Socialist economic policies, given enough time eventually fail, and fail spectacularly:
IQUITOS, Peru — Venezuela took its strongest step yet toward one-man rule under the leftist President Nicolás Maduro as his loyalists on the Supreme Court seized power from the National Assembly in a ruling late Wednesday night.
The ruling effectively dissolved the elected legislature, which is led by Mr. Maduro’s opponents, and allows the court to write laws itself, experts said.
The move caps a year in which the last vestiges of Venezuela’s democracy have been torn down, critics and regional leaders say, leaving what many now describe as not just an authoritarian regime, but an outright dictatorship.
“What we have warned of has finally come to pass,” said Luis Almagro, the head of the Organization of American States, a regional diplomacy group that includes Venezuela and is investigating the country for violating the bloc’s Democratic Charter.
Complete text:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/30/...-court-takes-power-from-legislature.html?_r=0
Using Venezuela to attack socialism is a bit like using the Democratic Republic of Congo to try to attack democracy or republicanism. Or, for that matter, it would be like using its precursor, Zaire, to attack anti-communism, given the fact that the kleptocratic dictator who drove Zaire into unimaginable poverty and human suffering, Mobutu Sese Seko, was a staunch anti-communist who was propped up for years by the US for that very reason.
Without pluralism, genuine democracy, and a respect for human rights, any economic system is doomed to bring about great suffering, whether it's nominally capitalistic, socialistic, or anything else. Some countries that have adopted many of the ideas of socialism have produced very high quality of life for their people. Others are absolute hell-holes. The same is true for some countries that have adopted many of the ideas of capitalism.
Another example of capitalistic failure would be Uganda. Uganda is, in some ways, a lot more capitalist than the US. The minimum wage hasn't been boosted in over three decades. They have almost no labor or environmental regulations to curb the abuses of the market. There is an unregulated market in snake-oil medical cures and even
child sacrifice is run like a business. It's a highly entrepreneurial nation, where people run little ad hoc enterprises selling goods by the side of the road to make ends meet. For years, they've been focused on further privatizing the country. It's a country open to vulture capitalists from abroad to extract the rich natural resources while doing little for the locals. They look in many ways like the pre-Progressive Era US, right down to the millions of child laborers.
Uganda is one of the worst places in the whole world to live. Venezuela is more than seven times as wealthy, in GDP/capita terms, and Venezuelans live about twenty years longer, on average, than Ugandans. And there are no shortage of people who blame capitalism for the fact that a nation as natural-resource-rich as Uganda could be so desperately poor:
http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/lashonors/4/
https://freeuganda.wordpress.com/2010/02/24/capitalism-is-the-curse-on-uganda/
http://www.monitor.co.ug/OpEd/Lette...our-society/806314-1854914-acln3az/index.html
Our embracing of the capitalistic economy has not only impoverished our society but has partly dehumanised us. Many people have shamelessly ravaged the lives of their own kin so that they can become wealthy.
So, would it be fair to point to Uganda with a sarcastic "Capitalist Paradise Update," and imagine that establishes that capitalism is always bad? Of course not. We know that there are plenty of major countries that have integrated a lot of capitalist ideas into their systems with great results -- just as there are plenty that have integrated a lot of socialist ideas into their systems with great results.
In fact, every single major nation in history that has achieved decent generalized prosperity has integrated substantial aspects of both. That would include the US, Canada, Australia, Japan, and the nations of Western Europe. If there's a "secret sauce" for generalized prosperity, two of the major ingredients are capitalism and socialism. So, why has it worked fairly poorly for Venezuela and downright catastrophically for Uganda? It's because the other ingredients matter, too. You need to have a commitment to representative democracy, pluralism, human rights, and a long-term investment outlook.
One thing Venezuela and Uganda have in common is something they share with a number of other nations that on paper should be nice places to live, but in practice are nightmarescapes: they've got economies based on resource extraction. Saudi Arabia is similar. Resource extraction doesn't rely on an educated and highly skilled workforce, much less an empowered and politically engaged one. So, those countries don't tend to develop such populations. Resource extraction also distributes a huge portion of wealth to those who control the resource-rich lands, whether that's a handful of oligarchs in Russia, the government in a socialist country, or predatory multinational corporations in the third world. That results in vast corruption, as well as oppressive means to keep the have-nots in line.
Even within the US, the states that are more oriented towards resource extraction (e.g., Alaska, Texas, West Virginia), tend to be more dysfunctional than you'd expect for their level of wealth -- for example, in terms of GDP per capita, Alaska's our richest state, yet in terms of life expectancy, teen pregnancy, unemployment, scores of reading proficiency, graduation rates, infant mortality rates, etc., it tends to range between mediocre and god-awful. And, of course, their political scene is wildly screwed up, elevating flakes like Stevens and Palin to positions of power.
So, I'd add one more ingredient to that "secret sauce," and that's a broad-based, value-adding economy. Although a country with a narrow recourse-extraction economy can prosper in terms of GDP, as long as those resources are priced well enough, the longer it goes with that kind of extraction focus, the more socially and politically demented it will become.
