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In Venezuela, 'Cutting-Edge' Cryptocurrency is Nowhere To Be Found (reuters.com)
Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro has made ambitious claims that the nation's petro cryptocurrency is backed by 5 billion barrels of petroleum reserves. But when reporters of Reuters conducted a months-long investigation, they found that petro is getting little to no traction in the nation or elsewhere. Reuters: Located in an isolated savanna in the center of the country, Atapirire is the only town in an area the government says is brimming with 5 billion barrels of petroleum. Venezuela has pledged those reserves as backing for a digital currency dubbed the "petro," which Maduro launched in February. This month he vowed it would be the cornerstone of a recovery plan for the crisis-stricken nation. But Atapirire residents say they have seen no efforts by the government to tap those reserves. And they have little confidence that their struggling village has a front-row seat to a revolution in finance. "There is no sign of that petro here," said homemaker Igdalia Diaz. She launched into a diatribe about her town's crumbling school, pitted roads, frequent blackouts and perpetually hungry citizens.
It turns out that Venezuela's petro is hard to spot almost anywhere. Over a period of four months, Reuters spoke with a dozen experts on cryptocurrencies and oil-field valuation, traveled to the site of the pledged oil reserves and scoured the coin's digital transaction records in an effort to learn more. The hunt turned up little evidence of a thriving petro trade. The coin is not sold on any major cryptocurrency exchange. No shops are known to accept it.
It turns out that Venezuela's petro is hard to spot almost anywhere. Over a period of four months, Reuters spoke with a dozen experts on cryptocurrencies and oil-field valuation, traveled to the site of the pledged oil reserves and scoured the coin's digital transaction records in an effort to learn more. The hunt turned up little evidence of a thriving petro trade. The coin is not sold on any major cryptocurrency exchange. No shops are known to accept it.
Venezuela has run out of other people's money.
Scandinavia is doing just fine.
Sweden == capitalism
Sweden didn't nationalize companies/ other peoples equipment, try to force farmers to produce under the cost of production, heavily regulate internal prices outside of market value, centrally govern production/distribution.
nationalization is not a requirement of socialism
Oil in the ground ultimately isn't really worth that much when you can't extract, process, and ship it. And Venezuela's aging oil infrastructure has been struggling for years now. Case in point this article from Routers that reports that Venezuela's tankers have been banned from some ports because they're so poorly maintained that they leak unacceptable amounts of oil into the local area. https://www.reuters.com/articl...
At the end of the day this really does show one of the weakness of socialist monoculture economies. If the one good you can sell starts too loose value you'll quickly find yourself in a pretty dire situation. Even more so if you're government is both corrupt and too incompetent to modernize your industrial equipment.
nationalization is not a requirement of socialism
That's just one way to steal property.
Socialism is a range of economic and social systems characterised by social ownership and workers' self-management of the means of production[10] as well as the political theories and movements associated with them.[11] Social ownership may refer to forms of public, collective or cooperative ownership, or to citizen ownership of equity.[12] There are many varieties of socialism and there is no single definition encapsulating all of them,[13] though social ownership is the common element shared by its various forms.
A prerequisite of socialism is the appropriation of private property from it's original owners - nationalization is just one way of doing that taking.
Of course, that means another prerequisite of socialism is authoritarianism - a socialist society has to force unwilling private owners to give up their property.
You mean to tell me that citizens of the country who can't trust their country's own currency aren't trusting their country's cryptocurrency either? That's crazy talk.
Venezuelan citizens using a cryptocurrency like bitcoin is probably the most legitimate use of it.
Norway basically nationalized its oil industry, but did so with some forethought and planning, creating a sovereign wealth fund with the intent of maximizing the benefit of oil revenues for Norwegians, rather than simply enriching oil companies and skimming royalties off the top. You can call that socialism if you like, but the fact is that Norway's sovereign wealth fund is now large enough to both pay for a fairly generous welfare state and sit there as a protection against what can be a fairly volatile international market.
What Venezuela did under the Chavistas is to use oil revenues to pay for its welfare state, but also to enrich the Chavistas and their generals, and try to buy influence with other Latin American countries (Venezuela basically underwrote the Cuban economy for years by selling oil to the country at what amounted to almost give-away prices). If Venezuela had duplicated the Norwegian model, it would actually have weathered the storm that came with the collapse of oil prices reasonably well. To be fair, it's not like previous right wing regimes were all that cautious, and certainly while Norway is a fairly advanced country firmly in the developed world, while Venezuela has much higher poverty rates, but still, looking at Venezuela is to see a socialist state that also basically functions as a kleptocracy, that managed to keep afloat when oil prices were very high, and the Chavistas gambled that that would always be the way.
To be even fairer, Venezuela was hardly the only petro-jurisdiction to squander the wealth. Up in my neck of the woods, Alberta had the Heritage Fund, with the idea that it would function like Norway's sovereign wealth fund, but has squandered much of it as well. North Dakota was similarly irresponsible.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Venezuela has no petroleum industry anymore. No oil company can pay (or even feed) workers. They cannot maintain equipment. They cannot ship oil.
Unitl Venezuela undergoes a complete reboot, they have nothing and people will just flee. If I had Jeff Bezos level money I'd take over a hundred square miles or so of fertile farmland and start running my own country, you'd get endless waves of people happy to join your new country that had food and water and security. Then just slowly grow outward until you own all of Venezuela, by the simple choice of the people moving there. Call it "True Venezuela", to preserve national identity which still has value even if the country itself does not currently.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"...said homemaker Igdalia Diaz"
Great editorial work, Reuters! You probably just got Igdalia Diaz killed under mysterious circumstances.
And yet "failing late-stage capitalist" countries are absolutely booming.
We're drowning in prosperity, with our most poor dying from obesity more than any other cause, and with everyone employed who wants to be... Yet socialists spouting idiocy abound.
Bernie Sanders has three homes and made $3.6 million dollars last year, but whines about how awful everything is.
Leftists and socialists violently riot, demand our destruction, and claim that we're the worst hell hole on earth... Yet people are literally dying to get in, and we're supposed to ignore all that.
According to this article from 2 days ago, Dashcoin cryptocurrency entered Venezuela with such a bang that it may have saved Dash (which has been tanking) as much as Venezuela. But all articles on cryptocurrency have been hype for the past 5 years, so I can't say I red very far. https://www.cryptorecorder.com...
Gently reply
Really? A communist state whose people can't even get TP doesn't really have petro-backed cryptocurrency??
Next you'll be telling me that my pen pal bride just wants a green card! (sniff :( )
Norway basically nationalized its oil industry ...
Norway did nothing of the sort.
In May 1963, the Norwegian Government proclaimed sovereignty over the Norwegian continental shelf. ...
... Norway also established the principle that the state was to have a 50 per cent ownership interest in every production licence. [in other words, if you want to drill Norway's oil and gas - which is already owned by the state - Norway gets half ownership in the license to do so - hardly nationalizing anything]
In spring 2001, the Storting decided that 21.5 % of the value of the SDFI portfolio could be sold; 15 % was sold to Equinor and 6.5 % to other licensees. The sale of part of the SDFI portfolio to Equinor was seen as an important element in the successful part-privatisation of the company. Equinor was listed on the stock exchange in June the same year, and now operates in the same way as any other commercial actor on the Norwegian continental shelf. The state-owned enterprise Petoro was established in May 2001 to manage the SDFI on behalf of the state. In 2007, Equinor merged with Norsk Hydro’s oil and gas division.
Heck, it seems like Norway even privatized at least parts of the state's ownership stake in the actual oil/gas in the ground.
There's nothing socialist about a sovereign nation deciding to manage its oil and gas assets that way. In fact, it's quite non-socialist in its lack of direct government control and apparent privatization of portions of that control.
nationalization is not a requirement of socialism
Yes it is. Socialism means government ownership of the means of production (capital). That is all it means.
Socialism does not mean "capitalism with healthcare". A better word for that is "progressive" or "social democracy".
All countries are a mix of capitalism and socialism. In America, the government runs a massive advertising business that delivers garbage to everyones mailbox. In Sweden, the post office is privatized, but healthcare is not. They are about equal on the capitalism/socialism scale with government controlling about 40-50% of GDP.
Norway has somewhat more socialism because the government owns Statoil, a big oil company, but it is still a mostly capitalist country.
In 1950, Venezuela had the 4th highest per-capita income on Earth.
... and nearly all that wealth went to the top 1%.
Socialism has screwed both rich and poor in Venezuela, but the status quo ante wasn't exactly a utopia.
With growing inequality in America, and many young people looking to the left for the solution, maybe we should try to learn from what happened in Venezuela.
*sigh* Inflation doesn't happen because people think it will happen. It happens because the government is printing too much money. If you double the amount of currency in the system, everyone figures it's worth half what it used to be, so prices double to compensate. Usually, governments resort to this if they're spending more than they're bringing in via tax revenue. Germany did this in the 1930s to try to pay back war debt. Venezuela does it to try to maintain their socialist paradise ("free" services for everyone). A government spending more than it brings in has two options - keep the debt on the books, or print money to pay for it. When a government prints more money, it's basically stealing from its citizens by devaluing the currency. The money a citizen has in his wallet is worth half of what it used to be, and the value of the other half gets transferred to the government in the form of extra currency it has printed. It's a way to tax people without actually needing them to actually hand over the money to a tax collection agency.
What saved Brazil was reforms that got government spending under control. Their new currency may have helped people put more faith in the currency, but it's not what stopped inflation. As Venezuela is finding out. Same thing nearly happened to Greece, except they were on the Euro. So their government over-spending ended up being paid for by other countries using the Euro. Which is why they banded together and gave Greece an ultimatum - adopt spending and economic reforms ("austerity"), or be kicked out of the Eurozone.
Everything that's consumed has to be produced, so productivity is the true fundamental currency of an economy. The money you choose to use is just a representation of that productivity. If you manipulate your monetary currency only to the extent necessary to keep its value more or less constant relative to productivity (what governments do with a fiat currency), then it remains stable, leaving the economy free to operate on its own. But when you start screwing around with your money supply to try to fix other problems (like pay for massive government debt), it shows up as a deviation between your money's value and the value of productivity - the value of your currency changes by a large amount. Basically, manipulating your currency is like changing the markings on a ruler. It may change the number of your measurements (number of Bolivars needed to buy a dozen eggs), but the fundamental distance (productivity needed to raise chickens to produce a dozen eggs) does not change. All you do is create additional overhead as citizens have to spend more time and effort trying to keep track of and compensate for changing currency values (i.e. waste productivity on financial bookkeeping, rather than on producing actual goods and services).
U.S. sanctions have nothing to do with it. A healthy economy is mostly domestic - most trade happens inside the country (U.S. imports + exports are only about 20% of its domestic GDP), so can't really be hurt by foreign sanctions. U.S. sanctions end up hurting Venezuela only because its government has completely crippled its domestic economy with its boneheaded economic policies.
This definition means that all of the democratic socialist spouters are wrong and that no European country is actually socialist in any form.
No, it means that larger portions of their economy utilize socialism, but that portions remain capitalist. Many countries (including the United States) can be considered such a mix.
And communism isn't socialism. Communism believes in effectively abolishing the state and going to pure shared ownership. No country has achieved communism.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
Yes, Norway created a sovereign wealth fund out of nationalizing their oil industry. Of course they could have done the same if they sold the extraction rights to private companies. Also, they didn't take the usual route of nationalizing an existing industry that had been privately established. Rather they just decided that the government would run the extraction for their newly discovered offshore oil. This was pretty easy to do since it's pretty hard for any individual to claim mineral rights on a patch of ocean.
However, for a large portion of its history, they weren't spending any of it, which was quite wise of them. Only more recently did they tap into it (and there are limits to how much they can spend) and in their newest budgets they're trying to cut what they're spending out of it. There was a lot of criticism of the Conservative government leadership spending a lot of that money out in order to get reelected, which I suspect is behind the efforts to curtail the spending. However, they'll claim that they only did this to ease revenue shortfalls as a result of the collapse in oil prices.
The other funny thing about Norway is that their top marginal tax rate is lower than the top rate in the U.S. Also the Scandinavian countries in general don't really have a "tax the rich" type of approach the social democrats (or democratic socialists) seem to spout on about. They tax everyone quite highly. You only need to earn about 1.5 times the national average income to fall into the top bracket in the Scandinavian countries, whereas it's over 8 times as much in the U.S. If you look specifically at Norway their top marginal tax rate is 38.52% (compared to the U.S. at 37%) and both Norway and Denmark have lower rates now than they did 10 years ago, whereas the U.S. actually has higher rates, even though they were recently lowered (from ~39%).
This notion that the Nordic model is some great socialist system is just nonsense. Up until the recent changes from Congress, every single one of those countries had lower corporate tax rates than the U.S., and by a wide margin as well. All of them had been in the low 20% for years now (the U.S. was at 35%, but now we're much closer to them) and every single one of those countries had been gradually lowering corporate tax rates over the last decade as well. These supposed socialist states, are anything but and if you look at how many of them have been adjusting their taxes, they're moving away from what the kind of people who think they're socialist countries would make them socialist countries. I think people just see the healthcare system and assume everything must be socialist.
The Alberta Heritage fund got raided because there weren't enough protections put in place to stop asshole politicians from putting their fingers in the pie and they eventually quit paying into it and spent the money instead. I don't think North Dakota has spent any of their oil fund (Legacy Fund) money yet. I think they're just having issues because they probably got used to having all of that oil money in their budget and the price collapse left them in a lurch. Random side note, but from a certain perspective North Dakota is the most socialist state in the U.S. in that they have the only state-owned bank. Maybe it's all the Norwegian farmers.
....Bernie Sanders has three homes and made $3.6 million dollars last year....Leftists and socialists violently riot....
Bernie Sanders never said people shouldn't own their own homes or be able to make money. He's for "medicare for all" because he believes that health care is a human right and that the role of government is to guarantee some basic human rights. If you're politically opposed to the idea of health care as a basic human right, make an intelligent intellectual argument as to why healthcare is not a right and why the government shouldn't provide medical insurance, but don't just attack the man and try to paint him as a hypocrite for owning three homes or having a job. He's not against individual property ownership or private enterprise.
It wasn't leftists who rioted in Charlottesville last year and ran over a counter protestor. It wasn't a leftist President who regularly and openly encourages violence at his political rallies, then promises to pay the legal bills if his supporters beat someone. It wasn't a leftist who committed the most deadly domestic terrorist attack in our nations history. You're trying to frame the debate in your own terms.
You can have "social ownership" without appropriation of private property. You can have socialized medicine; sure, it's paid for by taxes but only a moron would call all taxes a form of socialism.
Private property, by the way, being a relatively new concept for those who aren't monarchs. If private property were sacred, we'd have given it all back to the native Americans we stole it from originally. So taking of private property by conquest is ok? Private property only exists in the US because it was granted by the government to someone in the past.
I feel there's been a huge push in recent years to redefine a lot of political terms. Socialism isn't just a system anymore it's become something evil, and furthermore anything evil is rebranded as socialism. Similarly Fascist governments in the past are now being redefined to being left wing because of some innate assumption that the right wing has never done anything evil in the entirety of history. These new definitions are just used to prop up political views and would not hold water in any political science discussion.
But communism as defined by Marx has never occured in any country. You can't just change the definitions of words to make your point.
I give you authoritarianism.
FTFY. Authoritarian societies tend to screw over the people regardless of other factors.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.