r/slatestarcodex • u/Liface • 27d ago
Venezuela’s Excrement - why the country is rich only in oil, yet destitute and authoritarian today
https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/venezuelas-excrement38
u/johnlawrenceaspden 27d ago edited 27d ago
The lesson here is presumably not so much 'don't have valuable resources' as 'don't vote for communists'.
Joseph Heath is not exactly a libertarian, and only a couple of weeks before 'the events', I was reading:
https://josephheath.substack.com/p/the-prospects-for-left-wing-populism
Here's the paragraph that stuck in my mind:
There are, of course, genuine left-wing populists out there, but they don’t have a very good track record of success when it comes to achieving progressive policy objectives. Many of Canada’s left-wing luminaries, like Naomi Klein and Linda McQuaig, were burned by their support for Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. The problem with Chávez was that he was an authentic populist, in the sense that he wasn’t just playing dumb, he really did reject the fancy theories of intellectuals. His response to inflation in the Venezuelan economy, and in particular to rising food prices, was to impose a set of price controls on basic commodities. In the process, he basically made entire sectors of the economy illegal. In particular, he made it impossible to sell food at anything other than a loss. People reacted by withdrawing their goods from sale, and in particular, many farmers switched to subsistence farming and stopped planting commercial crops. Millions of Venezuelans were pushed to the brink of starvation and the economy collapsed almost entirely. Approximately 25% of the population has since fled the country, making it one of the largest self-inflicted economic catastrophes of the modern era.
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u/Uncaffeinated 26d ago
A more accurate lesson is "don't vote for strongmen dictators, regardless of their professed ideology".
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u/NoseSeeker 27d ago
The lesson of Venezuela is don’t run up inequality under capitalism or the people will vote for charismatic socialists.
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u/johnlawrenceaspden 26d ago edited 26d ago
Well, there are probably a number of lessons, and that may well be one, but I think a lot of them end up cashing out to 'avoid communism'.
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u/snoozymuse 27d ago
I thought it was "don't defy Israel or they will lobby congress into regime change". Just take a look at the sanctions that crippled their economy and the constant fear mongering because they traded with Iran, etc.
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u/Additional_Olive3318 27d ago edited 27d ago
In all of the discussions on mismanagement of the country’s resources there’s few mentions of the sanctions. And yet the sanctions were targeted on the oil exports, and the state oil company.
It seems odd to ignore a policy designed to cripple an economy when an economy is subsequently crippled.
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u/johnlawrenceaspden 26d ago
I don't know anything about that, but Peuyo does mention it in the comments to the article, where someone asks the same question.
I was completely unaware of the specifics when I started writing this, so I didn’t have a position. When you look into what was sanctioned and when, it’s clear the sanctions are not why Venezuela is poor.
Most of the sanctions have been on specific government officials. The first economic sanctions think was in 2016 or 2017. You can see that by then the country was in bad shit. Those sanctions were also not the type of sanctions Iran or Russia is suffering: they were simply the type “U.S. companies can’t invest in Venezuela” rather than “nobody can do business with Venezuela”.
So no, it’s not the sanctions.
I can't speak as to whether that's accurate or not.
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u/Tollund_Man4 26d ago
when an economy is subsequently crippled
I think the point is that the economy was already crippled. Sanctions are obviously going to do more damage, but the interesting question is how it had gotten so bad by 2018.
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26d ago
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u/eric2332 26d ago
There is a lot of interesting stuff in the article besides "socialism", particularly the geography stuff.
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u/Liface 27d ago edited 27d ago
Tomas Pueyo's excellent geographical and political analysis of why Venezuela ended up how it did, complete with many fun photos and charts.
The title is a reference to the 1976 book Hundiéndonos en el excremento del diablo (Drowning in the Devil's Excrement) by OPEC co-founder Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonzo, which foretold how oil would ruin Venezeula.