone a distorted and hampered one. From what I see it looks as if it’s only a matter of time before the inevitable conclusion of socialism, the complete disintegration of society, occurs there.