14 thoughts on “The Wages Of Socialism”

  1. Well, it is indeed bad luck. The question is whether it is “bad luck” bad luck or Heinlein bad luck.

    Venezuela has a lot of oil in a world that runs on oil. Do you suppose they fell into the trap of a country that has (what was once) a high-priced resource in abundance, making it an “extractive” economy? A situation that tends to attracts an autocratic government prone to “spread-the-wealth” schemes?

    I would consider their bad luck to be the Bob Heinlein kind if 1) oil remained at a high price, 2) their ability to extract oil dropped off, and 3) the reason their ability to extract oil dropped off is because they drove off the people or investments to keep the oil flowing owing to their autocratic socialist government.

    Yeah, even Socialists can be that stupid, but not always. And there is a sense that if they weren’t prone to their class-warfare politics that they could have a higher production capacity. But in today’s oil market, they are basically hosed — kicking out their Socialists would turn them into something like Putin’s Russia?

    1. What I might add is in the 7 years of President Obama, there have been three favorite tropes/memes/things that keep getting repeated over, and over and over again on the Libertarian/Conservative/Right Blogosphere.

      One is Heinlein’s accounting for “bad luck.” A second is Thatcher’s “sooner or later you run out of other people’s money.” The third is “____ is just kicking the can down the road.”

      My hypothesis is that these three aphorisms reveal a ‘tude held by the Libertarian/Conservative/Right Blogosphere that got Mr. Trump, who is no Libertarian/Conservative, elected president.

      Mr. Trump was never very popular at all among people using these three aphorisms and now he is President Elect (or at least until Jill Stein gets her recounts?).

  2. What words to describe Stephen Green? How about “lazy”, “biased”, “one eyed” and “arrogant”?

    The NY Times article states:
    “And as Mr. Chavez’s Socialist – inspired revolution collapses into economic ruin, as food and medicine slip further out of reach, the new migrants include the same impoverished people that Venezuela’s policies were supposed to help”

    2. Green appears to have searched only for “socialism”. don’t care.
      The interesting thing about the bit you quote is the presumption that it is the same poor people now as before Chavez / Maduro. I.e. their policies did not make things worse.
      Uh-huh. Pull the other one.

  3. My hypothesis is that these three aphorisms reveal a ‘tude held by the Libertarian/Conservative/Right Blogosphere that got Mr. Trump, who is no Libertarian/Conservative, elected president.

    Mr. Trump was never very popular at all among people using these three aphorisms and now he is President Elect (or at least until Jill Stein gets her recounts?).

    I notice that the libertarians get blamed for a lot of things these days. I guess you can’t have Big Brother without a scapegoat like Emmanuel Goldstein. Sorry, I’m not interested in shouldering blame for Trump.

    1. If you like Mr. Trump, if you favor having him as president, then no, you should not shoulder any “blame” for him and his policies.

      If you have been skeptical of Mr. Trump, no, if you have been among those aghast at the prospect of President Trump, and if you have been preaching “kick the can down the road”, “other people’s money”, and “people call it ‘bad luck'”, I think you need to shoulder some blame.

      Why?

      It is said that Hillary Clinton is in part to blame for the outcome because the Democratic Party Coalition did not turn out for her with anywhere the same enthusiasm as they did for Barack Obama.

      It is also said that Mr. Trump was not propelled to victory by enthusiasm for him among the white working class, except, in those place where he was (cough, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan).

      Is the rust-belt formerly unionized-until-the-jobs-went-to-Mexico (largely, but there is diversity there too) white working class , once a core Democratic Party constituency until the Party went all unisex bathrooms, rallying to “(we should not) kick the can down the road”, “other people’s money”, “people call it bad luck” as political slogans? I think not.

      I don’t think these key voters in the new Republican Coalition are in favor of budget-balancing austerity and cutbacks in the non-means tested paid-into-the-system-from-deductions-in-wages social programs. Making America Great Again appears to want to punt the can way down the road by spending a lot of other people’s money, and Mr. Trump feels lucky about that.

      Some on the left will assert that the way the Rust Belt governors elected in reaction to President Obama are like Mr. Trump is that their appeal is in demonizing or scapegoating someone (I guess the Left has their own demons, scapegoats and Goldsteins, too). With the 2010 class of Rust Belt Governors, it is teachers and healthcare providers in the public sector; with Mr. Trump it is immigrants and especially immigrants who are not here legally.

      But remember how those Rust Belt governors clashed with Mr. Trump? Mr. Trump is not of the TEA Party. Mr. Trump is not of the austerity programs, implemented in varying degrees, by those governors. The Left may claim that he harbors that desire in his heart, but Mr. Trump is not anti-union.

      I have been preaching (to little effect) that the program of the 2010 class Rust Belt governors represents overreach in the way that President Obama’s first 2 years in office was overreach. Steven Hayward over at Powerlineblog.com back in 2011 quoted me online(anonymously and with my permission from an e-mail exchange) to that effect, to which his online reply was that such a concern was foolish.

      President Trump. Get used to the sound of it. That is your Libertarian overreach for which I was so soundly mocked, for which I am still mocked. He may fail, he may yet be wildly successful, but whatever he is, he is certainly not the electorate embracing “(don’t) kick the can down the road”, “other people’s money”, and “they call it bad luck.”

    3. If Trump had lost, I wouldn’t have blamed Libertarians per se but rather the NeverTrump crowd who were sore losers over the primaries and voted for Johnson.

      I guess it is the Democrats that are upset with Libertarians?

      The only thing I blame the Libertarians for is not putting forward a credible candidate. But they are getting better. They aren’t nearly as bad as the Green party.

      As far as Trump goes, we need to wait and see how he turns out. There is a brand of irrational fatalism that many people posses that many people are possessed by.

    1. The word “because” does show up a handful of times but they had nothing to do with saying why the country is in such a miserable state even though the sentences were depressing to read.

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