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Comment by eugenerg | Hacker News Reader

Quoting someone else: "NY Times major piece on starvation in Venezuela.

Carefully avoids mentioning socialism. All the problems are passive voice ("as the economy collapsed," "as hyperinflation appeared") or exogenous ("oil prices collapsed").

Walter Duranty lives."

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> The Venezuelan government has used food to keep the Socialists in power, critics say. Before recent elections, people living in government housing projects said they were visited by representatives of their local Socialist community councils — the government-aligned groups that organize the delivery of boxes of cheap food — and threatened with being cut off if they did not vote for the government.

It does, however, directly badmouth the Socialists.

It was government corruption, not socialism that led to the current crisis.

Socialistic Scandinavia countries that have sovereign wealth funds from their oil extraction prosper.

Genuinely curious and not trying to troll: how successful would Scandinavian socialism be without oil?

Norway's is the only Scandinavia country with substantial amounts oil. Taxation is largely what is funding the welfare state.

That may be true, but all 3 countries are tiny with a large natural resource sector (so is Russia, incidentally, except on the "tiny" front). None depend on manufacturing or resources, despite all their European neighbors doing just that. Of course, sure, only 1 has a real oil sector. Like the middle eastern countries, though, Norway is somewhat guilty of sabotaging their own agricultural sector to appease political interests (ie. the greens), and compensating large amounts of importing from their immediate neighbors.

That’s not quite accurate. They also have the US paying largely for their defense needs. That saves them a ton of money.

All systems have corruption. However, when the government nationalizes food distribution and production, that corruption has a much larger impact.

Mismanaging/squandering/embezzling your country’s oil revenues and a steep decline in said oil revenues without a sovereign wealth cushion was what caused this, not nationalizing food distribution or production.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisis_in_Venezuela_(2012%E2...

Certainly the nationalizing seems to be part of it. Attacking the people producing said food for "hoarding" just to appease your socialist backers [1] [2], I must say, also seems less than helpful to my admittedly uninitiated brain. They've been at it for a decade.

[1] https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/11478

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/17/world/americas/17venezuela...

None of the scandinavian countries are socialistic.

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