Real Time Socialist Train Wreck (again) Happening Now in Venezuela

[giantdragon]

All right great, just making sure you weren't actually advocating for this to happen again  I've met a fair share of people who see these systems and what they've accomplished and say, "but this time it'll be better!"  I once heard a guy say, "Stalin's death count isn't even that big, and besides all those people who died were rebels anyway."  That one really hit me in the nads.

I am not advocating, but I fear that the same could soon happen again in Europe - far-right parties gaining popularity, even Anders Breivik-supporting party got a lot of votes in the Norway recently!
Adolf Hitler came into the power with some support from the population, and his success was largely predetermined by Great Depression and big unemployment.

P.S. If I am right about technological unemployment problem I described in another topic AND no measures will be taken to mitigate this problem - rise of new totalitarian ideology is very probable/inevitable.

[1714889614]

1714889614

[Mike Christ]

All right great, just making sure you weren't actually advocating for this to happen again  I've met a fair share of people who see these systems and what they've accomplished and say, "but this time it'll be better!"  I once heard a guy say, "Stalin's death count isn't even that big, and besides all those people who died were rebels anyway."  That one really hit me in the nads.

I am not advocating, but I fear that the same could soon happen again in Europe - far-right parties gaining popularity, even Anders Breivik-supporting party got a lot of votes in the Norway recently!
Adolf Hitler came in the power with some support from the population, and his success was largely predetermined by Great Depression and big unemployment.

P.S. If I am right about technological unemployment problem I described in another topic AND no measures will be taken to mitigate this problem - rise of new totalitarian ideology is very probable/inevitable.

Yes, we often forget that Adolf was democratically elected; we didn't learn our lesson, but it's probably because we forgot.  The only way the Europeans can change this is by taking control over their own government; this is also true for the Americans, and everyone else in the world.  No matter what we do, if we don't make the conscious decision to take charge of our own lives, we will always drift into totalitarianism; at that point, the left and the right become indistinguishable, the beginning of the end (for that empire anyhow) finally occurs and, depending, they either own the world and self-destruct.  The two options given in your thread seem to play directly into the hands of the state, which increases their power and further pushes them into totalitarianism; this is solely because you still seek reliance on the state, as opposed to pushing away from it.

I do believe socialism is possible, but it seems to only function with a society of rational players acting in self-interest.  Socialism on the opposite end, when a lot of irrational players act in the interest of the state, leads very quickly into fascism, which isn't something I'd like to experience.  I compare the spanish anarchists, who were communist, with the USSR and those like them, who were also communist, and compare the death tolls excluding war, and it's clear which form of government is more beneficial to our survival as a species based solely on how well we can live to reproduce.

[Wipeout2097]

President Nicolás Maduro ordered a military "occupation" of the company's five stores as he continues the government's crackdown on an "economic war" it says is being waged against the country, with the help of Washington.

So, this is impossible?

Is it possible the CIA is trying to destabilize Venezuela? Is it possible the CIA tried to poison Chavez and succeeded by creating his cancer? All those could be true but...

Occam's razor: when faced with competing hypotheses, select the one that makes the fewest assumptions.

Well, one could make this same argument when Kissinger ordered the replacement of Salvador Allende by Pinochet, or when Indonesia invaded East Timor. Being hard to believe, sometimes has nothing to do with the truth.

[Bungeebones]

Ridiculous, socialism has been proven time and time again to fail. People keep falling for the same mistakes, if you don't learn from history you are doomed to repeat it.

I agree. Plasma TVs are a terrible choice in 2013 

Yeah, doesn't he know that Health Care is the new socialist chic?

[Wilikon]

Ridiculous, socialism has been proven time and time again to fail. People keep falling for the same mistakes, if you don't learn from history you are doomed to repeat it.

I agree. Plasma TVs are a terrible choice in 2013 

Yeah, doesn't he know that Health Care is the new socialist chic?

Doctor Ché as Surgeon General...

[Wilikon]

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/11/19/us-venezuela-maduro-powers-idUSBRE9AI16L20131119


Venezuelan lawmakers granted President Nicolas Maduro yearlong decree powers on Tuesday that he says are essential to regulate the economy and stamp out corruption but adversaries view as a thinly veiled power grab.

Hundreds of supporters of the ruling Socialist Party cheered outside the National Assembly as the so-called Enabling Law was passed, while a recording of Maduro’s late predecessor, Hugo Chavez, singing Venezuela’s anthem rang out inside the hall. …

“With this Enabling Law we are following an order by President Chavez,” said Diosdado Cabello, president of the National Assembly and a staunch supporter of Maduro.

“He told us to pass all the laws necessary to wring the necks of the speculators and the money launderers.”

[Wilikon]

http://news.yahoo.com/venezuelan-president-tries-emergency-powers-071959194.html

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro exercised new emergency powers for the first time Thursday, signing decrees limiting business profit margins and tightening regulation of imports.

He acted as part of a so-called “economic war” against a crisis for which he blames the opposition “bourgeoisie” and imperialism.

Under new powers granted to Maduro on Tuesday, the two new laws aim to control prices and profits in the business sector and closely monitor imports and exports and hard currency that comes in from oil sales, Venezuela’s main source of revenue.

Maduro’s government says the business sector has been chalking up profit margins of up to 1,000 percent on imported goods.

The center-right opposition has called a rally for Saturday to protest the emergency powers granted to Maduro, the handpicked successor of the late populist president Hugo Chavez.

Venezuela’s economic woes are marked by inflation running at 54 percent and shortages of basic goods, among other problems.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Soon it will be too "expensive" to even buy their oil.

[Wilikon]

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/11/29/us-venezuela-economy-idUSBRE9AS0RM20131129

(Reuters) - Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro said a stricter wave of inspections for suspected price-gouging would begin on Saturday in an aggressive pre-election "economic offensive" aimed at taming the highest inflation in the Americas.

"We're not joking, we're defending the rights of the majority, their economic freedom," Maduro said on Friday, alleging price irregularities were found in nearly 99 percent of 1,705 businesses inspected so far this month.

Maduro, who has staked his presidency on preserving the legacy of late socialist leader Hugo Chavez, launched a theatrical - and often televised - wave of inspections this month to force companies to reduce prices.

He says "capitalist parasites" are trying to wreck Venezuela's economy and force him from office.

Opponents scoff at the measures as cheap and short-term populism that is hiding the failure of Venezuela's socialist economic model and intended to win votes at an upcoming poll.

Economic problems, including inflation running at an annual 54 percent and shortages of basic products, have been Maduro's biggest challenge since taking office in April.

"The inspections are continuing daily and have let us see into the under-world of capitalism," Maduro said in his latest speech to the nation, warning of severe sanctions starting Saturday against businesses maintaining unjustifiably high prices.

Government officials say companies have been marking up prices by as much as 1,000 percent over cost, though many retailers say they have been forced to hike prices sharply due to lack of access to foreign currency at the official rate.

The government has given a plethora of different figures on the inspections, with Maduro saying 100 retailers have been arrested but his chief prosecutor putting that at around 30.

"The government is seeking to transfer the political cost of the crisis to a third party (the businesses), while trying to give the impression it is attacking the problem," said Henkel Garcia, of local financial think-tank Econometrica.

LIMITS ON RENTS

Maduro also announced on Friday a new decree to limit monthly rents for commercial properties, to 250 bolivars ($40) per square meter, in a bid to reduce costs passed to consumers.

And in another populist move, the president said interest rates for savers on low incomes would be hiked to 16 percent, from 12.5 percent currently.

"This is just a first step to reward savers," Maduro said.

The leader of Venezuela's main business group Fedecamaras, Jorge Roig, said this week the government's erroneous economic policies and excessive controls risk setting up the nation for a dire 2014 of shortages and stagnation.

Wall Street analysts expect growth of 1 percent to 1.5 percent this year. The government has backed off its official target of 6 percent, but has not provided a new figure.

Roig accused policymakers of "improvisation" in the face of growing economic distortions and insisted that businesses nationalized in the Chavez era were operating at half capacity, while only 2 percent of expropriated land was productive.

"Mr. Jorge Roig, you have just declared economic war on the country," Maduro retorted on Friday, using the same combative tone and accusations against private enterprise common during Chavez's 14-year rule of the South American OPEC nations.

Having narrowly beaten opposition candidate Henrique Capriles to win April's presidential vote, Maduro and his supporters are gearing up for a new test at the polls with nationwide municipal elections on December 8.

The opposition is painting the vote as a referendum on Maduro's record, but any voter backlash over the economic problems may be tempered by his recent populist measures.

[bryant.coleman]

Chavez was a legendary figure with excellent ideals. Unfortunately, the same can't be said about the person who succeeded him. The results are there for everyone to see. 

[Wilikon]

President Nicolas Maduro will urge representatives of Venezuela’s television stations on Monday to change what he calls a culture of violence glamorized by the media.

Voters routinely cite violent crime as their top concern. In the latest case to put pressure on the government, gunmen shot dead a former Miss Venezuela and her ex-husband in front of their young daughter.

Maduro, who narrowly won a presidential election last April to succeed his late mentor Hugo Chavez, has accused TV stations – especially popular soap operas, or “telenovelas” – of glamorizing guns, drugs and gangsters.

“We are going to build a culture of peace,” he said last week, summoning representatives of local terrestrial and cable channels to the Miraflores presidential palace on Monday.

“They transmit negative values of death, drugs, arms, violence and treachery and everything bad that a human can be,” he said.


http://ca.news.yahoo.com/venezuela-worried-murder-rate-takes-aim-tv-soap-163302633--sector.html

[Wilikon]

CARACAS, Venezuela — On aisle seven, among the diapers and fabric softener, the socialist dreams of the late Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez looked as ragged as the toilet paper display.

Employees at the Excelsior Gama supermarket had set out a load of extra-soft six-roll packs so large that it nearly blocked the aisle. To stock the shelves with it would have been pointless. Soon word spread that the long-awaited rolls had arrived, and despite a government-imposed limit of one package per person, the checkout lines stretched all the way to the decimated dairy case in the back of the store.

“This is so depressing,” said Maria Plaza, 30, a lawyer, an hour and a half into her wait. “Pathetic.”

Depressing, in an otherwise bright, modern supermarket that sells $100 bottles of Spanish wine, Jack Daniel’s whiskey and organic rice puffs.

Pathetic, in a country with the world’s largest petroleum reserves and oil prices at nearly $95 a barrel, yet unable to supply basic goods because of its crumbling local currency and a shortage of U.S. dollars.

“Soon we’ll be using newspaper, just like they do in Cuba!” said an elderly man nearby, inching forward in line. “Yeah! Like Cuba!” others shouted. [...]

Maduro squeaked past opposition candidate Henrique Capriles in April’s presidential election, and Maduro’s United Socialist Party won enough races in Dec. 8 local elections to push back against perceptions that Chávez loyalists were deserting him. Just before the vote, with television cameras rolling, he sent soldiers into an appliance store accused of price gouging and ordered huge markdowns on televisions and microwaves. Apparently it gave his party a final boost at the polls.

Only the shortages and overall sense of unraveling seemed to have worsened since then.

Each day the arrival of a new item at Excelsior Gama brought Venezuelans flooding into the store: for flour, beef, sugar. Store employees and security guards helped themselves to the goods first, clogging the checkout lines, and then had to barricade the doors to hold back the surge at the entrance.

“The store owners are doing this on purpose, to increase sales,” said Marjorie Urdaneta, a government supporter who said she believes Maduro when he accuses businesses of colluding with foreign powers to wage “economic war” against him.

“He should tell the stores: Make these items available — or else,” she said.

But store managers said they are putting scarce, price-capped supplies out on the floor as soon as they arrive from government-run distribution centers.

Venezuela’s real problem, economists say, is that a shortage of U.S. dollars is squeezing the ability of the government and the private sector to import. Even in upscale Caracas shopping malls, international chain stores such as Zara and Gucci are gutted, their employees standing around with nothing to sell and the mannequins left naked.

While the government has fixed the exchange rate of the country’s currency, the “strong bolivar,” at 6.3 to the dollar, the widely used street rate is more than 10 times higher. Inflation was 56 percent last year — officially — and in an oil-warped economy that depends heavily on imported goods, businesses can’t get the dollars they need to restock their shelves. Even Venezuelan-made items go scarce as factories struggle to obtain replacement parts and raw materials.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/at-markets-chavez-successor-falls-short/2014/01/31/ac85c62a-8518-11e3-a273-6ffd9cf9f4ba_story.html

[dadomado]

One thing gentlemen forgetting
and it is that all these things we are discussing and passing
that neither the rule nor an empire and empire that existed (although in all such things existed), collapsed and disappeared ...

[AnonyMint]

Argentina isn't too far behind Venezuela's trajectory. We will see all of commodity exporter South America turn down hard once China's bubble economy implodes.

The contagion of the global dominoes are starting to fall just as I (and Armstrong) had predicted. The USA will be the last standing with the dollar moving to 118 before Sept 2015 (when the USA will turn down after being strangled by a strong dollar and Obama) as capital has turned and is starting to exit emerging markets. The emerging market tail does not wag the dog. Euro will crater sometime between now and Sept 2015, as the IMF is pushing for waves of "financial repression" (i.e. confiscation) starting with a 10% confiscation of all EU bank accounts. HSBC is already implementing capital controls.

All right great, just making sure you weren't actually advocating for this to happen again  I've met a fair share of people who see these systems and what they've accomplished and say, "but this time it'll be better!"  I once heard a guy say, "Stalin's death count isn't even that big, and besides all those people who died were rebels anyway."  That one really hit me in the nads.

I am not advocating, but I fear that the same could soon happen again in Europe - far-right parties gaining popularity, even Anders Breivik-supporting party got a lot of votes in the Norway recently!
Adolf Hitler came into the power with some support from the population, and his success was largely predetermined by Great Depression and big unemployment.

P.S. If I am right about technological unemployment problem I described in another topic AND no measures will be taken to mitigate this problem - rise of new totalitarian ideology is very probable/inevitable.

Solution:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=365141.msg4906694#msg4906694

[practicaldreamer]

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/01/28/us-venezuela-restaurants-idUSBREA0R0R020140128

Quote - "Venezuela's food shortages are nowhere near as bad as the situation painted by opposition critics, who revel in the idea that government incompetence has created Soviet-style dearth in the country with the world's largest oil reserves.

Restaurants remain packed despite a rise of about 70 percent in the cost of eating out last year and the waiters' mantra: "Sorry, we don't have that."

The average Venezuelan eats eat more and better than they did before Chavez took power in 1999.

One of the most applauded achievements of his 14-year rule was to make food affordable through price controls and subsidized grocery stores, a triumph recognized in 2013 by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization.

Since 1990, Venezuela achieved a 50 percent reduction in the number of citizens facing hunger, the U.N. said - two years ahead of a global target date for reaching that goal."




I know that the US loves to knock Venezuala - I suspect this may have something to do with Chavez having taken his countries oil wealth (reserves as large as Saudi Arabia's)  back into the hands of the Venezualan people and out of the hands of the "Seven Sisters" - but try to have a sense of proportionality here gentlemen  . They have, after all, used the oil revenues to try to help some of the most needy citizens of the Venezualan population.

     http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/hugo-chavez-proves-you-can-lead-a-progressive-popular-government-that-says-no-to-neoliberalism-8202738.html
    {quote - "Even opponents of Chavez told me that he is the first Venezuelan president to care about the poor. Since his landslide victory in 1998, extreme poverty has dropped from nearly a quarter to 8.6 per cent last year; unemployment has halved; and GDP per capita has more than doubled. Rather than ruining the economy – as his critics allege – oil exports have surged from $14.4bn to $60bn in 2011, providing revenue to spend on Chavez’s ambitious social programmes, the so-called “missions”."}

   http://embavenez.co.uk/?q=content/62-venezuelas-2014-budget-allocated-social-investment

[quote - "Merentes recalled that in 1998 poverty rate was 50.4% and now stands at 25.4%, while extreme poverty stood at 20.3% and is currently at 7.1%.

He said the Millennium Development Goals urged nations to reduce poverty to 27% and promote reduction of extreme poverty to 12%.

He also stressed the importance of social missions, created by Hugo Chavez since 2003, that have improved the living conditions of the Venezuelan population.

"Barrio Adentro, Mercal, and now the Great Housing Mission are social policies that have helped Venezuela to achieve economic development. Missions are a link through which the State has used the money and wealth for the less fortunate," he said.]





   Considering that the US is in debt to the tune of $1.28tn to another of those nasty socialist countries - and considering also that the US is dependent on oil imports for around 40% of its (massive) annual consumption, I'd say that people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.

[Wilikon]

Since bitcoin is a capitalist invention, there's no doubt there is going to be capitalist bias on this forum.

How do you know it was invented by capitalists? At least if you see bias on this forum it would mean you are not a fan of capitalism, bitcoin being its child, not a fan of bitcoin.
It's all cool. Bitcoin needs to be tested from anyone and every political prisms and belief systems.

Now back to Venezuela... 

[Wilikon]

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/01/28/us-venezuela-restaurants-idUSBREA0R0R020140128

Quote - "Venezuela's food shortages are nowhere near as bad as the situation painted by opposition critics, who revel in the idea that government incompetence has created Soviet-style dearth in the country with the world's largest oil reserves.

Restaurants remain packed despite a rise of about 70 percent in the cost of eating out last year and the waiters' mantra: "Sorry, we don't have that."

The average Venezuelan eats eat more and better than they did before Chavez took power in 1999.

One of the most applauded achievements of his 14-year rule was to make food affordable through price controls and subsidized grocery stores, a triumph recognized in 2013 by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization.

Since 1990, Venezuela achieved a 50 percent reduction in the number of citizens facing hunger, the U.N. said - two years ahead of a global target date for reaching that goal."

Venezuela is Heaven on Earth.


I know that the US loves to knock Venezuala - I suspect this may have something to do with Chavez having taken his countries oil wealth (reserves as large as Saudi Arabia's)  back into the hands of the Venezualan people and out of the hands of the "Seven Sisters" - but try to have a sense of proportionaliy here gentlemen  . They have, after all, used the oil revenues to try to help some of the most needy citizens of the Venezualan population.

     http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/hugo-chavez-proves-you-can-lead-a-progressive-popular-government-that-says-no-to-neoliberalism-8202738.html
    {quote - "Even opponents of Chavez told me that he is the first Venezuelan president to care about the poor. Since his landslide victory in 1998, extreme poverty has dropped from nearly a quarter to 8.6 per cent last year; unemployment has halved; and GDP per capita has more than doubled. Rather than ruining the economy – as his critics allege – oil exports have surged from $14.4bn to $60bn in 2011, providing revenue to spend on Chavez’s ambitious social programmes, the so-called “missions”."}

   http://embavenez.co.uk/?q=content/62-venezuelas-2014-budget-allocated-social-investment

[quote - "Merentes recalled that in 1998 poverty rate was 50.4% and now stands at 25.4%, while extreme poverty stood at 20.3% and is currently at 7.1%.

He said the Millennium Development Goals urged nations to reduce poverty to 27% and promote reduction of extreme poverty to 12%.

He also stressed the importance of social missions, created by Hugo Chavez since 2003, that have improved the living conditions of the Venezuelan population.

"Barrio Adentro, Mercal, and now the Great Housing Mission are social policies that have helped Venezuela to achieve economic development. Missions are a link through which the State has used the money and wealth for the less fortunate," he said.]





   Considering that the US is in debt to the tune of $1.28tn to another of those nasty socialist countries - and considering also that the US is dependent on oil imports for around 40% of its (massive) annual consumption, I'd say that people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.

[AnonyMint]

Even a broken clock can be correct two times per day.

The average Venezuelan eats eat more and better than they did before Chavez took power in 1999.

One of the most applauded achievements of his 14-year rule was to make food affordable through price controls and subsidized grocery stores, a triumph recognized in 2013 by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization.

Since 1990, Venezuela achieved a 50 percent reduction in the number of citizens facing hunger, the U.N. said - two years ahead of a global target date for reaching that goal."

Hilter achieved similar improvements initially by commandeering resources, but such top-down destruction of the free market always ends disastrously.

considering also that the US is dependent on oil imports for around 40% of its (massive) annual consumption, I'd say that people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.

With the midwest oil bonanza over the past years, USA is approaching being an oil and natural gas exporter and the largest producer in the world ahead of Russia and Saudi Arabia.

My email comments on that Hilter link above which were written October 2012:

Also the comments at the wakeupfromyourslumber.com link on that article are very interesting and in line with my view of how the energy has been suppressed by the cartels.

What we really have going on is always a mix of people trying to fight for freedom and the banksters exploiting human nature to their ends.

Hitler's experimentation into state-socialism failed. We can claim that Germany was more prosperous for a few years by printing its own money, just as we can claim China is more prosperous now by printing its own Yuan and directing it top-down to infrastucture.

But we see how it always ends, because such activity is not economic. The bankers bided their time while Hitler created a social liability, then when the time was right, they used their leverage over oil to force Hitler into aggression, because Hitler had to keep the socialism apparatus funded with cheap energy. Yeah okay we can say that Stalin had threatened Poland, but in reality these states were competing for resources, because they had promised socialism.

It is always the result that social, e.g. universal healthcare, results in war and failure.

We can say that Hitler was fighting the bankers, but he could only win the hearts of the people, by promising them more than the bankers were. So he increased the socialism and misallocation of capital. Remember my recent article, wherein I explained the math that top-down systems always fail.

Of course in the early stages, misallocation via top-down control appears to be prosperous. It is only in the latter stages (e.g. what China is approaching now) where the failure sets in.

Perhaps Hitler's hand was forced sooner than it would have been otherwise, if Germany hadn't been so dependent on external oil. But even if he had oil internally, the socialism would have eventually imploded on him any way.

So I still stick with that universal health care created the mindset that the weak are to blame for not being able to give away for free, that which is not free.

Excellent article! I learned a lot. Hilter was definitely a meglo-manaic, but he thought he had a better way. Of course, socialism is always failure, not matter what the intentions.

> I believe you are misjudging it. In my view most money they spent was spent productively.

Never is top-down spent money the most productive, but it often takes a long time for this to become clear.

In 5 years or less, we can talk about what happened to China after it is proven because they have collapsed.

The vital infrastructure typically is the least wasteful, e.g. the autobahn. But it is more wasteful than what a free market would have done with the same human capital. The politics and type of economy we see today in Germany was molded and shifted course somewhat by those infrastructure in Weimer era. And Germany is a failed state right now (depend on China and PIIGS imports).

This will all be more proven in a few more years.

It is silly for us to argue about it. We will know the outcome in a few years at most. Let's just wait to see.

> It was not the healthcare that killed them but
> the war effort.

Agreed, but the healthcare socialism (and its economic failure)
contributed to the development of the mindset for purging the weak.

When we promise healthcare to all, we socially get concerned about the cost of the weak.

It fits into the German psychology that men can improve and perfect the world. The German philosophers all exhibited this trait, and I can even see it in the Germans I meet here, they think they are better than everyone else. And Germans are known to write down an inventory of every item they buy for their household. I remember there was a time in the 1980s (when my WordUp software was published in Germany) when Germans did not want to adopt color computer screens for publishing, because they felt the B&W was more purely focused on the content and the essence of the layout.

I have German blood. I know that is where the perfectionist in me comes from. It is genetic. I have it more so than my father's side of the family, which is Welch and southern French.

I also got this native Cherokee blood, which gives me a bit of emotional and harmony with nature side, like the filipinos.

Hitler was an artist. He was dreaming of a perfect world where the superior race can do art and be prosperous. His dream was not all that far from my dream with an Inverse Commons where we can focus on knowledge creation and art. (software is an art).

The difference I hope is that I am not a megalomania in extremis. If ever I find I am top-down controlling my creation, I am likely to be repulsed and conflicted.

> War is always unproductive, even destructive and it
> was that that did them in financially in the later years.

Oh I agree. But they would have ended up a failed state any way, because Hitler fundamentally did not understand nature and economics. Top-down planning always ends up economically failed. Always. And you can try to rationalize that there has never been a test-case without the bankers meddling, but mathematically I am sure that is a strawman or red-herring.

I have explained it in my last two papers:

http://www.coolpage.com/commentary/economic/shelby/Understand%20Everything%20Fundamentally.html

http://www.coolpage.com/commentary/economic/shelby/Demise%20of%20Finance,%20Rise%20of%20Knowledge.html

I don't expect you to agree with me, because you really want to believe that if we could wipe out the bankers, that we could reach some nirvana.

For some reasons, the Germanic cultures think that nirvana is possible with man.

It violates entropy. It is mathematically false. I would have to try to explain this mathematically better than I have. But for now, I have no time to do that.

Erik Verlinde is proving that everything in nature is emergent from entropy:

I find Erik's explanation in the following video makes it easier to understand.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yk_Yy6TqgJs#t=675s

> Of course the Jews will deny that forever, because Hitler's financial model cannot be allowed to make school, then and now.

Bill Still of the Money Masters via fame, along with Karl Denninger, are promoting this "if the state can print its own money" school of thought.

The USA did during the Civil War apparently (the notes ended up worthless, but that is besides the point).

Any way, it will fail economically, because it is more top-down management of the economy.

There is no solution about money. And the reason is because money
represents passive capital and not active knowledge.

And thus I work on making knowledge a tradeable fungible unit in the Inverse Commons.

> Where would the
> money printers end up if each country started to print its own money?

They would wait for the economic failure of top-down money printing, and then they would be right back in business.

> Everything Hitler did must be demonized.

The bankers were probably helping him too, because they are smart enough to know that his model was doomed.

It is not as B&W as one might want to think.

> Of course, in the end his model was wrong too, because a government doesn't have any business printing money.

Bravo!

Happy we could agree on that!

I was worried you were going to idolized centralized solutions.

> Money is produced by the
> people in the form of products and services. If counterfeit money is printed, whether by Rothschild assholes or governments, it's still counterfeiting and theft.

Wow. We agree on a lot then.

Karl Denninger and I got in a very nasty argument in email, because he believes government printing its own money is a solution.

[practicaldreamer]

Hilter achieved similar improvements initially by commandeering resources[/u][/url], but such top-down destruction of the free market always ends disastrously.

You just broke Godwins Law - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law

With the midwest oil bonanza over the past years, USA is approaching being an oil and natural gas exporter and the largest producer in the world ahead of Russia and Saudi Arabia.

You are gonna have to provide sources for such a wild claim - preferably from a reputable and independant economic research unit - and not a right winger fanatic on the payroll.
    Even though the US's dependance on oil imports has diminished in recent years it is still a long long way from the position you describe.
  In the meantime it ought to show Venezuala the respect it deserves IMHO



I'll read the rest of your extensive post later - possibly - off to work just now

[AnonyMint]

Money = Capital, or didn't you know that?

Incorrect. You are very ignorant about money and economics.

Money is medium-of-exchange, and possibly a store-of-value.

There are many forms of capital most of which money can't buy, such as human capital (which is increasingly human knowledge which can't be financed), social capital, etc..

[practicaldreamer]

  It turns out that the US is spending $114 to extract a barrel of oil (blame it on shale) - whilst the Venezualans can knock it out at $20 a barrel  

   According to Sanford C. Bernstein (Wall Street) “Net income margins in the sector (US oil extraction) are now at the lowest in a decade - This is not sustainable. Either prices must rise or costs must fall,”     [we must agree also that Bernstein don't give a shit about the politics, they are only interested in the dollar - and so in this respect I'd cite them as a reliable source here].
       [ http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/ec3bb622-c794-11e2-9c52-00144feab7de.html#axzz2sN5MfMfp]

    At this rate the US will be having to subsidise domestic oil extraction from the public purse and so be in danger of getting in hock to the Chinese for another trillion dollars - oh, wait a minute, it seems they effectively already are subsidising it http://www.investopedia.com/articles/07/oil-tax-break.asp.    http://priceofoil.org/fossil-fuel-subsidies/.

    As much as I admire the average Americans willingness to transfer their hard earned dollar directly to the coffers of BP, Exxon, Chevron, Shell and ConocoPhillips , all in all the outlook doesn't look too promising does it ? - and there you have right on the doorstep, not a stones throw away, those horrible Commi Venezualans sat on the worlds largest reserves of crude - at $20 a barrel to extract , selling the stuff cheap to the fuckin Cubans and using the income to help their own poor and disadvantaged.

   I mean, its good that the US can cut its reliance on (Venezualan) oil imports (thereby causing short term problems for the Venezualans) - but at what cost to the US economy also ? Its a little bit like cutting off your nose to spite your face.


 I'd say either the US needs to find a way of convincing the US population that the Venezualans are a nation of drug addicted child abusers so as to be able to justify sending in the Marines Corps/ExxonMobil [this could be problematic given China's burgeoning relations with Venezuela]
         - or, as I've said previously, start showing them a little respect  .