International Socialism is worse for the economy than a world war

Prior to Chavez income per head had fallen to pre-1950 levels. According to the world bank the poverty rate decreased from 42.8% to 26.5% and the rate of extreme poverty fell from 16.6% in 1999 to 7% in 2011 with the third lowest poverty rate in all Latin America. 3000 new schools were built and 40 higher education institutions created. According to UNESCO his policy’s had eradicated illiteracy by 2005. With 8000 new medical centres and the number Doctors per 100,000 increased from 20 to 80 life expectancy was raised by two years and the infant mortality rate halved. According to the UNDP by 2012 Venezuela had the lowest inequality in the region. The number elderly receiving a pension rose from 300,000 to 2 million. Public debt fell from 45% of GDP in 1998 to 20% in 2011.


Socialism sure does suck.


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Believe it or not, Rod used to be a fairly sane poster. I keep wanting to believe his relentless, manic obsession with Cuba and Venezuela and "socialism" is a troll job. But tragically I think the guy is sincere.
 
Uh, I think that's why he posted that graph Rod. Man you're really terrible at discerning whose posting on your side and who isn't.

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Cuba has many more doctors though. Cuba has 8 physicians per 1,000 citizens while Guatemala and Honduras have less than one. That same source also shows that the probability of death for the age group 5-14 is lower in Cuba than both Guatemala and Honduras so its not just their infant mortality rate making them look better than some of their Latin American peers.

So let's use Occam's Razor in light of this data. Does it make more or less sense to assume that the country with about 20x as many doctors per 1,000 people has worse healthcare?
Yeah, holding up Guatemala as an example of pretty much anything functional or decent is a totally retarded idea. That place is fucked up.
 
Uh, I think that's why he posted that graph Rod. Man you're really terrible at discerning whose posting on your side and who isn't.

I dont give much crap about "sides" the chart proves my point, thats why i replied to it.
 
Believe it or not, Rod used to be a fairly sane poster. I keep wanting to believe his relentless, manic obsession with Cuba and Venezuela and "socialism" is a troll job. But tragically I think the guy is sincere.

Its called not having a cognitive dissonance.

I criticize shitty, undemocratic, antiliberal and corrupt regimes whether they are left or right.
 
Believe it or not, Rod used to be a fairly sane poster. I keep wanting to believe his relentless, manic obsession with Cuba and Venezuela and "socialism" is a troll job. But tragically I think the guy is sincere.
I've been wondering what happened. He has definitely changed, and has an agenda now.
 
War is bad. Helping others is good. There is no refuting that socialism helps others and in doing so is good.

we as a society need to stop doing more bad things and start doing more good things and if socialism helps then maybe we should start there.

What.. Socialism does not help people my guy it destroys socities
 
Its called not having a cognitive dissonance.

I criticize shitty, undemocratic, antiliberal and corrupt regimes whether they are left or right.

You have a total blind spot when it comes to a nation like Venezuela.

I told you a long time ago that I think Maduro is not good for Venezuela, is corrupt and needs to go. But I also presented you with multiple objective sources showing the last elections were free and fair. And I believe it's up to the Venezuelan people alone to democratically select their leaders. And then live with the consequences.

You, on the other hand, just disregard all the evidence from the independent election monitors, baselessly claim Maduro "stole" the vote and support a US backed coup.

One of us is taking a balanced, rational approach and the other is an ideologically driven fanatic.
 
China is a socialistic country. That hasn't seemed to have stopped them from having just a tiny bit of economic growth over the last 25 years..
Mao was in power from 1945 to 1976. In that period of time more than 50 million people were killed or were starved to death thanks to real socialism. In 1979 Deng Xiaoping opened chinese market, de-collectivize the farm productions so peasants could profit from their work, let foreign companies start factories in China and allowed private property again. Then the record shattering GDP growth you are mentioning started to happen... Only after what you would call "neo-liberal reforms" happened. When real socialism was alive, people were eating human babies and stuff like that.
 
Before we jump on the 'Boo Socialism' bandwagon regarding Venezuela, lets at least give a quiet nod to crippling sanctions and the value of their chief export going down by nearly half playing a role.
Venezuela GDP started droping in 2014; the first US sanctions were in 2016 under Obama administration. And those sanctions affected only Venezuela's government corrupt officials assets in the USA, he did nothing against the Venezuelan economy at that time. The real sanctions only came in 2018 under Trump, four years after the Venezuelan economy started it free fall.
 
So? what is good a doctor without tools?
I'd rather have a doctor short on supplies than no doctor at all
The infant mortality rate is the biggest single factor that weights in the life expectancy.
I didn't say otherwise, what I said was that the probability of death for the age demo 5-14 is still lower than that of Guatemala and Honduras.
Again, a doctor is useless without tools, and anyone can be called a doctor, we dont know the quality of said doctors specially when they face so much scarcity in their medical schools, i would rather have 1 good doctor that trained in a well equipped school and did his residency in a well equipped hospital than 8 who didnt.

All communist countries skewed their numbers and were shown to manipulate data, which explains why a lot of ex-soviet countries saw massive plunges in quality of life indicators after the fall of the iron curtain.

https://academic.oup.com/heapol/article/33/6/755/5035051
Remember Cuba doesn't have 8x as many doctors as those countries, it has over 20x as many. And Guatemala and Honduras do not have a robust healthcare infrastructure, in the former communicable diseases for which there is treatment are still one of the leading causes of death which is not the case in Cuba.
@Kafir-kun

Actually we do know that they suck and have been sucking for a while.

https://en.mercopress.com/2012/01/2...fail-basic-test-to-practice-medicine-in-chile
How did doctors from Guatemala and Honduras fare?
Yeah, holding up Guatemala as an example of pretty much anything functional or decent is a totally retarded idea. That place is fucked up.
No kidding. I gave about as conservative a compliment as you can give for Cuba, that its healthcare is better than that of Guatemala and Honduras which are two of the least developed countries in Latin America, right before criticizing it and Venezuela and yet apparently even that was too much for him.
I dont give much crap about "sides" the chart proves my point, thats why i replied to it.
Pretty sure that's exactly why he replied to your post with that chart and yet for some weird reason you came back with a snarky response.
 
I've been wondering what happened. He has definitely changed, and has an agenda now.
Probably the collapse of Venezuela coupled with the election of a socialist president in his country and the increasing popularity of socialism in the US if I had to guess.
 
Probably the collapse of Venezuela coupled with the election of a socialist president in his country and the increasing popularity of socialism in the US if I had to guess.
Yeah. The thing with social capitalism is you need capital to pay for the social. It can make sense with an industrialized and rich economy who is willing to play ball. But maybe Rod1 is trying to warn everyone of the downfalls of pure socialism?

I dont think socialism and corruption per se go hand in hand, same with a regulated free market. Corruption at its core is a human problem, regardless of the economic system in place.

But I do think capitalism has shown far more results in the grand scheme of things.
 
Mao was in power from 1945 to 1976. In that period of time more than 50 million people were killed or were starved to death thanks to real socialism. In 1979 Deng Xiaoping opened chinese market, de-collectivize the farm productions so peasants could profit from their work, let foreign companies start factories in China and allowed private property again. Then the record shattering GDP growth you are mentioning started to happen... Only after what you would call "neo-liberal reforms" happened. When real socialism was alive, people were eating human babies and stuff like that.
I’m not debating semantics of what is “real” socialism vs. communism vs. Marxism vs. Leninism vs. anarcho syndicalism vs. your -momism.

Nor am I advocating any “type” of centrally controlled economy.

I’m just pointing out that various and sundry systems are termed “socialist” in common use, and some of them have done rather nicely.
 
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I’m not debating semantics of what is “real” socialism vs. communism vs. Marxism vs. Leninism vs. anarcho whatever vs. your -momism.

Nor am I advocating any “type” of centrally controlled economy.

I’m just pointing out that various and sundry systems get appellated “socialist” and some of them have done rather nicely.
Socialism is when the goverment holds the mean of production.
Over.
 
Yeah. The thing with social capitalism is you need capital to pay for the social. It can make sense with an industrialized and rich economy who is willing to play ball. But maybe Rod1 is trying to warn everyone of the downfalls of pure socialism?

I dont think socialism and corruption per se go hand in hand, same with a regulated free market. Corruption at its core is a human problem, regardless of the economic system in place.

But I do think capitalism has shown far more results in the grand scheme of things.
A market economy is obviously superior to a command one, that much isn't very controversial. Even the most openly communist poster on this forum admitted that on the first page of this thread.
 
Socialism is when the goverment holds the mean of production.
Over.
Tell that to Donald Dump and everyone in the mainstream of the American political discourse who use “socialism” to descry everything from labor unions to free community college.
 
Sure Latin America in general is really corrupt but how many other corrupt Latin American countries have entered the death spiral that Venezuela has?

I think some leftists overrate Cuba's living standards but I stand by the assertion that its at least better than some of the other shitholes in the region like Guatemala or Honduras. But Venezuela is pretty much the shittiest place to be in Latin America at this point and that's clearly largely due to the governance of the socialist regime over the last two decades. Did US sanctions hurt them badly as well? Certainly but look at Cuba, its been maligned by the US for over half a century and it didn't collapse the way Venezuela has. So even by the standard of Latin American socialist shitholes Venezuela is a disaster.

I think Rod1 made a decent argument as to how socialist doctrine had unintended consequences that led to this collapse. Its not unlike how the neoliberal reforms pushed on the MENA countries produced unintended consequences due to factors like corruption and authoritarianism that set the stage for the 2011 revolts.
You're going to use Cuba to attack the socialism in Venezuela? I don't see how that makes sense.

And the death spiral that Venezuela has entered is not solely because of the change in government. Chavez was a socialist and he came into power in 1998. @Rod1's graph shows that the country started booming after 1998, slowlyl and then more aggressively in the early 2000s. They were socialist most of that time period. They didn't start their death spiral until Maduro.

So, if socialism was the problem then how come they thrived under Chavez? Because Chavez was a better leader, period. Same philosophies, different results.
 
So the value of oil isnt tied to oil itself, is tied to the ability to deliver that oil to the market, something that marxists cant understand.
Uh, I think that's why he posted that graph Rod. Man you're really terrible at discerning whose posting on your side and who isn't.

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I think people in general tend to take natural resources as a wealth generator for granted and dont quite realize the difficulty or skill required for efficient land cultivation and utilization. That comes before we can talk distribution (Norway excels at both, 'cause Norwegians are so smart and sexy). Of course, not all land is created equally either; Brazilian Ag and US Shale being two examples that immediately spring to mind.
 
Because it was the socialistic practice of nationalizing key industries that enabled such corruption. Socialism gives the government too much control over industry and enterprise.
Again - corruption. Blaming socialism for corruption only makes sense if we're going to argue that capitalism prevents corruption, which we know to be demonstrably untrue.

Maduro is corrupt. He's a worse leader and, possibly, more corrupt that Chavez. Hence Venezuela looks good on paper under Chavez and looks like shit under Chavez's hand picked successor. But both of those guys were socialists.
 
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