Comment by civilian | Hacker News Reader

Comment by civilian | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I'm gonna blame it on communism.

It's not that they don't know how to produce oil. It's that the oil company has been so heavily mismanaged and used for political purposes that it has become extremely inefficient.

http://www.economist.com/news/americas/21607824-venezuelas-l...

> IN 2003 Venezuela’s then president, Hugo Chávez, fired more than 18,000 employees, almost half the workforce, of the state-run oil corporation, Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA). Their offence was to have taken part in a strike (pictured) called in protest at the politicisation of the company. Their punishment was to be barred from jobs not only in PDVSA itself but also in any company doing business with the oil firm. The axe fell heavily on managers and technicians: around 80% of the staff at Intevep, PDVSA’s research arm, are thought to have joined the strike. At the stroke of a pen, Venezuela lost its oil intelligentsia.

Obviously, this wouldn't have happened in a free market. But even other state-run oil companies haven't made this kind of blunder.

What you (plus the quote from The Economist) describe is like shooting yourself in the foot. Still, ideology aside, why would Chavez do such a thing? Was he an intellectual moron? No. He knew that without oil exports his people would be hungry, and hungry people mean bloody revolution.

Also, quoting from The Economist is one sided considering their position regarding Venezuela during and after Chavez.

You see, media is biased and I don't want to trust them, no matter how "respectable" they are. (eg. NYT in the eve of 2003 Iraq invasion)

I'd like to hear from people who live there (or from less biased reporters) about causes for this situation in which an oil rich country must import oil from its major adversary, in which the whole society dissolves.

EDIT: User nnq asks the same questions as I do.

You don't trust The Economist to be unbiased. Fine. But I know of no sources that assert either that the event in question (the firing of the oil workers) didn't happen, or that it didn't destroy Venezuela's oil production. So in the absence of any contrary evidence, I think The Economist's account of that specific event is to be trusted.

Why would Chavez do such a thing? I suspect (OK, guess) that when you have a theory that you are so committed to that anything that doesn't conform is regarded as enemy propaganda, it becomes amazingly easy to do really stupid things. (Note that this does not depend on what the theory is; any theory, disconnected from any counter-evidence, is prone to this.)

Yeah, idk if I have the tools to convince you. AnimalMuppet's response is good.

If anyone is curious what The Economist's "bias" against Chavez looks like, here's a good article: http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21573106-appeal-populi...

your answer is on target but you're wrong to "blame it on communism." that has nothing to do with communism or any other abstract theory of political economy. that is an explicit example of incompetent authoritarian rule by an unhinged despot with no checks on his power.

> that is an explicit example of incompetent authoritarian rule by an unhinged despot with no checks on his power

… Communism!

Communism is tied to state-run monopolies of companies. Yes, the main fault was an incompetent authoritarian rule, but it wouldn't have been possible if the oil company hadn't be nationalized.

If Venezuela has an incompetent authoritarian rule, but had a free market for oil companies and didn't harass the employees of oil companies? Then they'd still be drilling with a state-of-the-art technology & workforce today.

ok sure, but I still don't see what that has to do with Communism. suppose their incompetent authoritarian system had been nominally capitalist? or a theocracy? or a monarchy? what difference does it make.

my point is its the incompetence and authoritarianism that caused the problems.

> I still don't see what that has to do with Communism

> my point is its the incompetence and authoritarianism that caused the problems

A lot of people believe there's a causal road from Communist governing philosophies to incompetent authoritarianism (though you're right, it certainly wouldn't be the only way to get there).

right, so there's many roads to perdition. what style of government is best equipped to avoid these types of problems? Is it democracy? Possibly so. Paraphrasing Churchill "the worst form of government except for all the other ones that have been tried".

All of those other systems I've mentioned also have high functioning, efficient, non-corrupt versions of them as well. Look at Singapore for an example of a high competence, low corruption form of Authoritarian government.

So I'll just say it one more time. Communism is orthogonal to competence/corruption of government. The fact that so many people implicitly believe they're linked is evidence of the century long propaganda campaign against anything socialist that has been waged by the powers-that-be in the capitalist system.

> All of those other systems I've mentioned also have high functioning, efficient, non-corrupt versions

I can't readily think of an example of a high functioning authoritarian Communism, but maybe there's one out there like those other forms... but I'm not sure counterexamples would go very far anyway.

I maybe said "cause" earlier, but I'm thinking "cause" in the sense that smoking causes lung cancer. You can smoke and not get cancer, and you can get cancer without smoking, but we still say they're causally related.

> The fact that so many people implicitly believe they're linked is evidence of the century long propaganda campaign

Eh, I dunno. Mostly the smart people I know who have studied economics and 20th century history seem to think there's a strong relationship, and they can provide plausible theories to explain why Communism would be particularly prone to these sorts of disasters.

Namely feedback systems... in democracies, when things go horribly wrong, the officials tend to lose power. In capitalism, when there's horrible mismanagement, those responsible tend to lose most of their capital, reducing their influence in turn. They might not always lose proportionate to the damage they caused, but the feedback is comparatively sharper than under authoritarian communism.

There are some other bits about the theory of prices as an information system, but I think feedback systems are the main issue.

Maybe those people that I think are smart are really part of a global disinformation campaign, but it seems pretty unlikely. And if all my friends are loading me up with propaganda, I'm probably screwed anyway.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com