In the end, I hope that half the country that aspires to this socialist democrat crap is happy when things turn into Venezuela. They will have gotten what they wanted and deserve!

Somebody help me out with something. Every time I hear nonsense like that being broadcast in Washington today I ask the same rather simple question...Give me one example of a program that government designed and implemented to "benefit the people" that didn't turn out to be a total and complete cluster[blank] from both an operational as well as financial standpoint?

Government does nothing well. Nothing. And increasingly, government does not function on anything approaching a rational basis. As such, they can jam all these socialist wet dream ideas where the sun doesn't shine (and where you can find their heads most of the time).

Good. If anyone is paying attention, the "lefter" they go, the "lefter" they all want.

The party ate it's own in 2016 between the Bernie Bro's, the Hillbots, and the Steinmonsters...

This cycle should be even better with the Betobots, Berniebros, Harrisoids, Warrendots, BrownBois, Bookertools, and Bidendweebs...

It is a crop RIPE for discord.

Each side is going to claim moral superiority and Identity Politic the other to death.

quote:

Betobots, Berniebros, Harrisoids, Warrendots, BrownBois, Bookertools, and Bidendweebs

Hate to be a party pooper, but we have long been out of $$$.

http://www.usdebtclock.org

My Friends Think That Being A Socialist Is About Being Nice

Posted on April 16, 2016 by topcat1957

Do you have a friend who claims to be a socialist? In the 20th century there have been numerous political systems, but in the latter half of the century there were only two survivors, Socialism and Capitalism. So we have at this time in the Western world, which for all practical purposes controls the world, two opposing political systems. (I have already previously stated that there is no basic difference between socialists and communists. There are, however, some very important factors relating to socialism of which you should be aware. Socialism will not work in a free market economy and, as a consequence it invariably deteriorates into a totalitarian state. Anyone wishing to argue that point is asked to point to one single instance where this was not the result). It therefore behooves us to remember who the worst despotic governments of this century were: Nazis in Germany, Fascists in Italy, Communists in the USSR, [Romania, East Germany, Bulgaria, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Cuba, North Korea, Cambodia, Vietnam, etc.] and China – each and every one of them a paragon of socialist endeavor. Their leaders; Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin [Ceausescu, Tito, Pol Pot, etc.] and Mao Tse Tung. The outstanding legacy of these individuals is that they each tried to out-do the others in the total number of their own citizens which they murdered. It is a fact that each of these men killed more of their own civilian citizens than they lost in military conflict.

The reason for this is inherent to socialism. It promises things that it cannot possibly deliver. When socialist politicians in power come to the realization that it is impossible to deliver on their promises and political unrest develops, they have two options if they plan to stay in power. First, they must locate a scapegoat on whom they can blame their inability to deliver. Any Jew can tell you who that was for the Germans and the Russians. The second is to develop, and rapidly so, a state security apparatus to keep them in office – the SS, the KGB, [Securitate, Stasi] etc.

The basic tenets of socialism are:
1. Seduce the populace into accepting the government as the arbitrator of all problems; government from cradle-to-grave
2. Begin delivering on those services to make the citizens dependent
3. Take away the citizens’ guns
4. Increase taxes on all services while destroying any free market alternative services
5. Blame the chosen scapegoat for the inability to meet demand for services
6. Have the centralized national police force round up any dissidents

Socialism cannot work because the cost of services must be collected in the form of taxes, and this is not a sustainable possibility. The reason is that since government pays for all services, neither the producer nor the consumer cares about the cost, and hence there is an uncontrolled spiral of inflation (today’s medical costs are a case in point and healthcare is not yet totally socialized). Furthermore, the government has no funds or assets. It only has the funds it confiscated from its citizens. The total inefficiency of a centralized bureaucracy does not help either.


Once citizens are weaned on this cradle-to-grave concept and are no longer self-reliant, they become wards of the state and will not accept any reduction of services. The government subsequently has no option but to reduce services, and as popular resistance develops State repression begins. This is the socialist cycle. It has been found to occur in every socialist state in existence to date.

The current most outrageous examples of this are North Korea and Cuba. These two societies share much in common – both are socialist, both are totalitarian, both have more political prisoners then any nation close to their size, both have non-working universal health care, in both the citizens suffer malnutrition, and both have food and fuel rationing. Their leaders and party members, in the meantime, eat caviar and drink champagne.

Socialism can never work in any environment. It violates human nature and logic.

The capitalist economic system differs greatly from its socialist adversary in numerous ways. While the socialist system is a top down centralized arrangement, the capitalist system, which can only exist in a free market economy that recognizes the right of private property, is totally controlled by the market itself. Interestingly, personal freedom, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness can also only thrive in free market economies. Capitalism is a sort of volatile and confusing situation where the capital markets dictate demand, price, and methods of distribution. The reason that the left is so very successful in criticizing capitalism is because it is not regulated and therefore difficult to explain. The reason capitalism works so well is that demand dictates production as well as price, thus avoiding market inequities and shortages.

Socialism’s principal theorem is centralization of markets under government control. This has never worked and there is not one single instance in world history where centralized governmental market manipulation has been successful. This, however, does not deter the Robert Reichs (America’s socialist Secretary of Labor who said, “Greedy corporations are screwing their employees, squeezing down wages while increasing profits.” This statement, from an economic illiterate who has never in his entire life worked for, or in, a business that made a profit. He appears to me to be a little man with a Napoleon complex, who, while having no clue about anything to do with economics, presents himself as a great expert. Corporate downsizing, mergers, and staff reductions has a great deal to do with international trade policies, NAFTA, EC, WTO, etc. and very little to do with greed.) of this world, who continuously make every effort to centralize economic as well as social and political power for themselves and their Satori masters (the ruling elite).

George Washington said it best: “Government, like fire, is a good servant, but a fearful master.” All capitalist functions are directed at free market concepts. A free market is one that serves society with little government interference. This concept is unpopular with the Satori because in order to attain more and more power they require centralization of all economic, social, and political functions. Because of their poor performance in the political frame they have altered their modus operandi and are now implementing their schemes through judicial activism. These judicial incursions, which by the way, in the United States are in violation of constitutional law, have been sold to the public based on the false misnomer that greedy capitalists don’t care about the people, their welfare, safety, or health, but that politicians do.

This, without doubt, is a ludicrous statement. The capitalist must perform to market standards. Competition will put him out of business if he provides an inferior product or service. He is furthermore constrained by his customers, stockholders, board of directors, lending institutions, as well as numerous laws, and, if all else fails, product liability statutes. In addition there is a veritable alphabet soup of governmental agencies which oversee his product, conduct with employees, public safety, product safety, environmental compliance, and financial performance.

In fact capitalists are over-regulated, which causes a considerable burden to be put on the public in the form of increased prices. A noteworthy fact is: the most egregious acts against the consumer, the environment, and the public in general, have all been made by socialist states.



https://topcat1957.wordpress.c...is-about-being-nice/

Those of us who are older grew up learning about the evils of socialism and communism, the purges, gulags, mass executions, the Red Guard, and so on. But what you have to realize is that the young today have heard nothing about all that. In high schools and colleges, socialism is white washed, it is presented as an ideology all about sharing and equality: taking from the rich what they don't really need, and redistributing to the desperately needy poor.

This is ideological cotton candy to the naive young.

Venezuela's lessons for American Socialists


Bloomberg Opinion) -- It’s hard to overstate how disastrous the reign of Hugo Chavez and his successor Nicolas Maduro has been for Venezuela. A recent series of Bloomberg articles vividly depicts the hellish, never-ending struggle for survival in Caracas, the country’s capital. Hungry children roam the streets, people are fleeing the country, health care is almost nonexistent, violence is endemic, even water is scarce. Chavez’s so-called Bolivarian revolution took a peaceful, middle-income country and transformed it into a nightmare that puts the ruinous Soviet Union of the 1980s to shame.



It’s important for other countries — including wealthy ones like the U.S. — not to ignore Venezuela, but to use it as a cautionary tale. Politicians like Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have embraced socialism, as have many young Americans. But what are the lessons of Venezuela? Why did the country become such a basket case?



The Bolivarian revolution’s defenders often make excuses for the Chavez-Maduro regime by claiming that the country’s penury is the result of outside forces. For example, some argue that it was the fall in oil prices in late 2014 and 2015 that sunk the country. Venezuela is a petrostate — petroleum products constituted about 95 percent of the country’s exports in 2014, so the price decline was naturally a blow.



But although lower oil prices undoubtedly made things harder for Venezuela, they can’t be the primary culprit in the collapse. Venezuela stopped releasing many of its economic numbers in 2014. But other petrostates — Saudi Arabia, Russia, Nigeria, Angola and Kuwait — saw their incomes stagnate or even fall after 2014, but they didn’t experience anything remotely like the devastation that has hit Venezuela:



Nor did the country come under attack by capitalist powers. Under President Barack Obama, the U.S. did impose sanctions against a few of the country’s officials in 2015, and President George W. Bush refused to sell arms to Venezuela, but these weren’t broad sanctions that had the power to seriously affect the country’s economy. No reactionary armies or bombers devastated Venezuela’s cities; the country’s impoverishment is all of its own making.



Venezuela’s critics can also be too sloppy. It’s easy to wave one’s hands and declare that socialism always fails. But Bolivia, another resource-dependent Latin American country, elected a socialist president, Evo Morales, in 2006. And Bolivia has been doing great. The country’s living standards, which had stagnated for 30 years, have grown rapidly and steadily since Morales took power:



Despite ominous signs that Morales is becoming more authoritarian, Bolivia has not yet experienced anything like the devastation that has afflicted its ideological fellow-traveler to the north.



So if it wasn’t oil prices, external pressures, or the inevitable tendencies of socialism, what did sink Venezuela? It’s hard to identify the exact policy mistakes that Chavez and Maduro made, but three failures loom large — macroeconomic mismanagement, nationalization of industry and interference in the state-owned oil company.The worst scourge of Venezuela’s economy has been hyperinflation:



This level of price increases makes it impossible to save money. Even though incomes tend to go up along with prices, the sheer unpredictability when prices are rising by 20- or 40-fold a year makes it very difficult to plan consumption. You may think tomorrow’s meal will only cost 10 million bolivars, but instead it might cost 20 million, meaning you go might hungry if you don’t buy immediately. It’s also very hard for companies, even state-owned ones, to plan their investments when the price of those investments is highly uncertain.



Meanwhile, hyperinflation has led the government — predictably — to impose price controls. Those created shortages of basic necessities, and made people turn to the much less-efficient and corrupt black market.



It’s not clear how hyperinflation gets started — price controls, currency depreciation and fiscal deficits can help kick it off, but once it gets started it’s very difficult to stop. Venezuela should have seen this menace coming, as its inflation rate steadily crept up year after year, but its leaders just made the problem worse. Bolivia, meanwhile, has managed to keep inflation very low.



Another big mistake was large-scale nationalization of industry and expropriation of private property. Chavez was very fond of nationalizing both foreign- and domestically-owned businesses of all kinds. This is a sure way to wreck the private sector — if local business owners and foreign investors don’t think their property is secure, they won’t invest, and output will languish. This can cause a spiral, where the government is forced to nationalize ever more of the economy as the private sector pulls back.



Morales, in contrast, has been much more careful with nationalizations in Bolivia, mostly limiting them to the oil and gas industry and the electric grid — centralized, stable industries where government ownership is common around the world.



Finally, Venezuela’s leaders interfered with the smooth operation of an industry that was already government-run — Petroleos de Venezuela SA, or PDVSA, the state-owned oil company. The company once operated relatively independently, but Chavez meddled in its affairs, firing employees and replacing them with apparatchiks, starving the company of investment in order to extract money for his own purposes, and driving away or expropriating the holdings of foreign partners who helped PDVSA keep up production. The unsurprising result is that Venezuelan petroleum investment has collapsed, oil infrastructure is falling apart, and production is in free fall— all this in the country with the world’s largest proven crude oil reserves.



Socialists in the U.S. should take note — if there’s a right way to do socialism, this isn’t it. Instead of cautious policies like those of Bolivia, Venezuela’s leaders chose to ignore the menace of hyperinflation, nationalize private businesses across the economy, and muck up the smooth operations of PDVSA. The result was predictable — one of the worst self-inflicted economic catastrophes of the century so far.



This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.



Noah Smith is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He was an assistant professor of finance at Stony Brook University, and he blogs at Noahpinion.



©2019 Bloomberg L.P.


Of course the Left learns the wrong lessons from Venezuela's collapse. They think Socialism wasn't done right and use Bolivia as an example. According to the opinion, Bolivia is an amalgam of Socialism and Capitalism. So to the Left it's a matter of ratios. To a Capitalist it is a matter of pollution. Socialism is an economic pollution that damages according to its concentricity. That is the lesson we should learn. But watching Leftists learn is tedious at best and deadly at worst.

quote:

Originally posted by justjoe:
Those of us who are older grew up learning about the evils of socialism and communism, the purges, gulags, mass executions, the Red Guard, and so on. But what you have to realize is that the young today have heard nothing about all that. In high schools and colleges, socialism is white washed, it is presented as an ideology all about sharing and equality: taking from the rich what they don't really need, and redistributing to the desperately needy poor.

This is ideological cotton candy to the naive young.

This why it is up to the parents to teach them, I did so with my older sons and just last night my 6yo and I were watching a clip on the Vietnam war. He asked why we were bombing them, I told him because they were the bad guys, he then asked why are they bad guys...."They're communists....communists are always bad guys and it is our duty to kill them"