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Venezuela: Cheap Television Sets For All!
solareagle writes "Venezuelan President Maduro has declared war on 'bourgeois parasites' by taking over Daka, an electronics retailer similar to Best Buy. USA Today reports, 'National guardsmen, some of whom had assault rifles, were positioned around outlets of [Daka] ... Maduro has ordered to lower prices or face prosecution. Thousands of people lined up at the Daka stores hoping for a bargain after the government forced the companies to charge "fair" prices. "I want a Sony plasma television for the house," said Amanda Lisboa, 34, a business administrator who waited seven hours outside a Caracas store ... "It's going to be so cheap!" "This is for the good of the nation," Maduro said, referring to the military's occupation of Daka. "Leave nothing on the shelves, nothing in the warehouses Let nothing remain in stock!" Maduro said his seizures are the 'tip of the iceberg' and that other stores would be next if they did not comply with his orders.'"
People said that the characters in Atlas Shrugged were two-dimensional cardboard cutouts and that real life is totally not like that... I guess they never went to Venezuela.
They also said that Ayn Rand would leave us in some sort of post-apocalyptic world with no police, firemen, schools, or anything basic services. Who knew that the entire city government of Detroit for the last 40 years were all a bunch of secret Ayn Rand worshipers who have finally put her dreams into action!?!?!?!??
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
Get it now, because no one in their right might is going to import electronics into Venezuela anytime soon.
Isn't vaguely socialist dictatorship great?
Yes. Source: I live in Venezuela.
Oblivion Awaits
'National guardsmen, some of whom had assault rifles, were positioned around outlets of [Daka] ...
FIRE! Sale
and nothing to wipe their asses with
Don't get sick, fuckers.
I hope your workplace is safe from this type of thing.
Yes and as stupid as it sounds. This will work for a short while. Every person of means is probably desperately trying to leave. Once the "bargains" are gone, there will be no more product. Price controls drive growth into the ground and set the stage to inflation when they are released. Next comes wage control, then shortages, rise in crime (fueled by black markets), persecution of the wealthy, then hollowing out the middle class, and finally riots and needless death.
Yeah. It's real. And the ironic part is that Chavez died at just the right time that a lot of people are going to look back on his rule as the good ole days. The path he laid out was utterly unsustainable, but was pleasant in the sort term for a lot of the people who ended up on the right end of his ultimately self-defeating economic policies. A lot of what he did was paying for things on credit against oil that wasn't even pumped yet. The wheels would have come off the bus eventually, but now they're going to come off while Maduro's driving, not Chavez. And people will blame Maduro (not that he doesn't have it coming as well, as is obvious from this article).
Prices are so high in Venezuela because of inflation and exchange control. A dollar is worth 6.30 Bs according to the government but it's nearly impossible to get them, so you have to search in the black market where it goes for at least 60 Bs. This store (Daka) though wasn't importing merchandise, so the prices were not just, but since it was allied with the government, it was allowed to sell at whatever prices: something happened, either they screwed up or this is just an election ploy (there are elections next month). Now, the rest of the affected stores ARE importing, and why would they do it now? Since Venezuela's production is nearly zero, this will only lead to broke merchants, and less market fluidity. And these "cheap television sets"? They are being sold at three or four times their price in the black market. As ussual, Chavists are breaking this country apart.
Oblivion Awaits
at least not sane ones. If anyone knows the background on this though I'd love to hear it. This sounds more like a political attack on the owner of the store. I'm all for getting electronics into the hands of those less fortunate. But do it like Britain used to do with the old Z (that's Zed)x, not like this...
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Thanks. Fortunately, it is, but at some point this madness will hit everything in the country.
Oblivion Awaits
They will probably end up eating them, since there is a food shortage as well. Also, toilet paper shortage.
Oblivion Awaits
since when is it a national right to have big screen tvs...or tvs of any size?
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
Thailand last non-elected Prime Minister tried to buy popularity in a similar way, by capping sugar prices very low. The penalty he introduced was 7 years in prison!
Sugar producers smuggled the sugar and sold it across the border, others abandoned crops since it wasn't worth the cost of the fertilizer.
There was a sugar shortage after that.
(comment snipped due to NSA surveillance).
Without Zimbabwe, I'd never have achieved my dream of becoming a Trillionaire.
Suck on that, Bill Gates.
at least not sane ones
You may indulge some high-minded socialist fantasy, but the millions of muppets your side takes its support from are exactly this kind of feral animal, and you know it.
If anyone knows the background on this
Election coming up. Maduro is buying votes.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
This would be a good start. Everything you have over 500 million? Gone. Belongs to the other 99% now.
Thanks for doing your part so well. You rich have truely served your purpose for the greater good.
But nah. never happen. instead it's going to get more and more unequal until people have to die.
We're pretty much past the point where that happened other times in history. So we're getting overdue.
It's gonna get nasty and violent. The wealth WILL be redistributed. And the longer it takes the worse it will be.
Should be entertaining at least. Hope i see it in my lifetime.
That seems like an odd example. I thought that Sinclair hated government involvement in business (unless he could get money without losing control, anyway).
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Detroit has been run by Democrats for decades.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
can you then tell are the "fair" prices high enough that they can restock or did venezuela just fuck up over-the-table electronics retailing for good in the country?
if the prices are't high enough then it's a short term robbery solution really..
I mean who the fuck would officially import ANYTHING to the country after this if they might e forced to sell the inventory at a lower price than what they paid for it...
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
more the educational one. The UK gov't pushed heavy on computers in education. In the States Apple practically gave them away, and Microsoft famously turned defeat into victory when they 'gave' millions of Windows licenses to schools as part of their Anti-trust settlement with Sun/Java.
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history has shown siding with the rich works much, much better. I'm not asking that rhetorically either. What's so different about Valenzuela that buying votes this way would work (meekly hoping for a rational, well informed answer instead of more Ayn Rand inspired wargaharble... :( ).
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I remember all the morons on Slashdot who thought Chavez was the best thing since sliced bread and wanted the U.S. to follow in his footsteps.
don't worry when they mean "all" it means friends of the soldiers(who can then resell for the real street price, since supplies are very, very limited, due to nobody, not even government, exchanging money at the official rate! that's what I gathered.).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Gotta keep the masses happy in whatever way.
> It's not safe to do legitimate business in Venezuela anymore.
He seized five shops in a country of 29 million people. Don't you think you're being a little alarmist proclaiming the end of imports?
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Hello from Australia.
Minimum wage here is $16.37 AUD ($15.23 USD).
Seems pretty prosperous.
Without food, you won't need toilet paper. Problem solved!
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Comes with an activation fee, requiring an online activation of the set involving contacting the manufacturer's activation partner to purchase a turn-on code, after purchased from the store, payable in Bitcoins.
With a rebate available, upon submisison of the receipt showing the dollar amount actually paid for the set.
It's enough if you exchange the Venezuelan currency to dollars at the official exchange rate. Of course only a complete fool would exchange dollars for bolivars at the official exchange rate. If you do at the rate people who actually do have dollars will agree to, then the store is only getting like 10% of what they paid for the electronics.
He forgot to add: " If you like your current TV set, you can keep your current TV set. "
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Venezuela sells oil to the world and receives US dollars in exchange. Dollars are NOT freely available for the common citizen. They are granted through much bureaucratic processes (institutions named CADIVI, SICAD and so on). Foreign exchange controls have set an official rate of 6,3 BsF per 1 US dollar, which are hardly obtainable as previously mentioned. A black market that widely operates outside the foreign exchange controls have set the price at around almost TEN times that amount (60,00 BsF as of today). Since Venezuela's inflation rates are going through the roof, people want to protect their money by obtaining dollars instead. Small businesses have imported goods using black market dollars [again, dollars are seldom available to the common folk], thus having to inflate prices ten times to protect their investments. This workaround upset the government and a crackdown ensued. Thus, many of these businesses are forced to sell at ludicrously low prices and subsequently shut down for good. Protip: there's a hefty election day in less than a month. With a raging food shortage that has been going on for many months, this was seen as a populist move to turn the balance back on their favour at the expense of dozens of legit businesses that got caught in this loop. Greetings from warm, sunny, and recently HDMI'zed Venezuela.
> Every day in Saudi Arabia
The Saudi regime doesn't act like crazy paranoid nutbags out to get us or out to convince their own citizens that we are out to get them.
That does alter the equation a bit.
As far as "atttacks on Venezeula" go, I see much more of that in European news sources as American ones just tend to ingore Venezeula and leave them to their self inflicted misery.
If anything, you're the frothing bigot here distorting reality by whatever means necessary to justify your little hate-gasm.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Prosperity can, in fact, be legislated (I think that even libertarian minarchists will agree that government is necessary, at minimum, to protect private property).
But you certainly don't do it by basically taking all goods currently present in the country, and splitting them equally among everyone, all while printing money.
Yes, because it's been such a disaster in the countries that have implemented it.
The UK, Australia, Canada, France, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, The Netherlands, New Zealand - some of the many countries that have set minimum wage at $10+ an hour. And many of those countries have socialist healthcare too! Scandalous!!
I like massages with happy endings, and my guess is that so do 150 million other Americans.
"His name was James Damore."
Free-market/Austrian economics predicts that inflationary expansion of fiat currency inevitably results in government implementation of price controls. We are just conditioned to see the Venezuelan version as ridiculous whereas the 'Murican version is far, far more damaging.
No Inflation Taxation without Representation
What's really going to make this thing sting is that it is illegal to fire or lay people off in Venezuela. I guarantee you that this is going to cause their profits to dry up really fast. What happens when there's no money to pay the workers? The management gets sent to jail? Executed? I'm sure that will work out real nice.
Entrepreneurism is well known to be what drives economies. What's going to happen when people realize that starting a business in Venezuela is a bad idea? (Hell, they probably already do at this point; Venezuela will probably see foreign investment dry up very fast as a result of this, assuming it hasn't already.)
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
And they also robbed Exito, the Colombian grocery store chain, and 65 percent of the food imported comes from Colombia. Thank god I do not live there.
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
It's enough if you exchange the Venezuelan currency to dollars at the official exchange rate. Of course only a complete fool would exchange dollars for bolivars at the official exchange rate. If you do at the rate people who actually do have dollars will agree to, then the store is only getting like 10% of what they paid for the electronics.
No, you didn't read the story. Importers specifically said they could not purchase replacements of the TVs Washers/Dryers at the official exchange rates.
Importers complain that there is such a shortage of dollars they are having to buy them on the black market to import inventory at a good price. If they were to charge clients based on obtaining the dollars at the official rate, they say they would make no profit.
If you buy on the black market with dollars, you can get a washer/dryer cost $650, which is about what you would pay in the states shopping at the low end devices at Lowes or Sears. But at the official exchange rate, re-sellers can't survive.
So, the importers will simply not import. It really is that simple.
Its a political ploy by a party facing an election, and the currency will be devalued shortly after the election is held. For all the oil money Venezuela makes, they have never gotten a grasp of basic economics. If they want a command economy, they are going to have to start manufacturing their own goods, because nobody will sell to their importers at dictated prices.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Exactly. It's like saying Saudi Arabia is prosperous. Not to mention Australia is in the middle of the mother-of-all property bubbles right now.
Except Australia could be doing better, in particular the poor. Here's a quick recap of studies by Stossel on minimum wage in Australia. I also recommend you check out the Roy Morgan polls and studies regarding unemployment and under-employment in Australia.
Quote:
In a 2004 study published in the Australian Economic Review, economist Andrew Leigh looked at what happened after Western Australia increased its minimum wage compared to the rest of Australia.
He found: "Relative to the rest of Australia, the [percentage of people employed] in Western Australia fell following each of six [minimum wage] rises." (Study here [1], update here [2].)
Another Australian economist, John Humphrey, summarizes [3] the findings this way:
"[Leigh found] that for each 1 percent increase in the minimum wage we can expect... [to lose] 96,000 jobs" in Australia.
[1] http://andrewleigh.org/pdf/Minimum%20Wages%20(AER).pdf
[2] http://andrewleigh.org/pdf/Minimum_wages_reply.pdf
[3] http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/4064106.html
These comments are mine; I do not speak for my employer.
I don't think he was suggesting that the minimum wage was responsible for prosperity. He was merely pointing out that a (reasonable) minimum wage doesn't inevitably destroy prosperity the way the OP suggested it did.
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Minimum wage is a bit of a weird thing economically. In the standard way of thinking it punishes the poor because they're unable to generate enough revenue to justify the minimum wage and thus go unemployed. In practice it tends to work differently since employers hiring bottom level employees aren't calculating the additional revenue as much as they're looking to fill a hole in their business.
They'll generally pay whatever is required, within reason, to fill that position. If the minimum wage goes up all those people at the bottom get a raise. If necessary prices go up as well and you get some inflation to compensate but the main effect is a mild wealth transfer to the poor.
I stole this Sig
Exactly same happened with me
Didn't Sony stop making plasma TVs some time ago?
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
but so, you cannot buy 1 dollar for 7 bol(or whatever the official rate is) from the government, I suppose? but they will gladly take your dollar and give 7 bol?
thats what the government should have been fixing.. not robbing importers. it's their fault the importers can't buy dollars for so cheap.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
A minimum wage doesn't destroy prosperity but it doesn't create it either. A minimum wage simply raises the price of all goods and services, nullifying its intended benefit [of raising the living standards of the lower to lower-middle class]. Think someone working for minimum wage can afford property in Sydney? Ever compared the cost of goods and services there to the USA? Or compared the prices of US cities with a high minimum wage, such as San Francisco? (even before the tech boom).
Obviously this is a way to flip the bird at capitalism and most major banking cartels. However it's likely not the right way.
Really? Likely not the best way?
Banking cartels have nothing to do with this, and they aren't the ones getting hurt.
The Venezuelan importers have to buy inventory with real dollars, nobody will give them credit any more since they nationalized everything.
So the Importers are done. Out of business. They will take their last few squirreled away dollars and simply leave. (None of these importers is dumb enough to keep money in Venezuelan banks.)
No more imports for Venezuela. The banking cartels won't notice a thing.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
I don't know dude. National Guardsmen with assault weapons take over stores because the prices are too high? That seems a little wacky.
It's gonna get nasty and violent. The wealth WILL be redistributed. And the longer it takes the worse it will be.
Should be entertaining at least. Hope i see it in my lifetime.
Yes, the wealth will be redistributed... those with more power will acquire more wealth. When the inequality gets too large, the people currently with a lot of power will discover that they now have none... and a new group will rise to take their place.
A nation with equally distributed wealth is a nation with no power or incentive. Humans abhor a power vacuum.
bummer.
i've been to venezuela many times. it is a great place. the last time i was there the black market exchange was Bs.7 to $1. that was just 3 years ago. now it is Bs.60 to $1. a country with vast oil reserves should be investing not spending!
With this Maduro is killing the last vestiges of business. Nobody will start one because the government will just call them thieves and seize everything. Maduro is digging his own grave.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Don't worry, they still do. Socialists never let a little reality get in the way of their ideals.
Muppets on all sides of this one... smash and grab from Best Buy, and by extension the economy on one side, and destroying the environment and the middle class on the other. Extremism, tribalism and simplistic catchphrases are the enemy here.
No, you didn't read my comment.
Hence the "only a complete fool would exchange dollars for bolivars at the official exchange rate" in my comment.
No, it's the an excerpt from Atlas Shrugged. Don't worry though, Francisco D'Anconia blows up all the Venezuelan Best Buys before anyone gets to loot them.
but so, you cannot buy 1 dollar for 7 bol(or whatever the official rate is) from the government, I suppose? but they will gladly take your dollar and give 7 bol?
thats what the government should have been fixing.. not robbing importers. it's their fault the importers can't buy dollars for so cheap.
Anyone who knows how economics works has been chased out. This is what you get, a mentality that everything should be free and money magically appears. Not even socialists are this idiotic.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I live in Caracas. Parent is utter and complete bullshit. NO media in Venezuela is owned by foreign companies, and certainly not by US ones. Actually, the government owns more than half of all media companies, and constantly threatens privately-owned media with closure if they don't toe the official line. That is a threat that they've actually followed thru with more than once. Look it up yourself if you don't believe me. Parent is a Maduro shill or worse.
Yes, like all the people pumping gas, filling grocery store bags, etc. Full employment!
Or ... not. If you a make a job economically unproductive, it goes away. Businesses don't pay to lose money.
Yep. Looters gonna loot.
They sure looked happy ransacking the place in the video I've seen, just like the LA rioters. I don't think they're going to be too happy when they run out of things to steal, though.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Obviously this is a way to flip the bird at capitalism and most major banking cartels. However it's likely not the right way.
Really? Likely not the best way?
Banking cartels have nothing to do with this, and they aren't the ones getting hurt.
The Venezuelan importers have to buy inventory with real dollars, nobody will give them credit any more since they nationalized everything.
So the Importers are done. Out of business. They will take their last few squirreled away dollars and simply leave. (None of these importers is dumb enough to keep money in Venezuelan banks.)
No more imports for Venezuela. The banking cartels won't notice a thing.
Banks have.
Venezuelan bonds are plummeting. The country isn't going to be worth a plugged nickel.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
In 30 years, current Venezuela will be held as the prime example of how they ran a thinly-veiled dictatorship while the rest of the world looked the other side and refused to call a spade a spade. It takes lots of guts to call "democracy" a country where critics of the government never appear on live, unedited TV. It takes lots of guts to call "democracy" a country where the president forcefully takes control of the media airwaves every day. It takes lots of guts to call "democracy" a country where the government openly threatens its workers with dismissal if they're found to be voting "for the counter-revolution". It takes lots of guts to call "democracy" a country where the next election day (Dec.8) has been officially declared "Day of Fealty to Chavez".
um.. you do realize what would happen shortly thereafter right? Hint: it's not the radiant socialist utopia you're hoping for.
Yes, like all the people pumping gas, filling grocery store bags, etc. Full employment!
Or ... not. If you a make a job economically unproductive, it goes away. Businesses don't pay to lose money.
I understand and have sympathy for that argument. But in practice even a free employee needs things like paperwork, supervision, and co-workers. An employee so unproductive as to not justify the minimum wage could easily cause negative revenue.
There's a reason not every business accepts unpaid interns, lowering/eliminating the minimum wage probably won't make an appreciable dent in unemployment.
I stole this Sig
Why? He's doing an EXCELLENT job of flushing the country down the drain. All by his widdle lonesome self.
Eventually the people in his own country are going to wake up to the consequences of his policy of thuggery and theft.
At that point, if he actually survives the coup, it'll be a miracle.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
No, it has been in a death spiral for a while now.
The country is spending money like crazy while keeping their money printing presses running around the clock. Read the line in the article, "Venezuela's central bank said the country's money supply grew 70% in the past year." The currency is collapsing due to stupidity and power-grabs in government.
Many countries have seen this sort of thing happen, and it is not pretty. Wheelbarrows of money to buy bread, only accepting payment in foreign currency, and financial collapse are common with this scenario that is playing right now.
Zimbabwe did this about a decade ago as the currency collapsed. Collectors picked up the trillion dollar notes that were printed at the end of the collapse and worth practically nothing. I hope it doesn't happen but part of me thinks it would be fun to collect a billion bolivar note from the country if/when the collapse happens.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
s/socialists/ideologues
or
s/socialists/extremists
FTFY
The problem with debating this in terms of the minimum wage is that the value of money isn't a constant. An argument which works when the currency has a certain value might not work when the currency has a different value, even if the minimum wage stays exactly the same.
If you want to see what's really going on, you have to look at the wage in terms of individual productivity. If the minimum wage is significantly lower than the average amount of productivity generated by lowest-income workers, then raising the minimum wage will increase the country's overall productivity (an income distribution which is more proportional to individual productivity results in fewer people wasting money on extravagances like gold toilet seats). But if the minimum wage is close to the average amount of productivity generated by lowest-income workers, then raising it will simply result in their jobs disappearing. An employer would lose money hiring a worker because he'd end up paying the worker more money than he got back in terms of productivity.
While I do think the U.S. minimum wage is too low, this is the crucial aspect those arguing for a "living wage" as the minimum wage are missing. Raise the minimum wage beyond a certain point and you don't magically create wealth for the working poor. You simply put them out of work (and the average wage goes up because these people disappear from the denominator). For the minimum wage to work while keeping the lowest-wage workers in a job, it has to remain slightly lower than the productivity generated by those workers. Otherwise an employer is simply better off not hiring them. If that productivity is below what would be considered a "living wage", then you have to choose between paying them less than a living wage, or not giving them a job at all.
and arson was pointing out that people like chavez are the result of socialist/government corruption gone too far... and the majority of libertarians do NOT take fox news seriously. The ones who do are the neo-conservatives.
Venezuelans cannot by dollars from the government for any number of Bolivars. It's illegal for them to have any currency other than Bolivars.
I just checked my Daka "Black Friday" flyer ads and I didn't see what kind of deals I can get. Does anyone know?
The real Sig captains the Northwestern. This one captains
Yes. Source: I live in Venezuela.
That must seriously suck.
Any plans to get out of the country before the collapse? Or are you one of the majority of the people who are stuck watching the nation collapse around them?
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
Whether they are or are not is a separate issue from whether the government should be involved in (re)distributing/forcing its preferred option at taxpayer expense.
Yes, I bet those pesky socialists in Sweden will be next. That country is already on the brink of economic collapse...
Nihil in publicum sputa.
Many fell for Chávez et al.'s socialist act, especially since out there you don't have enough tidbits to glean and see their true colors: authoritarian, bald-faced liars, sore losers, sectarian... It's all been a gradual power grab with "boiled frog" written all over it.
But you cannae change the laws o' economics, and the whole farce was teetering before Chávez died (officially on March 5, but his voice hadn't been heard since early December). Maduro's ineptitude as a statesman is more evident than Chávez's only because of his frequent blunders (Bush 43 shines by comparison), but the collapse was a matter of time:
* Local production of goods has waned, in good part because of ridiculous controls and destructive expropriation of businesses, increasing the demand for foreign goods and the currency to buy them.
* Venezuela barely exports anything beyond oil and some steel.
* The state oil company was run into the ground by bad management and direct social spending (by presidential mandate); even less dollars coming in.
Venezuela owes some $215bn (60% of GNP), and Maduro had to go in person to China to negotiate the latest $5bn loan. 12-month inflation is 54%, likely to increase as December rolls in. Nope, not looking good.
This post contains no rudeness or derision of any kind. All arguments are friendly. Terms and exclusions may apply.
But importers ARE being forced to, and now they are being forced to sell their goods at those prices as well, so there will be no more imports.
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No true scotsman... Seems like most socialist governments cross the corruption line pretty quickly.. This is because too much power is centralized in one place. In fact, one thing keeping the USA from collapsing into a venezuela tomorrow is the fact the power is distributed across the fortune 100, which are hashing it out with the federal government with the left hand while shaking hands with the (neo)right.
The Australian property situation is concerning, and rather depressing if you're looking to get into the market. But to call it the "mother-of-all property bubbles" isn't fair. It's nothing on the Japanese asset bubble in the early '90s, and probably not as bad as what's going on in HK now.
who the fuck would officially import ANYTHING to the country
Maybe that's his goal : to stop everyone from buying Chinese product and to force local production instead.
> with assault weapons
That's just the sensational way of saying that the army was there. Bringing some soldiers when seizing a building doesn't seem so strange to me. They didn't fire, or surround the shop. It's just sensationalist reporting.
When a US cop does his job, is he described as "an officer with a Taser, Mace, and firearm"? Of course not. That sort of nonsense reporting is reserved for stories about Central and South America.
The article mentions a fridge being sold for more than five thousand US dollars, so it seems there was indeed a need to do something. Seizing the oil refineries worked very well for Venezuela, maybe this is worth trying for electronics too.
I'm not saying it *is* a good idea, I'm just pointing out that the quality of reporting is lousy and there's the usual bias against any Central and South American leaders who don't pander to the US.
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On my desk is a small silver coin: 25 centimos, .835 silver, 1960. It has to be worth more than their treasury is right now. The national oil company is trying to sell $4.5 billion in bonds to bring dollars back into the country, but you can bet there will be very few queuing up to buy these bonds as only a fool would trust this government to honor them.
My father had some German stamps from the 1930s which were something like 250,000,000,000 DM
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
What about videos from random witnesses, and outrageous speech by Maduro himself? The “don't leave anything on the shelves” quote in TFS is there.
There's not unrest in the streets, but individual stores were looted in the first two days; there are pictures of people carrying even the demonstration TVs too quickly for the 3-4 cashiers present at these stores to have checked them out, in front of passive National Guards (who have also been photographed carrying merchandise in their patrol pick-up trucks). In the following days, other appliance stores haved cut their prices down to prevent similar incidents and queues have formed at their doors while the NG oversees the “controlled sales”.
Some of these people are hoping to resell the goods for a bit of profit; others are just taking advantage of the “fire sale”; and yet others want to do *something* with their money before it loses value to the rampant inflation (54% over the last 12 months).
This post contains no rudeness or derision of any kind. All arguments are friendly. Terms and exclusions may apply.
It's common for the National Guard in Venezuela to carry assault rifles even on urban duty, thus it was natural to have them there. Of course it's overkill, and given the historically high insecurity it's likely a crude attempt at making the city look safer.
And yes, the whole thing started because “the prices are too high” - words like “usury” and “speculation” are (mis)used to describe prices you don't like.
This post contains no rudeness or derision of any kind. All arguments are friendly. Terms and exclusions may apply.
My mistake, you're right about the lack of US ownership. (At least directly.)
But, the role of the TV stations and newspapers after the 2002 coup is clear, no? They almost universally tried to remove a man who had the support of the great majority of the people.
So these media companies weren't part of the free press, they were just a very powerful lobby group for a very small part of the country, and they were abusing a state-granted monopoly (the right to use a section of the public airwaves). Dismantling or nationalising those excessively powerful lobby groups was a good start toward fixing democracy, no?
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Parent is a Maduro shill or worse.
Looking at his home page I doubt it. Probably just ignorant.
Other than getting the media thing wrong, everything else he wrote sounds plausible. Do you disagree with any of it, and if so, why?
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Just like what happened to Mugabe in Zimbabwe. While I'm not willing to predict that there won't be a takeover, I wouldn't be so quick to assume that his goose is cooked. Despots have a habit of surprising the free world with their brutality.
If the prices are too high in a store I go somewhere else. This is beyond overkill. Soldiers taking over a retail store for high prices is crazy. What do they do if the TV is defective? Slaughter all the sales clerks?
To be exact, I make it, my employer hands about a third of it to the government, my insurance and other obligations eat another 15 or 20 percent then my wife gets what's left.
Only thing is it's not getting more unequal. Income maybe, but income doesn't equal wealth. Wealth has actually been spreading in the US, but not thanks to any government, rather thanks to capitalism. Government has actually been slowing that down in the form of tariffs, wage floors, and price controls.
- Tariffs increase the cost of goods and reduce domestic production (imports and domestic production rise and fall with one another - this has been empirically proven numerous times.)
- Wage floors increase unemployment and reduce purchasing power of the poor by making goods they buy more expensive. (A poor person is more likely to balk at a tomato rising in price from $.60 to $1 in order to make up for increased labor costs than Bill Gates would, and the poor person is also now less likely to be able to find a job. See the lump of labor.)
- Price controls restrict supply and artificially create scarcity of wealth (lines at the gas pump in the 70's.)
I like to make a comparison of a poor person today with a rich person of the 80's. In the 80's, you were one fatcat if you owned any combination of a car phone, a big screen TV, and a personal computer. Today even the poorest own laptops, big flat screen TV's, and cell phones, and the ones they own are of much better quality than those that were owned by the 80's fatcat.
Government didn't make that happen, actually the very rich did. The rich got there by figuring out innovative ways of making things simultaneously cheaper and better so that you'd buy from them instead of some other rich guy.
Anyways, we'll see the result of what happens in Venezuela. I think what's going to happen is they are creating a very bad situation of the first and third item I described that governments can do to reduce the distribution of wealth: Since shops in Venezuela are required to sell at prices well below their worth in the actual exchange rate, they'll be effectively forbidden from importing goods. The result will be fewer material goods in the country, which means that as these goods break and depreciate, the poor will become even less wealthy.
If things turn out the way I'm pretty sure they are (their bonds have already collapsed as a direct result of this, by the way) then I'd hope you'll see why your war against the 1% is a pretty bad idea. Sure, they'll lose their wealth, but you'll lose a lot more than that. You'll get to declare that you won a war, but you'll be permanently much worse off than when you started it.
If I'm wrong, well then, viva la revolucion.
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
Funny how the definition of socialism changed over the years. First it was social ownership of everything with no private property. Then it was central planning of the industry with some made up price system that never worked like the various schemes Soviet Union came up with (usually followed by a famine). Then it was the "third way" of countries like Yugoslavia (at the time it was briefly prosperous before the collapse) with a mix of state owned industry and some small scale private enterprise. Now it's basically a capitalist economy like Sweden with a slightly higher taxes than in the US and more welfare spending. Pretty soon you guys will finally be driven all the way to the right and call laissez-faire capitalism "socialism".
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
You do realize, of course, that minimum wage is a price control on labor.
We already have abolished the minimum, for all intents and purpose. They're called illegal immigrants, they work for less than min wage, and it has resulted in tens of millions of jobs.
The guy has been spouting pro-Maduro factually incorrect stuff all over the post. (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4438553&cid=45410025) Willfully ignorant, perhaps.
And does the Australian minimum wage earner have twice the lifestyle of a US minimum wage worker? Does the number really matter or is it what the money buys? Look at all the Zimbabwean trillionaires. That country should be a paradise, right?
Who's to say that everything shouldn't be free?
I guess no one...
But what I can say is that if my hard work is now "free", then I won't work hard anymore.
If you don't compensate people for what they do, they'll stop doing it, unless you enslave them and use brute force. It works for awhile, until it doesn't.
Bolivars = Toilet Paper
You need value to have wealth. People do not bother much more than what it takes to survive without value and they are rewarded with wealth even if it is just a pittence. This is why money is around (curency). You convert your time which has value and your skills which have value into money which is either wasted or put up as wealth. Wasted is a poor choice of words but im trying to keep this simple.
So why shouldn't everything be free? Because without money, most people will not exert effort beyond their own existance which is why communism and pure socialism tend to migrate to oppressive implementations. So in short, the people and human nature say it shouldn't be free.
somebody mod this up
Pssssh, plebe. I'm a multi-hundred-trillionaire.
Just like what happened to Mugabe in Zimbabwe. While I'm not willing to predict that there won't be a takeover, I wouldn't be so quick to assume that his goose is cooked. Despots have a habit of surprising the free world with their brutality.
The problem is that Mugabe maintains a large degree of popular support and will likely pass on screwing up the country to whoever brown-noses him best, and this is similar to Venuzuala.
Unfortately, in Zimbabwe I suspect the opposition does not possess the ability or the leadership required to be credible to prevent this.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
....as they do in North Korea. And then government provided tablets with bolivarian internet. We know the rest of the story.
For the record, this is exactly what socialists DO.
"Whenever the cause of the people is entrusted to professors, it is lost." ~ V.I. Lenin
the local production has to still buy parts with some other currency than bolivars. the root of the problem is the joke value of them - it's a joke currency and even the government knows it hence the governments reluctancy to trade it both ways. they'll print them but they wont buy them back and nobody else will either.
that is, unless he has like 200 billion dollars/euros stashed somewhere and is going to use it to buy foreign expertise to spool up production it's not going to happen(a large factory ecosystem is responsible for these products, you need driver chips, you need display elements, you need all kinds of stuff to make them).
rather than cheap tv's for everyone it is cheap tv's for those favored by the police and then cheap tv's for nobody. and then in a little while it's more bribe money to the cops from smuggles which I guess suits the police and army just fine.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
You sir, deserve more mod points! :)
The minimum wage for youth in Australia is $7.74 AUD for 16 year olds up to $16.00 AUD for 21 year olds. Also apprentices in Australia earn less than the $16.37 AUD wage as well.
Not really.
For some of the domestic stuff those are mostly jobs that would not have existed otherwise (though I'm not sure if it's expected for minimum wage to apply to 'odd jobs' anyways). But for farming the fruit would still get picked, it would just get picked by more mechanized and higher priced labour. The jobs would still be there, the food would simply get a bit more expensive.
I stole this Sig
Yes. However... this is not a result of socialism per se... it's a result of cronyism. There are quite a few Venezuelan companies which have not been targeted like this. There are plenty of stable social democracies around the world.
That being said, with the US's record of destabilizing democracies in south America that it does not like... I wouldn't put it past them to nudge a bit (I'm not accusing, just guessing).
There is a fine line however...
A tipping point where you would throw up your hands and say, "never mind".
What if your tax rate was raised to 50%? Would you continue to go to work? What about 75%?
Each of us would have a different cutoff number, but clearly at some point most people would not bother anymore.
Sorry for pissing on your righeous parade, but Sweden is a social democrat state, and social democracies are still a form of socialism. In fact, it's further to the left than a textbook social democracy, because Sweden still forces some sectors of the economy to be centrally planned and managed, such as housing and licquor selling. In fact, the swedish government has a ministry dedicated to managing Sweden's housing and construction.
Where would you fit a ministry dedicated to housing and construction in your laissez-faire capitalism idea?
That's not exactly a policy which is to the right of Europe's typical social democracies, is it?
The slippery slope nonsense is nonsense, and you're only showing off your ignorance.
Point being, he was saying the same essential thing originally. You misunderstood his post, then proceeded to write a fairly informative summation of the incentives, so honestly I was too confused on how to mod you. :)
The food will rise in price, but the jobs might not be there.
Once, wheat was harvested by hand, now it is done by machine. What once took 2 days for 1 man to do, a modern combine can do in about 8 minutes.
McDonalds has been looking into automatic burger machines, they would complely replace the staff in the back from having to cook and assemble the burgers.
At $7.25/hr, it makes sense to use humans for that.
At $15/hr, it might well be worth installing machines to replace some of those jobs. If they replace just 4 jobs per McDonalds with new machines, that is tens of thousands of jobs lost across the country.
What if half of the fast food restaurants swapped out a few workers each for machines?
http://www.gizmag.com/hamburger-machine/25159/
There are other ways to pick fruit and other ways to cook food, not all involve hiring people.
Those people protesting for higher pay would be wise to keep that in mind.
There will certainly be some labour reduction via mechanization but the same mechanization often creates new jobs in other fields. And the unemployed people either take those new jobs or the jobs vacated by the people who took those new jobs.
I stole this Sig
That's the sort of reasoning that underlies minimum wage, but there's little evidence it works that way. Individual small businesses making short term plans may "pay whatever is required". That's because businesses don't optimize perfectly and instantly. Long term, however, they do.
European grocery stores already don't have baggers or shopping cart attendants. Raise the cost of hiring further, and you're going to see more self-checkout. Go even higher, and grocery stores are going to move to RFID checkout. Even higher, and they are going to go to stores based on fully robotic warehousing systems.
In the end, it's cheaper for most businesses to (1) either have customers do part of the work (whose time is cheaper than that of a full time employee), or (2) to automate. You don't help people by creating incentives for eliminating their jobs.
Straw man. Social democracies have existed for decades. Some stuff (like the postal service, and power) is better nationalised. The US, bastion of the free market supposedly, pumps billions into infrastructure via private companies. It's more socialist than you realise.
So why shouldn't everything be free? Because without money, most people will not exert effort beyond their own existance which is why communism and pure socialism tend to migrate to oppressive implementations. So in short, the people and human nature say it shouldn't be free.
You're partly right, but then stop mid-track. You're absolutely right that there needs to be an incentive to show that "effort beyond existance", but in theory this could anything that is seen as a reward. You'rer educing that to money because that's what we're currently are used to as the only form of reward.
How could the native americans have a society for centuries without a concept of wealth and currency? Or go back a few hundred years in Europe. People from knights to bards did not queue up to work for a king because of huge monetary saleries. (even if the job provided a higher standard of living than most people had). The incentive that made them "exert effort" was fame.
But this worked only as fame and appreciation something valueable. Neither an aluminium chip with "Hero of Work" embossed or "Employee of the month" are worth anything today.
bickerdyke
And frankly, the people losing their jobs to this? They aren't going to be building or maintaining the machines that replace them, if they could, they wouldn't be working at McDonalds.
If the people at McDonalds had any other job options, they would already be doing that. They are generally working for minimum wage due to a lack of other choices, not because they want to be.
AU$1.85 for a loaf of bread
AU$0.99 for a litre of milk
This is in Townsville, a northern city ~2000km from the markets in our state capital. Can't remember other prices, but a Danish girl I knew said there was a bewildering array of brands here compared with anywhere else in the world she had been, which seemed quite strange given the size of my city.
I've been told that the price of generic computer hardware and electronics isn't bad here either, although the US companies seem to want to charge a premium, even for software sold directly over the internet (this was recently a story on Slashdot)... why is anyones guess.
Entrepreneurism is well known to be what drives economies.
What drives capitalistic economies, I beg to differ. It would not drive a planned economy, and setting up a free market is in no way the only form of economy.
On the other hand it seems that a prospering planned economy would need a plan classes better than what Venezuela is doing... (Heck I doubt they have a plan at all!)
bickerdyke
But you cannae change the laws o' economics,
Groundskeeper Willy with his pithy econ-politcal insight?
And if my house is free, my utilities are free, my food is free etc I have no reason to spend time working producing anything of value when I can consume things, take holidays and read more instead.
The only way everything will ever be free is if there is nothing.
On the other hand it seems that a prospering planned economy would need a plan classes better than what Venezuela is doing... (Heck I doubt they have a plan at all!)
Doesn't really matter to be honest. If you're planning down to the scale of selling TVs and consumer electronics, then you're both doing too much micromanaging and operating well outside any area of knowledge or expertise you might have.
Importers buy dollars (or possibly Remninbi, but Chinese companies usually price their stuff in Dollars). I'm sure they would love to be able to buy Dollars at 6.29 VBF, but nobody will sell them at that rate if they can get 60 VBF on the black market for them.
Very easily, though I expect they still had the equivalent of wealth they just wouldn't of defined it as the person with the most metal discs. Though it's an irrelevant question as the original, naive, question was why shouldn't everything be free. I'd suggest that anyone who thinks that if buying a loaf of bread didn't cost £1 any more but instead you could exchange it for 5 hours work it was 'free' doesn't have a clue what they are talking about.
Now they just need to provide cheap bread...
I completly agree with you here.
A currency-less economic system would either be based on barter (which is basically what we still have - just with currency units to make it more convinient) or on some kind of honor system, where you do the best for your society (read: working at whatever is needed and you're good at) and society takes care of your material needs. But as you mentioned, this wouldn't be "free" as you'd still be expected (or bound by honor) to do some work.
This works quite well in a Kibuz, but on a larger scale, there would be people who would actually mistake their loaf of bread as "free". This still could work, if overall productivity would be high enough compared to the additional burden of such freeriders.
bickerdyke
Well, if I plan to sell TVs, I need to hire someone whose expertise is selling TVs. No matter if I'm a country or a electronic retailer.
Espescially if you're a country. If a retailer fails at selling TVs, Crazy Eddy goes down the drain and no one would notice. You don't want your country to fail just because they didn't know how to sell their stuff.
In theory, there are pros for planned econoomy. But the biggest con is that so far, no one got it to work...
bickerdyke
He's got an internet connection, so he's one of the wealthy minority, who's probably not too happy for being reminded that people of his class have been raping the country for generations, and finally someone is attempting to do something about it, albeit not with great success.
True, Venezuela has many problems as we can see, but - unlike some 3rd world countries - they don't have the death penalty as you are implying.
Notice a pattern? The definition changes to fit whoever someone needs to have made a bogeyman out of.
Pretty soon you guys will finally be driven all the way to the right and call laissez-faire capitalism "socialism".
I think that line has already been crossed when simpkly the thought of everyone having health insurance has been called "socialism".
bickerdyke
This is spot on. I'd guess that the tendency to redefine Western European countries like France, Germany, Sweden and even the UK (with its NHS and high welfare spending) as 'socialist' comes from the rhetoric of a particular American political party opposed to the introduction of universal healthcare. Or from people opposed to that particular party who want to draw a definite line between the US system and what's done in every other western developed country (including ones outside Europe like Australia, Canada, NZ).
Of course there's no definite, scientific definition for 'socialism' but academcis and political parties in these countries usually define their system as a 'mixed economy' or a 'Social market economy (German: Soziale Marktwirtschaft)'. Which basically means a capitalist based-economy where the majority of GDP remains in private ownership but the government takes a significant amount (33-45%, sometimes more) to fund a welfare state and other programs, and the government has significant power to intervene in markets to ensure fair competition, prevent environmental damage etc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_market_economy
http://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Mixed_economy.html
Pre-canned Evolution Links for all those Slashdot holy wars.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/07/venezuela-not-greece-latin-america-oil-poverty
Interesting theory, but it looks like they have 35 Billion in the bank.
If you think someone isn't free to have a different definition of "freedom" you may be a tyrant.
Or if there is more than everybody could possibly consume, and nobody needed to produce it.
This is why I like robots.
Help I am stuck in a signature factory!
The problem is that these business owners were ACTIVELY PART of the coup against Chavez... The poor guy in charge just can't tell his enemies anymore, and can't kill them or the CIA will assassinate him. Clearly the Bankers are playing economic games with them to buy foreign goods... And he doesn't know who to fight for it.
But you cannae change the laws o' economics,
Groundskeeper Willy with his pithy econ-politcal insight?
I'm thinking Chief Engineer Montgomery "Scottie" Scott more likely.
"You cannae change the laws of physics" was one of his catch phrases.
"this is not a result of socialism per se."
Whatever you agree to call it, it is a monstrous ideological trespass upon private property.
"There are quite a few Venezuelan companies which have not been targeted"
Why were you thinking this is somehow counter-evidence for communism (or its aliases) in Venezuela?
The stable social democracies around the world, at least those that don't have debts over 100% of GDP, are enlightened enough to know that they should get out of the way of business and try and make conditions as conducive to private profit and investment as possible. In those that fail, the temptation to manage private business "in the interests of the people" almost always fails. I would recommend a quick reading of Ludwig Von Mises for a good explanation of why.
The ignorant fools running Venezuela at the moment (including his predecessor and the morons in the West who hold Venezuela up as some kind of worker's paradise, like Britain's Owen Jones) are treading a familiar path that will almost certainly result in the collapse of their economy. But hey, they will finally get what they want: Equality. Everyone will be piss poor.
Lol. Once again the "starting wars for oil" fiction.
Mugabe was forced to play in the end though, wasn't he. The West, Britain particularly, had no stomach for a potentially bloody fight there to get rid of him. In any case Zimbabwe was just a little rehearsal for what's going to happen in South Africa in 20 years time when people are sick of the ANC. I predict (quite confidently) that the exact same thing will happen, except on a much larger scale.
Everyone will be piss poor.
The saddest part is that is never quite what happens.
Private property is the most fundamental component of freedom and democracy. Strong private property rights both in the form of society won't allow a strong man to just smash and grab and society does not appropriate property at will are key. Add to that a currency and you get a form of democracy. One mans money is as good as the next and if you want more of it you'll have to get offer him something he will consider a fair trade for it.
What you get in the face of communism/socialism is political currency becomes a new sort of exchange. Politically important people still find a way to concentrate wealth in their hands. Even shortly after the Russian revolution while perhaps most people were hungry and being forced to share what had been single domiciles because nothing could get built or maintained, loyal party members got to eat tea-biscuits and watch the ballet. Sixty years later when it all comes a part a small group of people who'd managed to get into the right government roles managed to walk away with lots of formerly state property giving themselves quite the leg up in the new economy.
Marxism might be a nice ideal but it completely ignores human nature. Whenever anyone really tries to implement you don't get your Marxist workers paradise you instead get something that is a lot more tribal; an oligarchy where a few guys share power with their sons, nephews, and old army buddies who live very comfortably, a little more equal if you will, and everyone else who gets to support it.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
That summing up of knights seems a bit like Renaissance fair history. You're right - knights didn't receive monthly bank transfers. In some cases they'd receive land, and the goodies they pillage. This tradition survived well in to era of gunpowder. There would also be knights fulfilling pledges to their lord or a king for which they'd get to keep their power and land, and perhaps rewards in the afterlife. Bards similarly were getting recompense for their work. In short, these were reciprocal arrangements. That they didn't receive salaries doesn't change this. You can't eat fame. This wasn't some medieval reality TV show, and knights used to shit in their armour.
-- Using the preview button since 2005
The stable social democracies around the world, at least those that don't have debts over 100% of GDP, are enlightened enough to know that they should get out of the way of business and try and make conditions as conducive to private profit and investment as possible.
Unfortunately, that's not a good plan either. If you look at the place in which it's succeeded the most, the US, you'll still see lots of undesirable byproducts of unregulated business, like major income inequality and, consequently, a higher prison population. Not to mention the decline the US has been experiencing due to relying on unsustainable exponential growth. What I mean to say is that we're fucked either way, embracing or extinguishing the free market.
Or go back a few hundred years in Europe. People from knights to bards did not queue up to work for a king because of huge monetary saleries.
Umm what?
Knights and Bards perhaps did not draw a huge monetary salary but the certainly were paid. They enjoyed nice accommodations and plentiful food at court which were provided at great expense to the crown. There was also the strong possibility if you impress the king enough he might bestow some property or the right to use some property upon you. Just because they never got a W2 at the end of the year does not mean they were not paid.
Then there were all the vassals, who again were getting the use of their manor. You might view them as property mangers today. They performed the administrative functions to productive manage the land and people on it for again what amounts to a cut of the profits, the rest was remanded to the king in direct taxes or some other means like providing troops for his army, which he might well employ against another vassal that's stepped out of line.
In short there was definitely a concept of wealth and ownership under the feudal system. There was an employee of the month type incentive as well sure, but Kinghts were absolutely their for the economic benefits not just fame.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
It usually works like this: The official exchange rate gives you, say, X10 per $1 and the black market rate X100 per $1. (Which happens because the official rate is not one which balances supply and demand). So, everyone wants to sell $s at the black market rate and buy at the official rate. The government then forces everyone they can who has dollars to sell - legal exporters and their customers, for example - to do so at the official exchange rate. This gives them a small source of official dollars. Most people can't get these, there are too few, so they go to people the government likes. eg, bribe-givers, political allies, ruling politicians and their families, etc. Those lucky people can then immediately sell them on the black market at huge profit, or import goods very cheaply which they can either use or sell at huge profit. You could also use it simply to bankrupt all of the private companies you don't like to support the ones you do (until you run out, of course).
I don't know any specifics about the Venezuelan government, but governments doing this usually have no incentive to fix it. Much easier to use it as a source of power, wealth and patronage.
Grew up in a country which had 'Socialist' as a part of an official name and still live with all* of it's numerous socialist residues and I can guarantee you, that you won't find "cronyism" in Socialism, simply because it's such a normal way of how things are, that your eyes adjust after a short time.
Well, maybe not all. I escaped some of them by being forced into grey economy by laws made ostensibly to protect me.
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State run stores were selling the same products for 1/5th the price. The excuses about exchange rate issues seem dubious because those stores would have been in the same situation. People were upset about being fleeced, and the government is there to serve them.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
yeah we could go back to exchange based economy.
so I could get 20 potatos, a sixpack and a pack of fags for a days work, then I would go and exchange those smokes for a piece of meat and 10 of the potatoes for a cola and 5 of them for a dvd rental.... and then pretty soon someone would give these potato creds which would allow me to give the potatoes and smokes to just one person who would then sort it out with the rest of people I want to do commerce.
I don't know where the fuck you got the idea that native americans living in groups larger than 20 lacked the idea of currency and debt.... historically(in europe and anywhere) metals were used for trading since copper is copper and gold is gold and the value was in the coin itself. others used whatever produce and desirables they had.
And I damn well know why families kitted a horseback cavalier in my home country to serve the swedish king and it wasn't fame or adventure, even if many surely went to the war for them. you want to know the fucking simple reason? TAX EXEMPTION FOR THE ESTATE!. if they were lucky then from their service they were granted nobility and a piece of land - riches galore basically for the period.
btw. I think potato backed currency should be the way to go, at least in the case of hyperinflation you can make booze out of them.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Except that anything produced locally is ripe for government annexation, so nobody is going to put forth the risk in capital to start a factory.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Yes. However... this is not a result of socialism per se... it's a result of cronyism. There are quite a few Venezuelan companies which have not been targeted like this. There are plenty of stable social democracies around the world.
It's is one of the byproducts of socialism, you have to have a central body in charge to determine what is fair an what is not. Fairness is a subjective measure doled out by imperfect humans corrupted by their power.
In the socialist countries that are not complete failures their economy only survives in spite of their governments measures. This is true in many smaller European countries where the poor live in another country, the successful outnumber the unsuccessful so the unsuccessful are not a huge burden on the economy. Larger countries like the US can not afford that as there are too many people not paying into the system.
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
Yes.. Guilty of oversimplification.
But my point stands that "reward" for effort has not to be handed out in some currency. It can be goods, land, loot or your daily ration of bread and rice. Which would neither mean that the serf is working for free nor that he gets his bread for free.
My "fame" example was going on from there. For that to work you either need to be able to cash in on that fame somehow (e.g. a "famous" knight getting a job at some other duke's court with better perks or getting that spot at "Celebrity Intern") or have basic food and housing taken care of otherwise. (Socialist government handing out shelter and rations or as a part of a work-for-tangible-goods deal like above)
Having that whole currency system instead makes everything easier, of course, but fails if the monetary reward falls below what is needed for food, housing and health.
bickerdyke
I do! All I have to do is swipe a piece of plastic or enter some numbers in a web page and I get real things like hamburgers and video games! I don't know why everyone wants dollars but it's to my advantage that they do. If everyone stopped accepting dollars tomorrow I'd be a sad panda.
In short there was definitely a concept of wealth and ownership under the feudal system. There was an employee of the month type incentive as well sure, but Kinghts were absolutely their for the economic benefits not just fame.
Basically what I said. But it wasn't based on currency. Just because they didn't have to buy that accomodation and food, that doesn't mean that it was free. And it wasn't only based on material goods, but also, as you mentioned, on reputation.
bickerdyke
Yes, as I said: Money simplifies that whole process.
btw. I think potato backed currency should be the way to go, at least in the case of hyperinflation you can make booze out of them.
That's almost straight out of Terry Pratchett's "Making Money"
bickerdyke
Unfortunately, that's not a good plan either. If you look at the place in which it's succeeded the most, the US, you'll still see lots of undesirable byproducts of unregulated business, like major income inequality and, consequently, a higher prison population. Not to mention the decline the US has been experiencing due to relying on unsustainable exponential growth. What I mean to say is that we're fucked either way, embracing or extinguishing the free market.
The prison growth has nothing to do with unregulated business, there is not even a correlation between regulation and prison population, or it would be decreasing. One of the few things that does correlate with prison population is single parent households. When children of single parents are corrected for there is little difference in crime rates between blacks and whites, 70% of children in juvenile prisons are from simple parent households, 80% of inmates are from single parent households. Many of these studies were done in the 90's when only 25% of children were raised by single parents, while now the number is over 40%, which would correlate with the growth in prison population. CEO's making 6 or 7 figure salaries are not causing it there is not evidence to even correlate it.
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
You see, I'm not even solid middle class, though I have a degree that took me 8 years to get because I had to work to pay for college. I have a job and I *still don't make as much money* as some leech that's living off welfare. I am angry because despite working my ass off and getting an education I can't get off the ground. Instead, we get laws that protect criminals, leeches and corrupts. Chavistas have been "attempting to do something" for 15 years by now. Obviously, they have no idea what they are doing, and in the process we live in a country which minimun wage is around 50 bucks. An underage girl who gets pregnant by a killer who's in jail and lives with her grandmother makes more money than, say, an engineer. I understand she might need it, but this country is raising a generation of people who don't want to work for a living, because they want to suck off the government, who, fishing for votes, encourages it. TL;DR: I'm not, and you're talking bullcrap you have no idea about.
Oblivion Awaits
"Sorry, Venezuela haters" Yeah I can't take that guy seriously.
Oblivion Awaits
Yeah, 35 billion is nothing. That's half the budget, annually, for California. If they have these reserves and pull them out then the country truly is at rock bottom. It will be heading there as the attack on Daka demonstrates only state owned stores will flourish and they likely won't have anything in stock because nobody wants to sell to Venezuela and be paid in toilet paper Bolivars. It'll be like the good old days in Soviet Russia - where you sell your neighbor for a pair of blue jeans.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Most people in collapsed East Europe and Soviet Union did not blame the Evil USA for their problems, they knew who was at fault.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
It can only work when the central authority making the plans has access to more and better information than the local businessman AND has more computational power than all the businessmen (or possibly every individual person) in the country put together.
The first requirement is extremely difficult. The second is simply impossible with a government run by humans. Strong AI might be able to centrally plan an economy after a few generations of exponential self improvement.
Wow. Just wow.
Ok question, why would anyone buy from these retailers at 5x the price? Why would not everyone just go to the state store and get their TV for 1/5 the cost? How do you explain this?
>United States
>Unregulated business
Pick ONE. Business regulation has been expanding for a full 100 years. It is now collapsing under the weight. Not just Federal, but state and local regulations as well.
Further, income inequality is caused primarily by money printing by the central bank. It doesn't really have much to do with regulatory regimes. No, the purchasing power of everyone holding dollars is diluted every time a new dollar is printed, and they are printing $85 BILLION a month. Those who receive the freshly printed money first are the ones who get the benefit, as the purchasing power of the rest is transferred to them. It amounts to something like $268 for every man, woman, and child in the US. That's like every household having an extra mortgage to pay, on top of their own debt and the taxes they already pay, and you pay it without even knowing it, as it is simply taken out of the power of your dollars.
It won't end well for most.
Periodic examples of Leftist despotism are useful demonstrations of why extreme Left-wing (sorry, TPers, the US Democratic Party is Rightist by global standards) governments are bad.
The US should stay out of this one other and exercise the "popcorn option" lest it anoint the despot with the gift of Yanqui Opposition.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
But what I can say is that if my hard work is now "free", then I won't work hard anymore.
If you don't compensate people for what they do, they'll stop doing it, unless you enslave them and use brute force.
You won't. The claim that no one does/will do anything other than for the money is as specious as it is tedious.
Most people making below minimum wage are effectively trainees, or live with their parents, or use the job as a second job or second income in a family. They don't need to get enough money from a job to "live a reasonable life without government subsidy". By imposing a minimum wage, you simply take away job opportunities that they would otherwise have had.
Of course we will. And then other jobs will be below-living-wage jobs. Web design and PC maintenance, for example, will likely become the equivalent of baggers and cart handlers.
"We" should simply stop trying to impose price controls; they pretty much always hurt.
If these people could be getting better jobs, they would already be getting them. Most of them are inexperienced and need a job history and experience before they can get better paying jobs, and that opportunity exactly what you destroy by imposing "living wages".
You are correct. What drives a planned economy is force. In other words, in a planned economy people fall into one of two groups: those who run things, and their slaves.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
You do know that the guy in charge is Chavez's chosen successor, right? The coup against Chavez failed and he died of natural causes. President Maduro was Chavez's Vice President and, more or less, the man whom Chavez chose to succeed him.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
I don't think Venezuela has quite reached this point. Certainly not "most", certainly not enough. And the revolution, if and when it comes, will not be televised (for there will be no TVs).
Then again, what the hell do I know? I'm basing this assessment on a passing knowledge gleaned from a handful of magazine articles and the movie "Bananas".
... with other people's money is a time-honored political ploy. This is just a more obvious example than the usual.
BTW, where did you get the 35b in reserves? I have not been able to find reliable numbers. Venezuela’s is not exactly independent and I have heard rumors that their books are not exactly square.
But let’s assume the 35b is right. The 35b means nothing in itself. It is a stock value – a snapshot. Think of your checkbook. It only has meaning if you compare it to a flow value – the amount of money coming in and out. A rule of thumb is that a central bank should have about 1 years’ worth of reserves. Venezuela imports/ exports about 90b a year.
So even by your standards the reserves are thin.
Here is a link to a more pessimistic article.
http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21588093-latin-america-must-press-nicol-s-maduro-not-use-decree-powers-throttle-his-opposition
Aehmm... a gouvernment with an overview over internal and external politics and economic data HAS more information available than any businessman on its own. For example who - if not the gouvernment - has access to census data and can use that data to estimate the need for certain goods? (x pounds of bread and rice per person, y cars and TVs per household) A local businessman would not only need that data, but also additional data on what percantage of those TVs and rice will be bought in his store and what percantage in his competitors store. (and as all competitors would have to stock that amount +x% it would lead to more overstocking than if only one central vendor would have to stock the estimate +x%. Usually overstocking is undesired waste, unless overproduction is considered part of "economic growth". But that's another kettle of fish along with planned obsolescence)
And humans are designed to work and plan with incomplete information. Ask anyone in the military about that. Incomplete information about the enemies capabilities never stopped anyone from waging war against someone.
So even if planned economy never worked so far, that's for other reasons. (Usually the planing commitee being manned with persons caring more for their own well being in combination with a political system without a possibility to remove them from office.)
bickerdyke
I like to make a comparison of a poor person today with a rich person of the 80's. In the 80's, you were one fatcat if you owned any combination of a car phone, a big screen TV, and a personal computer. Today even the poorest own laptops, big flat screen TV's, and cell phones, and the ones they own are of much better quality than those that were owned by the 80's fatcat.
This is ridiculous cherrypicking.
By exactly the same "reasoning", I could point out that only "fatcats" enjoyed US rural electric services until the government drove rural electrification, or that only "fatcats" enjoyed private, expedient interstate travel until the federal government instituted the interstate highway system.
I could also point out how US broadband and wireless services, and especially their pricing, remain embarrassingly inferior to those offered in more "socialized" economies.
Ummm, from the article in the comment I made?
If you think someone isn't free to have a different definition of "freedom" you may be a tyrant.
> spouting pro-Maduro factually incorrect stuff
I think you're seeing what you want to see.
My point was that media reports about Venezuela in the US media aren't reliable. The article suggests that the population of Venezuela is getting plasma TVs for almost nothing. And that's typical. So, yeh, I'm sceptical about anti-Maduro stuff I read on Slashdot.
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The law of supply and demand, combined with the fact that supply is not infinite.
The former is a universal truth and the latter is a physical fact. Neither will change no matter how much someone of any particular political ideology wants it to.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
people fall into one of two groups: those who run things, and their slaves.
Which is different from todays corporate America exactly how? (Except of course that they aren't called slaves...)
bickerdyke
What a tasty and oh so flammable straw man. Care to link to those hordes of slashdotters who professed their love of Chavez? Or is this just the result of one of your fevered political nightmares?
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Well, it's possible that every other way is even worse...
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Sure, people will paint, make movies, record music, there are people who will do that stuff for free if there is no money, but very few people will do the dirty, nasty jobs without being paid for it.
Increasing minimum wage typically causes some inflation, but not of the same order as the minimum wage increase itself. Australia has higher prices than the US, but the minimum wage is still higher in purchasing power as well (not twice, but still by a good 50%).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_wages_by_country
You still run into the problem of limited resources. For example, not everyone can eat Lobster because there just isn't enough of it in the ocean for that.
Not everyone can live on the beach, because there isn't enough beachfront property. That is why good beachfront property costs millions of dollars, the price controls the supply.
I'm sure the people running the American auto manufacturers into the dirt over the last 50 years had nothing to do with ruining the city. Or even if they did, they were probably Democrats too.
How is the cost of living?
Very high, isn't it. Think these things may have something to do with each other?
http://www.mercer.com/press-releases/cost-of-living-rankings
http://m.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw/cost-of-living-in-australia-is-among-the-highest-in-the-world/story-fni0cx12-1226677641006
Why, you'd almost think that high minimum wage gets absorbed by how expensive everything has become - even domestically-sourced things like rent or meat.
Prosperity comes from innovation, entrepreneurs, and hard work. And, a government/marketplace friendly to them. Never from an enforced cost structure. See also: Germany, 1950 - 1991.
Extremism, tribalism and simplistic catchphrases
What's scary is those same traits seem to be at work in the US as well.
I've seriously though about cutting grass for a living. I know people that do it and they make 30-40K a year working just over half a year at it. It's a cash business so they pay little to no taxes. One guy makes about 15K selling firewood during the winter in addition to grass cutting during the summer. He lives far better than I do at 60K a year.
Well, in today's America you are not forced to work for someone at the point of a gun AND you get to choose who you work for. In order for a planned economy to work, people need to work at the jobs they are told to work at, otherwise there will not be enough people doing the jobs that need to get done. The problem with a "planned" economy is that no group of people knows enough to make plans to address all of the needs.
If you do not know enough about economics to understand why planned economies invariably fail, this forum is too constrained for me to explain it to you (any "planned" economy that did not collapse survived because it allowed for free market work arounds).
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
It's the great promise of Socialism.
Dark Reflection
Q. How do you know your country is NOT a democracy or a republic?
A. Your country has "Democratic" or "Republic" in it's name.
Dark Reflection
If you don't compensate people for what they do, they'll stop doing it
Unless you're a geek contributing to a FOSS project. Or a geek in general with a pet project of some kind.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
It takes a lot of resources and a lot of money to build the fabs that Intel and AMD use, and not all of that work is glamorous. A lot of it is time consuming, dirty, and tedious.
Who is going to do that?
The ideas sound nice which is why people keep moving towards them, "if only" everyone would just do "their fair share", then everyone could live in peace and harmony.
Nice idea, but people just don't work like that. Maybe you do, but that is because you have ideas of working on FOSS all day, not driving trash trucks.
Who's to say that everything shouldn't be free?
Anyone with common sense.
Just another day in Paradise
Toilet paper shortage solved!!!
I don't think you can point to Sweden as a success story. From what I've read, they've gone through a large amount of austerity cuts, and reductions to healthcare subsidies.
Just another day in Paradise
Government didn't make that happen, actually the very rich did. The rich got there by hiring productive workers to figure out innovative ways of making things simultaneously cheaper and better so that you'd buy from them instead of some other rich guy.
FTFY. Unless you've got examples of rich guys that actually, you know, do productive work.
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
They also had almost no rights and it was no workers paradise.
As for the Native Americans, it isn't as simple as you describe, there was a lot of war between various tribes, a lot of what they did was simply for survival. There also were never very many of them, they traveled from place to place living off the land without actually developing or inventing much.
There are now too many people today for us all to just "live off the land", we'd run it dry then we'd all starve.
Many Americans and Europeans may have trouble with the idea of "official" and "real" exchange rates. You can go in to any bank and purchase or sell currency, you can trade larger amounts on foreign exchange markets. You find the price never varies much place to place at a given time, because you can always go elsewhere. If Citibank wants more for Euros than Deutsche Bank, well you can buy them from Deutsche Bank even if you are in America. The currencies truly float, their value against each other varying all the time based on trading.
This is not the case in a place with a fixed currency like Venezuela. The government says "You can buy X amount of our currency for Y amount of foreign currency," with the foreign currency usually being US Dollars. Ok, easy enough to understand, and generally the government is happy to sell you as much of their currency as you want at that rate. The problem is when you try to go the other way. The government won't buy their currency back and give you dollars. In and of itself that makes sense, governments generally sell their currency to other people, they don't buy it back, since they are the ones who generate and control it.
So you say ok, well I'll sell that currency on the foreign exchange markets. Ahh well here's where your problem comes in: Those markets don't value the currency the same as the government that sold it does. You have to give them a whole lot more of it to get the same amount of dollars (or other currency). So you have two rates: The real one and the official one. The real one being the rate things actually trade for on markets.
Well government who implement currency controls don't like this. That is why they are implementing currency controls, to try and fix prices (it doesn't work, but they are still trying). Hence they usually restrict or ban trading like this. That then of course leads to a black market, where things are even higher, since the people involved are skirting the law.
This is just the kind of thing that happens with fixed currencies/price controls. While it might seem to be workable internally, it doesn't work on a global scale since other countries don't value your currency the same and they don't sell goods directly in your currency.
He used the correct pronoun multiple times, you know. It was obvious from context that he was being intentionally figurative.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Everything seems prosperous when you're in growing bubble.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cB5ihHGsm2o
ayottesoftware.com
Aehmm... a gouvernment with an overview over internal and external politics and economic data HAS more information available than any businessman on its own. For example who - if not the gouvernment - has access to census data and can use that data to estimate the need for certain goods?
That isn't nearly enough. You can't just base demand projections on historical figures and census data. That doesn't tell you anything about how supply and demand are likely to change. You have to predict what people are going to want, and what they're going to be willing and able to give up in exchange, whether that means money, barter, or simply goods which won't be available due to limited production capacity.
The government has tons of information (mostly collected by the local businesses), but it's the wrong kind of information. The idea that you can manage supply and demand with nothing but high-level statistics and census data is why planned economies are doomed to experience shortages and surpluses. You can't even trust people to report their own preferences accurately on a survey; their actions often contradict their words. Running a profitable business is as much as art as it is a science, and as with any other art, details matter. The local business owner has a much better idea of what his customers want and are willing to pay for his goods than any central planner working from a "big picture" perspective. Moreover, the local business owner has far more at stake in getting his estimates right.
Incomplete information about the enemies capabilities never stopped anyone from waging war against someone.
Indeed not. It has led to losing more than a few, though, and starting some which needn't have started at all. I hope you're not trying to make this sound like a good thing. People can deal with incomplete information—the world won't end even if botched central planning leads to widespread starvation in the midst of luxuries—but better information makes for better decisions. That is particularly true of local and relevant information, which is where central planning falls short.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
<spoiler alert> It ends badly, really badly </spoiler alert>
Come to think of it, someone should have sent it to the Presidential Palace in Harare, must have slipped the mind.
Whose definition of socialism changes, though? A vague definition that basically amounts to "any economic system where the government takes more from me than I like" is pretty much only common to American right wing. As for myself, I stick to the original definition of socialism as collective public ownership of the means of production. And, yes, by that definition, there is no socialist country anywhere in the world, and even USSR was a stretch.
I suppose I don't see much a difference between formal salaries and payments by other means.
We definitely need a living wage, and realistically that requires some form of currency once a society grows to a certain size. To change the basic need to have more power than one's peers, which is the root of accumulation of wealth, is a difficult task. Socialism would simply express this need through other means.
-- Using the preview button since 2005
So these media companies weren't part of the free press, they were just a very powerful lobby group for a very small part of the country
The free press necessarily includes minority groups whose opinions you disagree with.
and they were abusing a state-granted monopoly (the right to use a section of the public airwaves)
The problem here is the state monopoly itself—nationalization of the airwaves. Even putting aside the issue of centralized state control over the airwaves, withholding or revoking a license to use the airwaves to communicate with the public based on the content of that communication is just as much censorship as if the medium were print rather than radio.
Dismantling or nationalising those excessively powerful lobby groups was a good start toward fixing democracy, no?
No. Any democracy, presuming that's even a desirable concept to begin with, must include the minorities, not suppress them. To be anything other than tyranny of the majority, the rights of minorities must be protected when when it goes against the majority's interests. The "excessive power" you're railing against is nothing more than a minority group defending its rights against a majority intent on driving the entire country off a cliff, dissenting minorities included, in support of an overly charismatic leader.
A democratic form of government is really nothing more than a tool, a way of avoiding revolutions and making not-entirely-unpopular public policy decisions by committee. The goal should not be democracy, but rather liberty.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
You've got an internet connection. Who have you been raping?
(I think that even libertarian minarchists will agree that government is necessary, at minimum, to protect private property).
This amounts to a tautology, as "minarchist" in the common use excludes anarchists, and the state monopoly over defensive force is pretty much the only element separating minarchists from anarchists. There are plenty of libertarians who recognize that private property can be protected in the absence of governments through private security and arbitration; they just aren't considered minarchists.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
My point was that the vast majority of people, including most libertarians, do agree that government has to legislate to some extent to establish an environment that is necessary for prosperity. I'll grant you that it could have been worded better.
Anarcho-capitalists are such a tiny minority, and their concepts are so obviously utopian, that I'm not concerned about not giving them their due.
Just to add a bit more info, since a slightly similar foreign-currency situation happened in Zimbabwe, and I was there. The exchange controls were pretty bad as they were, but the additional problem came in when the government was applying favoritism to give out what little foreign currency it had. Basically how it went was the politicians and their friends/family earned the local currency, and were then allowed to exchange it into foreign currency at the central bank using the official rate. After that, these individuals just went back and sold the foreign currency at the black-market rates. Either by buying items from shops that were forced to peg their prices to the official rate, or by simply exchanging it and using it as they please. Usually this meant that they could afford ridiculously extravagant goods while the people they were supposedly there to serve/protect were screwed over constantly.
Getting by in such a situation meant that people had to get by on the black market for almost everything, especially the basic goods. Society, as a whole, there became very favoritist. The poor laborer that just earned some money working in the field had to wait in a long queue to buy bread, while the guy that knew the manager of the store came in with some foreign currency and got what he needed without a problem. The harder the government there tried to squeeze the people for more foreign currency, the harder people worked in order to evade it. Barter, hawala trading, and just simple friend/neighbour cooperation all formed in order for people to get by without being destitute. Also, payment in the form of goods/services also became common; in essence turning day-to-day commodities into a sort of currency.
Since I don't live there, I can only speculate that a similar situation is arising in Venezuela as the populace tries to lead a normal life in the midst of all this turmoil and exploitation.
Government didn't make that happen, actually the very rich did. The rich got there by figuring out innovative ways of making things simultaneously cheaper and better so that you'd buy from them instead of some other rich guy.
Actually, it was not the very rich who did that - all of us did. If you work for a living, and you do something productive, than you contribute to that. It's the rank and file workers who create wealth, not the people owning the companies. The latter mostly just get rich by pocketing a significant part of that wealth.
So, no, trying to reduce said pocketing is not going to ruin the economy or to make it produce less. What does ruin the economy is when you start treating it as a basket that is magically filled by invisible gnomes, and goods can be taken out and redistributed at will with no accounting whatsoever, which is precisely what they're now doing in Venezuela.
Your comment would make sense if we were discussing a small group that owned 5% and Chavez reduced it to 1% or 0%, but that's not the case. We're discussing a small group owning 95% of a public resource, and Chavez pushed it back to 70% or 50%. Or the anti-Chavez crew here might say he pushed it back to 30% but there's still *tonnes* of anti-Chavez/Maduro stuff on TV and in the newspapers, including the minorities.
> The free press necessarily includes minority groups whose opinions you disagree with.
In Venezuela, the airwaves were under the almost exclusive control of a small group. This was anti-democratic and the only body with the power to fix it was the government. The government took some of the airwaves away from that small group and the US media (and much of the European media) reported it as Chavez taking over TV.
> The problem here is the state monopoly itselfâ"nationalization of the airwaves.
There's only one set of airwaves so whoever regulates it will have a monopoly.
The government is the only body that has a duty to look after the interests of the population. There's no other body that could do this job.
That's how pretty much every country operates. Nothing to do with Chavez/Maduro.
> [you shouldn't block stuff] based on the content
Nonsense. The airwaves are a limited resource and they're supposed to serve the public. If they're serving just a small group (by only broadcasting their content) then that's a problem for democracy and has to be fixed.
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Let's be honest. Minimum wage is basically an attempt to sneak in universal basic income under a different name, and with a few irrelevant strings attached to attempt to satisfy the conservative "must work to live" crowd. If we lefties are honest with ourselves, we should be open about what we actually want, and just say that society has a moral obligation to provide a basic quality of living for every of its members - and implement this directly. Mincome FTW.
government has to legislate to some extent to establish an environment that is necessary for prosperity
Even if true (and I'm not saying it is), that is hardly "legislating prosperity". That would only be removing one of many possible obstacles to prosperity. The actual prosperity is created by the people, not the law. At best the law reduces the likelihood that someone other than the government will get away with destroying whatever prosperity you've managed to create.
(The fact that many people persist in thinking it necessary to have government protect property rights, when governments are, by a large margin, the greatest violators of property rights around, is truly awe-inspiring. No lesser thief could brazenly take half your income year after year with no fear for the consequences.)
An example of attempting to legislate prosperity would be the minimum wage or the proposal for a basic income. You can legislate people money but you can't legislate them wealth. The more freely you hand out money, the less it's worth.
P.S. That word "utopian", it doesn't mean what you seem to think it means. Anarcho-capitalists are well aware that a society without government would not be perfect, any more than any other society can be said to be perfect. We don't even necessarily believe that an aggression-free society is an achievable goal. We simply refuse to legitimize aggression, which would contribute to the imperfection. What we find inexplicable is how others manage to justify to themselves the idea that there is any legitimacy at all in harming those who have not harmed them first. That's really all there is to our position: if someone hasn't harmed you, and doesn't want to get involved with you, leave them well enough alone!
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
We're discussing a small group owning 95% of a public resource, and Chavez pushed it back to 70% or 50%.
First, it's not a public resource. It's just a resource. Second, it doesn't matter how small the group was or how much they owned. Nationalization of private property is nationalization of private property.
There's only one set of airwaves so whoever regulates it will have a monopoly.
"One set of airwaves" is a gross over-simplification. Broadcast radio can easily be divided into distinct non-interfering sets by frequency, location, time, or any of a number of other ways. The only reason a monopoly exists here is that the state has created one for its own benefit. Homesteading a particular use of the airwaves is no different than homesteading a particular plot of land. There is no need for anyone to regulate it (i.e. nationalize it). Just recognize that the first user has a negotiable prior claim which must not be infringed.
The airwaves are a limited resource and they're supposed to serve the public.
Nonsense. They are a limited resource, like nearly everything else, but they don't exist "to serve the public" any more than any other good. They exist to serve those who can find a use for them which doesn't interfere with prior uses by others. The government has no place getting involved apart from arbitrating disputes, which could be done equally well—or perhaps better, with politics out of the picture—by a private arbiter.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
Let's be honest. Minimum wage is basically an attempt to sneak in universal basic income under a different name, and with a few irrelevant strings attached to attempt to satisfy the conservative "must work to live" crowd. If we lefties are honest with ourselves, we should be open about what we actually want, and just say that society has a moral obligation to provide a basic quality of living for every of its members - and implement this directly. Mincome FTW.
I think it's different from a universal basic income since the requirement of a job is hardly an irrelevant string.
I see it as an assumption that the lowest income workers don't have the bargaining power to receive a fair wage, so the government steps in and makes sure they get that wage. I also see it as a moral belief that if you work full time you should be able to afford to support yourself.
I stole this Sig
Yeah, 35 billion is nothing. That's half the budget, annually, for California. If they have these reserves and pull them out then the country truly is at rock bottom. It will be heading there as the attack on Daka demonstrates only state owned stores will flourish and they likely won't have anything in stock because nobody wants to sell to Venezuela and be paid in toilet paper Bolivars. It'll be like the good old days in Soviet Russia - where you sell your neighbor for a pair of blue jeans.
Poor choice of words, or you haven't been paying attention. One of the biggest recent Venezuelan shortages was of toilet paper, so if they actually started printing Bolivars on real TP, it would probably serve to increase the value of the note!
I think it's different from a universal basic income since the requirement of a job is hardly an irrelevant string.
It is when you add the "right to work" to the picture.
On the other hand, we've been saying that people who don't work should get unemployment benefits, so long as they are looking for a job (but can't find it). So you are guaranteed either these, or minimum income. Which, again, is a basic income guarantee for all practical purposes.
If you include long term unemployment benefits I suppose that does become a basic income guarantee, and it's something I wouldn't mind though I'm not sure they are a necessary pairing particularly since minimum wage should be higher than the unemployment for the bottom workers.
I stole this Sig
> Broadcast radio can easily be divided into distinct non-interfering
> sets by frequency, location, time, or any of a number of other ways.
That doesn't refute anything I said. But, since you bring it up, if you believe the government shouldn't regulate the airwaves, then exactly who will divide up the airwaves?
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Sorry, but you're wrong. Yes, in the '90s when those studies were done, it kinda looked that way. Since then, however, the percentage of single-parent homes has continued to skyrocket, only, funny thing, crime itself has gone way down. Read the above linked article, look at the graphs. Sure, some research says single-parent children may be more at risk for going to jail than those from two-parent households, but you can't explain the prison population that way, not without seriously cherry-picking your data.
In the US, minimum wage doesn't preclude employer paid health care, people making minimum wage often pay close to ZERO taxes in the US, and the get unemployment too. So again, do Aussie min wage earners live twice the lifestyle that US min wage earners do? Does the concept of buying power mean anything?
It's worth noting that Zimbabwe didn't actually ever fix their inflation issue, they merely knocked up a bunch of zeroes off the official notes.
Oh, they did fix it - they made the US Dollar their de-facto currency.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
You mean like Steve Jobs hiring Steve Wozniak? As I recall, both of them became rich.
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One thing to keep in mind is that as things have been progressing, usually in America we replace things before they're actually beyond their useful life. For example, I just got rid of a 55" bottom up projection TV I had from 14 years ago. It still works fine and even works as intended by design - I just didn't want it anymore. People do this all the time with their computers as well.
In cases like this, you can safely measure it in terms of how much you paid for it over how long you actually used it. When things like that are cheap, then your purchasing power is high. That is what we currently have in terms of homes in most areas, actually, whether you rent or own. Areas like New York are expensive, but they've always been expensive because so many people actually want to live there. People there live paycheck to paycheck not because they are forced to, but because they choose to. If you want to live that lifestyle, it's going to cost you.
If you think the prices for rent are oppressive there, just go somewhere else where you can live within your means. I'd like to live in Florida myself, and you can buy real estate cheap there. I'm actually wanting to move to Australia myself, but the purchasing power there isn't very good. Sure, they have a $15 an hour minimum wage, but stuff is so expensive there as a result of that wage that it is hard for even those of higher wages to afford stuff, and likewise it can even be hard to import luxury goods there. Case in point: (read the comments from those who actually live there)
http://slashdot.org/story/13/10/31/2153223/ask-slashdot-package-redirection-service-for-shipping-to-australia
I think it's much easier to live on $7 minimum wage in the US than $15 minimum wage in Oz. They are a perfect example of why wage floors don't accomplish their goals and instead make things worse. Though so long as I land a good enough job prior to arrival it won't bother me as I try not to let politics influence my decision on where I live.
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By exactly the same "reasoning", I could point out that only "fatcats" enjoyed US rural electric services until the government drove rural electrification, or that only "fatcats" enjoyed private, expedient interstate travel until the federal government instituted the interstate highway system.
Could be, but is it only fatcats that live in rural areas, or only fatcats that traveled between states using roads? As I recall, the first transcontinental railroad was a private effort that everybody benefited from. Also I know many people in Washington state who would never drive a car to Arizona, instead they opt for the smaller airports that can run as cheap as $50 for a round trip flight - all privately run - compared to using your government built interstate highway system costs much more than that in fuel alone (also forgetting the whole time is money thing, maintenance, and the food needed along the trip.)
I could also point out how US broadband and wireless services, and especially their pricing, remain embarrassingly inferior to those offered in more "socialized" economies.
I think that depends on where you live. For example, I pay $32 a month for 50/10 in Arizona for cable internet. My phone service with t-mobile is $23 a month for completely unlimited everything - or rather, $115 a month after all taxes and fees for 5 lines. Try finding better prices than those in other countries. Canada I already know is much worse. Japan, Australia, and the UK also being more expensive.
Also google fiber is difficult to top, though I don't have that myself.
Let me tell you a little secret about ISP costs: The Telecommunications Workers Union wants to keep them high, and so do local governments (the higher they are, the more tax revenue they get.) In areas where these aren't a factor, broadband prices are cheaper.
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A slave has no choice but to do as they're told, and they can't leave.
In corporate America if you don't like your job or your boss, working somewhere else is always an option, or even changing your career field should you choose it.
Planned economies always falter precisely because there's no entreprenuerism.
I personally hate Facebook, but try finding another country that is more hospitable to a company like them to spring up. In a planned economy, some derp would say "we don't need social networks, rather we need more plumbers, so you'll be a plumber." This is why planned economies fail - they invariably lack vision and flexibility.
Even semi-planned economies pale in comparison.
Google, Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo, HP, Intel, Nvidia, Skype, Youtube, and Netflix even...why is it that tech companies of this scale always show up in the US instead of the EU? In Europe the government tried to create Quaero as an alternative to Google, spent millions on it, and it failed miserably. South Korea and Japan have a similar economic philosophy as the US, so it's no wonder why companies like Samsung and Sony will show up there. Europe had Nokia, but not even that anymore, which is why it takes more than double the population to get a GDP comparable to ours.
Planned economies eventually falter, and once they falter you get the Berlin Wall. It happens every single time.
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How is the US planned? Last I checked, there aren't any government mandates on the number of employees in given industries. The closest to that I can think of is Oregon and Maine requiring gas attendants at the pump (personally I think it is much more dangerous to let people drive their own cars than to pump their own gas, but somehow Oregonians can't trust themselves to pump their own gas.)
There is *sort of* a privatized labor planning in the form of labor unions, but in just over half of the states they don't have any power over who can work or how much they can work. However none of them answer to a central planner.
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I completly agree with you that a planned economy wont work, but for other reasons.
That isn't nearly enough. You can't just base demand projections on historical figures and census data. That doesn't tell you anything about how supply and demand are likely to change. You have to predict what people are going to want, and what they're going to be willing and able to give up in exchange, whether that means money, barter, or simply goods which won't be available due to limited production capacity.
Ah ha. Projections based on historical figures won't work, but predictions (based on what else besides historical figures and market research) would work?
The government has tons of information (mostly collected by the local businesses), but it's the wrong kind of information.
Then what would keep gouvernment from collecting the right information? If that information is available to someone, the gouvernment can get access to it.
And even in our normal economy, companies now have to think on that "centralised" country-level, too. A car company does not have local factories everywhere, so they also need to project the demand for certain models country or even world wide. That's even more difficult that
The idea that you can manage supply and demand with nothing but high-level statistics and census data is why planned economies are doomed to experience shortages and surpluses. You can't even trust people to report their own preferences accurately on a survey; their actions often contradict their words.
Why are they doing that? Either because they don't know their own preferences or need for - say combine harvesters - when the fill out the survey. But that would effect ALL plannings based on that survey, no matter if it's done by a local dealer or big gouvernment. Or option B) what happend in real life so far: As there never has been a surplus of anything useful, people knew that they would get onkly half of their projected need. So if they needed 5 combine harvesters, they would put down a demand of 10.
Running a profitable business is as much as art as it is a science, and as with any other art, details matter. The local business owner has a much better idea of what his customers want and are willing to pay for his goods than any central planner working from a "big picture" perspective.
Again: nothing would keep a gouvernment from hiring those "artists/scientists" if that is needed to have things running smoothly.
Nothing of what you mentioned above. It's simply that those high paying jobs are reserved not for people with an intrest in running a working economy, but the Nephews of El Presidente! That's why it never worked so far.
And we shouldn't try really it either, because of the stakes.
Moreover, the local business owner has far more at stake in getting his estimates right
From a high-level overall risks are not distributed as you mentioned above. a local merchant who made an error has to close shop for some reason is quite a small risk to a society. One greengrocer less... so what. But if something goes wrong in a centrally planned economy, the whole country will go down the drain as there are no competitors as a redundant backup.
bickerdyke
The rank and file workers may implement and therefore play a role, however they don't engineer new designs that make production more efficient.
I see what you're getting at by saying that, e.g. the CEO isn't the only engineer. But the Henry Fords, Bill Gates, Elon Musks, and Larry Paiges of the world are the ones who really set things into motion. And then there are the Wozniaks of the world. Sure, Woz didn't run the company, but he's one of the 1% that the occupy movement is so eager to declare war on - yet without him, there never would have been an Apple to have invented that ipad that they made a big deal about when another occupier stole it.
I personally don't have any plans to ever strike it rich, rather I tire of people always looking for some nameless face to blame all of life's problems on. If I don't speak up, who will? They can't for the same reason that I can't speak out about why as a white guy I'm not the cause of all of black America's problems. Same shit, different crowd, so many people refuse to take responsibility for themselves its pathetic.
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People aren't earning below the minimum wage (unless they are employed by a company breaking the law) so no they aren't any of those things. You can't pretend that the minimum wage is somehow artificially manipulating the job market when the government is willing to subsidise people with low earnings because the market is already manipulated.
Nearly 20% of UK households receive housing benefit. Nothing like 20% of UK households are entirely unemployed so your world view where the only low paid workers are trainees, living with parents or working for shits and giggles is nothing more than a fiction you seemed to have confused with reality.
Well, in today's America you are not forced to work for someone at the point of a gun AND you get to choose who you work for.
Not by gunpoint, but by threat of starvation. And you can't choose who you work for when you have to be lucky to find someone who lets you work for him in the first place.
And while I, too, prefer to live in a country that does not force you to do anything at gun point, the "freedom to starve" is just as usefull as the "freedom to get shot" when you're stuck in some shitty job but have to consider yourself lucky for having a job at all.
But as you said. someone has to do those jobs. It is not like everyone could just choose some other job. Someone has to do those jobs. And in every society there will be the poor sods who are forced into those jobs.
Ah, yes.. the Maerican Dream. The firm believe that no one will ever be stuck in a shitty job because everyone has lots of chances to find something better.
Or to paraphrase John Steinbeck. There aren't any poor people in America. Just " temporarily embarrassed millionaires."
bickerdyke
The rank and file workers may implement and therefore play a role, however they don't engineer new designs that make production more efficient. I see what you're getting at by saying that, e.g. the CEO isn't the only engineer. But the Henry Fords, Bill Gates, Elon Musks, and Larry Paiges of the world are the ones who really set things into motion.
You need to move one step further and realize that 1) engineer is also a rank and file worker, and 2) the person can be both a productive worker and a rent-seeking capitalist at the same time. Insofar as they are performing managerial, R&D, engineering etc work, they definitely do produce wealth. But above and beyond that, when they get the portion of the company's income out of proportion to their contribution to its wealth production, they are living off other people's labor. This scale is flexible, and tends to go to either extreme depending on company size: in small businesses, even those with hired workers, most of the owner's income is "sweat of the brow", and in large companies, the owners tend to be rewarded grossly disproportionally to their contribution, if any.
This leads to the obvious way of dealing with that disparity: just tax capital gains more - more than "sweat of the brow" income, anyway (and make the tax on the latter completely flat, with basic deductions). Woz and other guys like him, insofar as they are doing great engineering work, they should be rewarded by being paid accordingly. OTOH, some rich guy who's living entirely off dividends on his stocks, he does not contribute much if anything - so let's tax him and use that money for social projects that benefit the people who are creating the wealth that backs those dividends in the first place.
Obviously, I mean "people earning below a proposed minimum wage". Geez, use your head.
I don't know how the UK works, and I really don't care; European economies are so broken that anything is possible.
In the US, the majority of minimum wage earners are younger than 24 yo, have no higher education, and work in food service (where they get supplemental income in tips).
And public benefits / welfare are preferable to a higher minimum wage. A higher minimum wage attempts to place the burden of welfare disproportionately on business employing low-wage workers, and they will simply respond by eliminating jobs and/or passing the costs on. If you want to help low-income people, do it via taxation and redistribution, don't try to sneak it in via these kinds of market manipulations. Of course you know full well that people would likely vote against increasing public assistance financed through higher taxes, which is why people like you engage in this kind of deception.
Steve Jobs was worth an estimated $8.3B in 2010.
Steve Wozniak is estimated to be worth $100M, which is about 1.2% of Jobs' wealth.
My point is made.
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
While the nominally capitalist societies in this world could be improved, I am sick and tired of hearing people who have never experienced true oppression compare what goes on in those countries to such...while calling for "reforming" their economies into an economy that ONLY works when there is true oprression.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Well, another socialist dictator running an economy further in the ground, not, that we didn't see it coupla hundred times...
Somehow, she ends up in all these types of stories. Maybe there is a reason. But, don't expect those who grew up in a bubble of the virtues of Socialism or Collectivism to understand. Their last original thought was right before they were indoctrinated by their Socialist Professors. BTW, Ayn's best book was The Fountainhead. Go into any independent book store and ask for it.
Ah ha. Projections based on historical figures won't work, but predictions (based on what else besides historical figures and market research) would work?
Predictions based on experience. Experience is based on history, but it includes subjective observations and details which aren't easily quantifiable in a report. Perhaps the biggest difference is that you're trying to put together enough information in one place to come up with a single ideal way, where free individuals would try many different ways. While it has more waste initially, the latter has a much better chance of coming up with something that closely approximates the ideal. Since it's based on the overall result rather than a model, it takes into account information we didn't even know we needed and can't directly observe.
You're assuming skills and observations can be freely extracted from individual's minds and turned into nice, neat algorithms or figures in a report which can substitute on equal terms for the original person making the decision. The real world doesn't work like that. Statistical analysis is all well and good, but there are aspects of personal experience relating to decision making which we have no way to quantify or automate.
... nothing would keep a gouvernment from hiring those "artists/scientists" if that is needed to have things running smoothly.
Sure, but to do any good, they would have to leave the experts free to run their businesses as they choose in real-time. Those skills are based on live interaction with the market, and don't translate into coming up with a plan beforehand. If you did this you'd have a market economy, not a centralize, planned economy.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
Oh so Woz isn't rich then?
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There are still lots of regulations from all levels of government. There's the federal reserve. There's Obamacare. Central planning isn't all or nothing. Most economies, including the United States, are mixed.
The federal reserve doesn't plan the economy or even any part of it, rather it has heavy influence on the medium used for exchange. The federal reserve for example can't influence the number of basket weavers we have. Obamacare is still in its infancy, but it doesn't bode well for the point you're trying to make, as so far it isn't going very well (by that I mean it isn't delivering what it promised since some people are losing their coverage, and many people in the medical field are actually leaving because they don't like the changes.)
Limiting union power is a type of central planning. Most union busting actions come from the state, not from private Pinkertons of ages past (one exception being Walmart, they spend their own money to keep unions from forming)
That doesn't make any sense - in right to work states, the rule is simply that an employer can't reject you for a job because of your standing with any union. That isn't planned at all. Unions very much do exist in these states, by the way, and still organize strikes and everything. They just can't forcibly control any of their members by holding their job hostage, rather they have to earn the respect and trust of their members instead, and they can't force their members to contribute to political campaigns that they don't want to. I think it's better that way.
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The point I was making is that being productive is not as lucrative as exploiting the productivity of others.
But let's look at Woz's $100M fortune, then. Did he make most of that money by doing productive work at Apple, or was it instead a result of the astronomical valuation of Apple stock over the many years since 1987 when he last did any work at Apple?
So sure, let's say that Woz making two orders of magnitude less money than his business "partner" nonetheless puts the two of them in the same financial bracket. Then consider that an overwhelming majority of even Woz's money came not from his work at Apple but from financial investments in Apple. Are we saying that holding onto shares of stock is productive work?
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
Hello from Australia. Minimum wage here is $16.37 AUD ($15.23 USD). Seems pretty prosperous.
Sure, until you want to buy or rent somewhere to live.
Source: Live here too. And http://www.rs.realestate.com.au/cgi-bin/rsearch?a=sp&s=wa&u=perth
You need to move one step further and realize that 1) engineer is also a rank and file worker
I don't think you realize that management isn't a rent-seeking role or necessarily even a leadership role, rather it is just a job function that keeps the operational and logistical cogs turning, and can in fact be taken up by anybody from time to time.
Bill Gates would be a rank and file worker throughout his entire career at the company under your definition.
When I say rank and file, I'm going by the actual meaning of the term based on its military origins. Somebody like Wozniak rarely involved himself in management (though he certainly partook in many management functions) but he certainly wasn't a rank and file employee. The military definition of the term is quite literally those lower in rank, i.e. those who perhaps haven't been with the company long or haven't really advanced anywhere significant within the company.
If I start my own business and run a one man operation, I'd also be a rank and file employee under your idealism. Reality is that I would be wearing many hats.
when they get the portion of the company's income out of proportion to their contribution to its wealth production, they are living off other people's labor.
That's kind of dumb actually. That would be like you hiring somebody to weed your yard, then suddenly that guy saying "Hey, I think I contribute more to your wealth than you're paying me, so now you must pay me more. Who cares if the other guy will do it for less, you have to pay me anyways, so sayeth the people's revolution."
Really what's happening in that exchange is somebody might be better at weeding yards than you are, so his time spent weeding yards is worth less to him than your time spent weeding your own yard is worth to you. So it works out to your mutual advantage to have him to it instead and you just pay him.
"Rank and file" work within companies works this way.
so let's tax him and use that money for social projects that benefit the people who are creating the wealth that backs those dividends in the first place.
These almost always go into projects that nobody actually wants. I mean who really benefits from NEA funds for example? The christians were pissed about piss christ. It didn't bother me insofar as its message, but I'm trying to figure out why somebody deserves to get paid to piss in a jar with a jesus statue in it when it doesn't have any value that somebody would actually pay for it. I mean really, how does a jesus statue in a jar of piss add to our domestic wealth?
It's just throwing money away. Public works is a better idea in principle, but it too was just a waste. The Keynesians have time and time again been proven wrong throughout history - especially in the 80's when stagflation happened, and under Keynesian theory stagflation is impossible. So they replaced that with New Keynesian theory, which too has been taking continuous beatings as the economy does things that their models never account for.
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I don't think you realize that management isn't a rent-seeking role or necessarily even a leadership role, rather it is just a job function that keeps the operational and logistical cogs turning, and can in fact be taken up by anybody from time to time.
I do - that's precisely why I have been talking about "owners", not "leaders".
Yes, I did mess up the terminology somewhat. You're right that CEO, for example, is not "rank and file", but he still performs managerial functions that do contribute to overall wealth generation. Of course, CEOs today are generally paid well in excess of what they actually produce, and they often also own significant portions of stock, as well. Like I said, this is a smooth scale, it's not binary. For example, most of my income is my wage, but I also own stocks, including dividend-paying stocks - and those dividends are me cashing in on the efforts of people who work for those companies; so, to some extent, I'm also a rent seeker.
Really what's happening in that exchange is somebody might be better at weeding yards than you are, so his time spent weeding yards is worth less to him than your time spent weeding your own yard is worth to you. So it works out to your mutual advantage to have him to it instead and you just pay him.
It doesn't matter that the exact amount that is skimmed off wealth generated by other people is established in a free market - it's still a person appropriating wealth that someone else has produced. Note that this is not at all about what is "fair" or "not fair" about compensation goes. The point is that people work to produce a product or a service, and said product or service is then sold for a price higher than the cost of non-labor inputs (material etc). What enables this higher price is the productive labor that went into the product or service, and it is possible to estimate, in theory, how much each worker has contributed - even if it's difficult in practice because the volume of information that needs to be processed is very large. If some person gets a part of that profit margin who has not contributed any effort towards the value increase that made it possible, then the only logical conclusion is that they are leeching off everyone else who did contribute.
These almost always go into projects that nobody actually wants.
Really? Is the interstate highway system a waste? Is public healthcare (in all the other countries where it's present and working) a waste? Is ITER a waste? How about public schools?
I think that most people will disagree with you here. I don't really see much point in discussing this disagreement, as well, as it is a matter of dogma among libertarians.
Note, though, that my proposed scheme did not talk at all about what the taxes would be spent on, only about how to procure them. The decision on what the government should be paying for is a separate topic, and even if you are a hardline minarchist who believes that the only legitimate government expenses are courts, police and military, it still leaves the question of where the money for those should come from. And I would still stand by my assertion that it makes more sense to tax people more on rent and less on labor, even from the libertarian perspective.
This so called strategy that Maduro is using is not real. The owners of the store are long time collaborators to the regime. The untold story is that this guys sold their inventory and store to the government and left to Panama where they opened a brand new electronic store. On the other hand, Maduro calls the masses to take the store merchandise while being protected by the militaries. Now he comes out with this cheap prices strategy when in reality is just sending a message to the remaining big store owners: Either play with me or that is the fate of your store. Looking at it from the strategy point of view is brilliant but the consequences will be disastrous for the people of Venezuela, my birth country :(
Aehmm... a gouvernment with an overview over internal and external politics and economic data HAS more information available than any businessman on its own.
So what? It's not useful information for running a business. Businesses don't really need to know that much about the world outside of their target market. And the voluntary act of trade guarantees that those party to it are acting in their interests.
It doesn't matter that the exact amount that is skimmed off wealth generated by other people is established in a free market - it's still a person appropriating wealth that someone else has produced.
That's the nice thing about a free market though, is if you don't like your compensation and you are good enough at your job, you can find somebody who will offer what you want. The whole reason most of us take weekends off is because Henry Ford wanted to reduce employee turnover, so he offered incentives beyond pay (which by the way, pay isn't actually a good work incentive, rather if rank and file workers aren't being paid enough then they tend to be more dissatisfied, but raising their pay doesn't raise their satisfaction in most cases) and part of those incentives was a fixed work schedule. It worked extremely well by getting him both the type of employees he wanted and got to keep them. Other employers caught on and soon it became the mainstream.
Now keep that in mind and then keep in mind what happens in a planned economy. In a planned economy, it's pretty much you just do as you're told. Poor saps are often given illusions of everything being perfect when it's all centrally planned, and start their wars against the "bourgeois". Every single time in history when "the people" "the poor" or "the downtrodden" win these wars though, without fail, when their revolutions succeed they always end up worse than before they started that war. This is why I mock the occupy movement for example - they foolishly know not what they ask for. Most of them are very ignorant of history, and are even more ignorant of economics (seriously, pollsters have found them heavily lacking in education.) I'm very much pro free speech so I'm in favor of them being out there, but I'll be ever vigilant in opposing their ideals.
Really? Is the interstate highway system a waste? Is public healthcare (in all the other countries where it's present and working) a waste? Is ITER a waste? How about public schools?
The interstate highway is probably a good thing, though it's being misused. Remember how it used to be legal to drink at age 18? Sure as shit you're old enough to pay taxes at age 18, but the federal government holds interstate highway funding hostage for any state that doesn't push that age to 21. They do that and similar things with it.
ITER could very well be a waste. Tell me, what do we have to show for it so far?
Public schools are definitely wasteful. Not that I disagree with the idea of publicly funded education - quite the opposite, education is critical for building strong economies - but ours is perhaps the worst managed one there is, and unions are largely to blame. I really like the idea of a voucher system myself - private schools can reject the problem kids (who caused me a ton of grief during my school years, so I have zero sympathy for them) and the problem kids can stay in the public system where they belong. You can't just let the problem kids drag down everybody else with impunity, which unfortunately we allow to happen rampantly, and it needs to stop.
Private schools have been well proven to provide a superior education at a lower cost, so it boggles the mind why some people are so opposed to making them more available to the public. I agree with the concerns about religious schools (I'm very much atheist) but that problem can be solved by denying vouchers to schools that don't meet academic standards in *all* sciences.
On the topic of unions; I'd much prefer European style unions to what we have in the US. In the US, unions ARE rent seeking businesses in the purest form - they don't give a shit about the workers, they just want somebody to collect dues from and then do just the minimum to make the workers think they're on their side. Look at what the teamsters union did to hostess; I don't think forcing them out of business was exactly in the interests of the workers, but the union leadership declared it a victory anyways,
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To clarify, I am not arguing in favor of centralized planning - I lived in the country where such was practiced, so I know how exactly it sucks in practice. I do accept a great deal of Marxist economic analysis, simply because it makes sense - but I don't accept the measures that they propose based on that analysis.
I do approach all kinds of government regulation from a "moderated libertarian" perspective - that is, begin with maximized theoretical freedom - "everything goes" - and then look at the practical effects of that approach and whether they do result in significant problems; then introduce just as much regulation as is necessary to correct those problems, but balancing the limitations it places on personal freedom with the social value of the objectives that it achieves (which may include more practical personal freedom for other people).
Market regulation in a capitalist, from that perspective, is necessary for two reasons. Both stem from the fact that capital is, by definition, "wealth that creates wealth", and therefore its owner can utilize the very fact of said ownership to produce more wealth. Beyond a certain limit (at which point we call the person who is the owner of the assets a "capitalist"), this is basically self-sustaining growth.
Now, this is not an issue per se, but it does mean that capital tends to accumulate in the hands of the few people who already own it. It is possible for a person with no capital to accumulate enough wealth to break into that circle, through a lot of effort and luck (being in the right place at the right time etc), so social mobility is better than it is in e.g. a feudal society, where any rank elevation is "invite only"; but it's still low enough to cause visible stratification into classes.
The first problem that directly stems of said narrow accumulation of wealth is a tendency to form cartels or otherwise monopolizing the market, as Adam Smith has already noted early on. This is natural, since monopolies are virtually always more market efficient (from perspective of people participating in them, of course, not their customers), and so it is rational to seek their formation. However, when there are many small players, the organizational overhead is big enough that monopolization is hard if not outright impossible; OTOH, with relatively few big players, informal agreements are relatively easy to arrange, and monopolization becomes only a matter of time - as we've seen many times in our history. The effect of monopoly is far-reaching - by raising barriers to entry to the market, it also raises barriers to the existing social elevators, further reinforcing stratification and income divide.
The other problem stemming from the accumulation of wealth is the divide in economic power that, beyond a certain limit, starts to spill over into the political sphere. Basically, once you have significantly more money than everyone else, there is a motivation to move the political system closer to one-dollar-one-vote. In a representative republic, this is trivial to implement, most obviously by funding elected representatives to pursue your agenda (which also tends to be the most cost efficient method), but also by investing into propaganda, and even outright vote buying. However, an even more cost-efficient way is to ditch democracy altogether, and replace it with an autocratic pro-big-business regime - the pattern that we see time and again in Latin American and African countries in reaction to leftist trends in democratic politics.
There's one more thing, which is not a clearly articulated issue, just something to keep in mind. As is often noted, pure "to everyone according to their need" communism is non-achievable, at least in a scarcity society, because it goes contrary to human nature, as greed is a part of it. What is often ignored, however, is that this same human nature also has some other hardwired behaviors, and one of them is altruism, which includes a desire for "fairness" (there are a number of psychological experiments
The other problem stemming from the accumulation of wealth is the divide in economic power that, beyond a certain limit, starts to spill over into the political sphere.
Actually that doesn't happen in practice. I think you're confusing wealth and money (they are very different things) but when I see, for example, people decry about how some rich folks have trillions hidden in offshore accounts and are therefore "hoarding" wealth, that doesn't hold up.
Money sitting in some offshore account doesn't in any way equate to wealth. It's just a number on a ledger. There was some marxist group a few years ago who released a study indicating that all of this money could end world poverty 4 times over....only it can't actually do that. You see, they based this study purely on government figures that say "if you have at least x money, then you are above poverty" and figured that they could reach that amount four times over with this money.
Perhaps the math works, but there's a big huge hole in that reasoning: Money can't just magically turn into material wealth, it has to be traded. Somebody somewhere has to actually farm food or manufacture useful things. Pulling that money out of those accounts doesn't do that - the fundamental problem of scarce resources hasn't gone away, rather the medium of exchange has expanded. The actual result of that would simply be inflation, or that since there's more money in more people's hands, the money itself would now be worth less, and those government figures about what constitutes poverty would simply rise.
Here's a nifty car analogy: You own a car. Would owning another car exactly like it add to your personal wealth? (presuming you weren't going to sell it or allow anybody else to use it) Not really. Why would you want a second car after you already own one? That concept applies to money as well. Adding more of something one already has plenty of simply brings in diminishing returns of actual worth. This is simultaneously why minimum wages don't increase wealth, and in fact have the opposite effect.
Another consideration to make is how poor people who win the lottery seldom remain rich. The fact is that most people don't know how to manage money. I myself actually live better off than many people who make a fair bit more money than I do, and it's entirely due to how I manage my personal finances.
Unions can be both beneficial and harmful. Their original purpose was to organize workers so that they had bargaining power that was on par with that on their employer when the latter is a major business. When they go beyond that level and monopolize the labor market, they are just as harmful as business monopolies.
That's a common misconception: The very first labor unions were intended to stem the growth of "yellow goods"; goods that were made by "chinamen". This was later extended to stemming the growth of black made goods in order to keep the wages of white people high. The original labor unions were very much rooted in racism. It wasn't until about the 30's that the modern impression of what most people think of as labor unions began, though most of the things that you hear "thank a union" for weren't actually brought about by labor unions (think this list which is just flat out dead wrong for almost all of these, for example Henry Ford started the 5 day 8 hour work week, not labor unions.)
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