Writ-with-Hand

k3,

My feeling about oil in Venezuela is pretty much like my feeling about cocaine in Colombia or Peru, Venezuela owns its particular advantage. Arizona is not going to put Colombia out of the cocaine business anytime soon no matter what the cartels do. The cartels could shift 40% of their profits to feeding the hungry in the Sudan and Arizona would still not have an advantage in producing enough cocaine to put the cartels out of business. If you were talking about the production of car parts in Venezuela and not oil I might feel differently.

lin

But they don't make cars there, do they. They are the classic Third World economy...sell off their resources until their gone, then try to flog their underpaid, unskilled labor.

Having the state grab the resources just hurries that process. Because there has NEVER been a marxist state that has produced a product that can be profitably exported except for souvenir value.
Because it's a pie in the sky theory with no touch with economic realities.

Brazil handles their oil industry pretty well. And they DO make cars and equipment and export them. (Some really good firearms, too)

So when the oil is gone, they won't be fucked. Unless they're stupid enough to invite a Chavez in to take over and make himself king for life

__________________

Writ-with-Hand

My point had to do with the oil specifically. Like some Middle Eastern nations Venezuela has an advantage in the oil market (I'm not sure they do in refining it). So, the situation is not like building cars wherein the competition can be incredibly steep.

Before Chavez the right-wing industrial class of the nation, and it's government, hid behind high tariffs to protect them from competing internationally, to my knowledge anyways, and by doing so they remained "big fish in a little pond." So, practicing capitalism in this way does not promote domestic growth and job creation in a nation. Once again I go back: Chavez did not create poverty in Venezuela.

Not a peep was heard from American right-wingers until Chavez took power - now all of a sudden "we care about the poor in Venezuela." Bullshit.

Brazil under left-wing Lula and his administration use tariffs the right way: to protect its lesser competitive industries until they develop enough to be able to compete effectively on the global market. Same thing the early Independent America did against British goods and the same thing Japan did till it got where it is today.

Anyways, k3's focus seems to have just been on Venezuela's nationalized oil company. So, to that degree I don't see much a problem with using some of the profits to develop the infrastructure and or human capital of Venezuela. In fact some might argue it is not only benevolent but pragmatic. Oil men aren't known as the most innovative people on earth. I remember an engineer once telling me that from his experience with working with American oil men he found them to be the greediest bastards on earth with no eye to future innovations. So, the minds behind oil aren't of the same mind frame as those in biomedical research.

lin

I'm dying to know where you get your news.


Ah, some guy you met. Well, that settles it. Sort of at odds with what you see in international oil, where places like Mexico are riding their oil industry into the ground because they are sucking the profits out too fast to reinvest, are too timid to explore, and are afraid of foreign investment because they know foreigners are better at business than they are.

(Same knock gets applied to Venezuela, by the way...and the corporations didn't suck NEAR the profits off it that Hugo is doing with his "buy up the world so I can have a bigger statue" program)


Even CUBA managed to overcome a similar attitude and invited Canadian firms in to help out. One of the few straws keeping the country afloat.

Brazil has done much better. But their experiment with leftism has only started. Wait and see.

__________________

lin

Compared to politicians????? Compared to fucking MARXISTS?????????????????????????

__________________

JosephB

You're going to run out of question marks if you aren't careful!

__________________
"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources."
-- Albert Einstein

"I am really only interested in a fiction of miracles."
-- Flannery O'Connor

Malone

Does socialism allow religion, or is it completely atheist like communism?

__________________
There Is A Policeman Inside All Our Heads: He Must Be Destroyed

Writ-with-Hand

You really don't know what in the hell you are talking about do you?

If American oil men - like the Bushes - where so innovative they would have been reinvesting some of their profits into creating non-fossil fuel energy, instead of milking as much oil out of the ground as they can, and doing what with their profits? searching for more oil?

Socialism and religion can coexist although many socialists historically have been agnostic if not atheist.

Life After Welfare: Reforms Punish Poor, Veteran Socialist Says

You might now Carl Sandburg for his famous poem on Chicago. A poem I very much like by the way.

It might be worth nothing that welfare in the United States began in Milwaukee. The city created and funded such a cash transfer program, after the U.S. Civil War to take care of the widows and their small children, who lost husbands and fathers in that perhaps, greatest of all American wars.

As this pertains to your question on religion, Milwaukee has historically been one of the prime Catholic cities of the United States, sharing along ranks with Baltimore and Boston, and I would presume New Orleans. (so Catholic it used to be referred to as "Snapper city" in reference to the Friday Fish Fries)

For the record the Germans of Milwaukee, who were largely socialists and abolitionists, were in both spirit and action on the side of the Union. So, they were not like those in the city of Baltimore who were fiercely on the side of the Confederacy in spirit - but not in action.

k3ng

You see that's where the problem comes from too. If they don't spend their profits on exploration, there soon won't be any profits. This is exactly what PDVSA is having problems with. With their profits spent on Chavez's socialist policies, they don't have enough left to explore more oil reserves... leading to lesser profits. And they can't stand to Chavez and go 'sorry sir we've not enough money left so you'll have to stop giving it away'.

So you see, the profits NEED to be invested in exploration to keep the damned company alive in the first place.

__________________
Learn Malaysian English at the C10 site! -->http://c10site.blogspot.com/
Come see why your life sucks -->youaremediocre.wordpress.com

'In truth, those who cringed at the use of cliché were their own cliché.' - Ted Dekker in Saint

aspiretowrite

Yes it does - not the best example I know but look at Saddam Hussain's Iraq. He was a socialist muslim - not a good one but hey.

It's a shame that socialism gets such a bad reputation but I think that is because it is equated with Marxism which in turn became communism. Actually I am assuming people know that Karl Marx never intended to have his theories of a socialist society put into practice. His views were purely theoretical - in fact he is often quoted as saying "I am not a marxist" and died before he completed 'Des Kapital' The for the fialure of communism / socialism is that Marx's view of the world never included a working template of how to implement a socialist society. So after the Russian revolution, the self appointed heads used the old Imperial system as the practical template. This to me is akin using Nazi experiments for life saving medical research - two entirely incompatible principles with different objectives combined to make a bad situation worse. They then maintained the status quo by dictatorship.

Anyway to get back to the question - yes there are;

Aside from Iraq - the Uk under Labour (before Tony Blair) was for the large part a socialist nation - with a National Steel, Coal and Motor Industry - Water, Gas, Electricity, Telephone under government control, transport services operated by the local authorities and of course the NHS(all of which except the NHS have either been privatised or contracted out to private companies - not all of them for the better.) During that time the UK has and still a democracy and although multicultural, predominantly christian

China allows Buddhism to flourish at their Shaolin Temple only because it contributes to the economy via tourism. Christianity whilst allowed is under very very tight conditions making open prayer impossible hence resulting in brutal persecution.

I think India has a socialist party which has a majority in their parliament but wouldn't like to swear to this.

That's all I can think of.

__________________
Mr President. If a child can buy pornography for five dollars on any street corner, isn't that too high a price to pay for free speach?

No but I do think five dollars is too high a price to pay for pornography.

lin

Sure he was. Most people would tend to think he was a ruthless dictator who seized property not for the state, but for himself. He lived in lavish palaces while people went hungry in hovels.

Somehow that doesn't seem to fit the mold of socialism.

It does, however fit pretty well with every world ruler I can think of who came into power as a socialist revolutionary.

__________________

The Hack

"All animals are created equal...but some are more equal than others." ~ George Orwell

aspiretowrite

Lin

I meant he considered himself to be a socialist muslim. As for the rest I couldn't agree more.

__________________
Mr President. If a child can buy pornography for five dollars on any street corner, isn't that too high a price to pay for free speach?

No but I do think five dollars is too high a price to pay for pornography.

Writ-with-Hand

I'm sorry... but simply searching for more and more oil under the presumption the world is always going to stay addicted to gasoline is a wrong course of action in my opinion. I'm sure the oil men would like it to stay as such but the search for new and cleaner energy and transportation is on.

Look toward the future - one American company already is: Tesla Motors (it takes 3 hours and $4.00 to recharger this car up completely).

Straylight

We can consider Socialism, really, in two seperate capacities, and plainly see from both that it's a broken, flawed idea that does not work.

My preferred approach is the reality-based one. Look at socialist governments that exist and have existed in the world, and consider the standard of living, fairness and human rights records of those governments. You will find, universally, that all socialism succeeds in doing is giving everyone an equal poverty in exchange for their civil and individual rights. You'll find that socialism chokes innovation (even China recognizes this, and has flagged certain cities as 'Capitalism Zones' so it can be competitive in the world marketplace), as no one has any motivation to innovate.

Reality-based approach doesn't work for you? Consider it then as a point of philosophy. Socialism is the principle that what you earn doesn't belong to you, it belongs to everyone. If you yourself produce nothing of value (or little of value) and thus earn nothing, then yes, Socialism probably seems great to you -- after all, it means you get a bunch of my money, and Bill Gates' money, and the money of all the other people who create things of value. If you are an innovator, however, you would probably think differently, you would probably feel like you were being robbed, at gunpoint (which you effectively would be).

It's a bad idea. Both theory and practice bear this notion out. Take a look at the much-heralded Canadian Socialized Medicine plan, and the waiting lists for health-care, and how the only thing it's guaranteed is bad to mediocre healthcare for everyone.

Now if the Left would just figure that out, we could make some progress in this country ;P (that being USA for all you 'provincial' folks (kidding!) ).

__________________
"Every man builds his world in his own image. He has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice."
-Ayn Rand

"I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: 'O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.' And God granted it. "-Voltaire