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Not That Kind of Socialism
When people on the right cite to Venezuela as an example of socialist failure, people on the left typically respond, “We don’t mean that kind of socialism, we mean the kind that’s practiced in Scandinavia.” And by that they mean, one presumes, a market-based economy supporting a large welfare state.
But when you look at their candidates’ proposals – the Green New Deal, 70% tax rates, the injection of “stakeholders” into corporate boards, breaking up the big tech firms, more corporate regulation, government control over political speech – their brand of socialism doesn’t look at all Scandinavian. By and large, the Nordic countries have less government regulation over businesses than the United States does today – and that’s before the left has its way with the economy.
While the left may not be proposing out right expropriation of the nation’s “commanding heights,” they are proposing an enormous increase in government control over those heights. At some point, the question of ownership becomes irrelevant. If you own a factory, but I control from whom you buy your raw materials, what you produce, how much you produce, where you send what you produce, whom you hire, and how much you pay your employees, how much do you really own?
At what point does “Scandinavian-style socialism” morph into the Venezuelan variety?
Published in General
Yeah, and don’t forget how one of the reasons they can even do this is their dependence on the US for all the expense of R&D. All of which will be destroyed if AOC gets her way.
Scandinavians are comfortable with 70% taxation. I cannot imagine Americans will be.
It does look a lot like Italian economic policy after 1927:
https://www.investors.com/politics/commentary/donald-trump-the-fascist-who-cuts-taxes-and-deregulates/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Italy_under_fascism#The_corporative_phase
The top marginal income tax rates for Scandinavian countries, according to Wikipedia:
That being said, all of them also have VAT around 25%.
Great post. Keep ’em comin’.
If the Dems offers a choice between the Green New Deal and the Scandanavian solution I’d take the latter. The American hope for mankind would be extinguished much later under
than by the psychotic anti-capitalist bad trip of GND.
As it happens, I came across this article earlier in the week.
“Socialism was an essential component of the theory and practice of Chavismo. Consider, first, how Chávez ideologically justified his far-reaching programs. He launched his 1998 presidential campaign on a promise to destroy “savage neoliberal capitalism” and “Yankee imperialism.” By 2006 he had declared that the world had to choose between “socialism or death.” Almost every week of his rule, he denounced “oligarchs,” “fascists,” “hoarders,” and “speculators” — the “corrupt bourgeoisie,” in a phrase. His policies, he claimed, would “uplift the poor,” “empower the marginalized,” “save slum-dwellers from penury.”
This rhetoric was accompanied by predictable changes in policy. Chávez took direct control of Venezuela’s national oil company, funneling its profits into massive social programs. Enormous subsidies were channeled to public-housing projects, health care, and education. Gasoline and basic food products were subsidized or subjected to price controls. Onerous labor regulations were implemented. The government’s payroll dramatically expanded. Worker cooperatives proliferated under state leadership. Protections of private property were systematically eroded: Peasants, for instance, were told to occupy large farms, displacing their owners in the process. Key firms that produced steel, glass, electricity, food, and paper were nationalized or their property expropriated; so too were the telecommunications and transportation industries.
Whatever else Chavismo may have stood for and represented, socialism was undoubtedly part of it.”
https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2018/11/17/my-stepfathers-m16/
I read a really haunting book last night titled Never Remember : Searching for Stalin’s Gulags in Putin’s Russia by Masha Gessen, and this sounds like how one of the Gulag “work-camps” operated” :
If you own a factory, but I control from whom you buy your raw materials, what you produce, how much you produce, where you send what you produce, whom you hire, and how much you pay your employees, how much do you really own?
Well said. Keep saying it.
The key is saying you want Scandinavian socialism while counting on the people you’re saying it to never investigate for themselves what exactly that is, versus what the people who are saying it are proposing (they’re also assuming those same viewers aren’t going to get the information from the majority of national media outlets, many of whom were all-in on touting the Chavista ‘miracle’, denied any naysayers during its first decade, and swooned when Hugo would do things like attack George W. Bush as the devil in his United Nations speech.
They swooned as well during Chavez’s first meeting with Obama after the 2008 election, because they thought bonding between kindred spirits was going to happen. But the more savvy ones started backing off a bit on the wonders of Venezuela socialism when the oil price decline from $147 to $33 a barrel in 2008-09 started showing the big problems in the economy even before Hugo died, and as a way to deflect blame he started blaming Obama and his government in nearly the same tones as he had been blaming Bush.
By the time Maduro took over, those people already had started shifting their spin to “That’s not real socialism” and tacking towards the Scandinavian model as their avatar. But the hardest of hard-core types who have the AOC/Bernie mindset didn’t back off their support until the train wreck dumpster fire was so radioactively toxic, not even they could deny how badly things were going in Venezuela. They’ve only recently moved to saying Venezuela is merely a thugocracy, and all of their plans merely mirror what Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark are doing (even though for intersectionality purposes, they’d much rather have a hero in the Fidelisto mode like Hugo and Maduro, than base their plans on what a bunch of blonde-haired, blue-eyed people came up with).
True. One of my favorites on Venezuela: “It’s because of American policies!”
It’s easier to do now, based on the idea you can convince enough people Venezuela was not collapsing until after Donald Trump took office. Only the hardest of hard-core progressives are willing to blame American policies for Venezuela’s collapse if you have to go pre-1/20/17 to do it, because then you’re lumping Obama in with Trump and Bush 43. The further we get away from that date, the more effort there is to try and blur the timeline on Venezuela’s failure.
Let’s call it what ithe is. The F word. Fascism.
Yes, there’s a fine line indeed. Too bad most of our young people think Fascist means “anyone who disagrees with me.”
I’d call it Fascist Socialism.
And no, I don’t think they’ll give us Venezuela-style socialism. It’ll be worse than that.
No matter which way you slice it, fascism, communism, they’re all just milestones on the way to authoritarianism. The larger government gets, the closer you get to the south pole. Also, know that at the south pole, both Predators and Aliens battle for control of the planet.
So the south pole is really bad. Ask the Endeavour.
To be comfortable with that level of gov’t involvement a society needs a very high level of trust. Ethnic, religious, and cultural homogeneity is a baseline requirement. Multicultural societies can never function well enough to foster that level of trust.