The French supermarket chain Éxito was expropiated by the Venezuelan Government and is being re-opened under the new management headed by the Vicepresident for Productive Economy Elías Jaua. The pic was taken in one his bad days, I hope.
I cannot understand Latin American compulsion to attack and destroy any working enterprise in their countries. They are unable to tolerate successful businesses.
15 comments:
Oy our friend the ganef again. He earns 2000 per day now but he does not say 2000 what - 2000 Zimbabwe dollars perhaps?
I don't think the desire to expropriate is that hard to understand. It is the same motivation as the thief who breaks into your house and steals your jewelry. You can dress it up in fancy ideological language but at bottom it is still theft.
There is also a dynamic in socialism. You start out with "moderate" measures to raise up the level of the poor. These measures cause capital and talented people to flee, so the economy deteriorates and the lot of the poor becomes even worse. Rather than draw the proper conclusion that you should abandon these destructive policies, you decide that not enough medicine has been administered and what you need are even stronger measures. The revolution would have worked, but it has been undermined by "speculators", Jews, foreigners, cosmopolitans, counter-revolutionaries etc. so actions must be taken to prevent this. You maintain this spiral until your country is a hellhole like Cuba or N. Korea. "Counter-revolution" can be defined downward until it means having any property beyond the rags on your back (the leadership class excepted of course).
K
Expropriating a supermarket chain is just about the most stupid thing a crypto communist can do. These supermarket chains extract surplus value from the hapless suppliers and supermarket workers and pass much of it to the consumers. It has been a long time time since suppliers and workers have had much say in pricing. The chains are financial engines accumulating cash from millions of consumers for the purpose of countervailing power. But they can exercise it only after prompt payment to the suppliers and coercion of the workers to ease their pain. WalMart and Carrefour can get away with what they do as they play an unintended role in social stability by keeping prices low. After fiddling around with the GSTs and VATs, the Chavistas will find that there is no more money to buy off the proletariat. We are fortunate in this age that the crypto communists we are aflicted with, such as Obama are Chavez are not men of satanic genius like Lenin and Hitler. As Marx puts it, the first time as tragedy.
I don't know how 'coercion' slipped in the phrase the suppliers and coercion of the workers to ease their pain... . It must be the devil Marx.
...the second time as farce. To the people in Venezuela, which was once upon a time a semi-civilized place, this is more tragedy than farce even if Chavez appears to be a clown to us, just as the humor of Obama's attempted socialization of our medical system escapes me as an American.
K
To the people of Caracas that now has no electricity nor running water, Chavez is no joke. Venezuela is now a Communist country in everything but the name.
1. Ivan, most retailers that serve a mass market have a profit margin of 1%, so when they squeeze suppliers to force lower prices they are just forcing the suppliers to have the same margins they do. In contrast regulated electric utilities routinely are allowed profits of 6%.
2. Venezuela is going communist because it is a Catholic country. What is so hard to understand about this? America was founded by Protestants, and has generally resisted Communism, whereas Latin America was founded by Catholics and generally supports communism.
I remember watching a news program on PBS that profiled Chavez that stated that Chavez receives most of his support in poor neighborhoods where the Catholic church is very active. Think of the Jesuit priests during the 60's and 70's that spread Liberation Theology across Latin America.
You could also explain Latin America's hankering for communism is racial terms too, but for the moment let me flog my obsession. Let me use the US electorate as an example of Catholic liberalism.
If you look at this table you will see that there was a difference in voting in the 2008 election along faith lines. The data in the table falsely gives the impression that White Catholics voted for McCain, whereas this article states that they went for Obama.
Put simply Catholics went by a slim margin for Obama, whereas Protestants went for McCain either by a slim margin or by a landslide.
Think of all of the forms of liberalism takes in the Catholic church, such as Catholic Social Teaching, Distributism and support for unionization.
Hi Ronduck,
1. That's my point. The supermarkets are already operating with low margins, the Communists will do a lot worse.
2. Catholicism contrary to what some Protestants put out does not fit naturally with communism, the Popes have been active against Communism since the time of Marx. Catholics have suffered greviously under the Communists. One only has to recall the fate of the Catholic and indeed all the religious peoples of Russia, Ukraine, Poland and Vietnam and in short wherever communism takes root. For the god of the communists is Materialism and he acts through the class struggle but we have only the Holy Trinity.
3. The Catholic Church intervenes in elections all over the world and especially so whenever the communists threathen to make inroads. Then as in Kerela the bishops will instruct you whom to vote for. And Catholicism is the force that kept the communists at bay in Europe, when Stalin's successes threathened to sweep all before it. Christian Democrats in Germany and Italy, Gaullists in France and Franco in Spain all to one degree or another were inspired by the Church to resist the the blandishments of the communists and offer alternative economic arrangements which were consonant with the Church's teaching.
4. It is a standard trope, possibly stemming from the work of Max Weber that Protestants are more hard-working, and successful than Catholics and less superstitious to boot. But weigh that against the fact that Bavaria is Germany's richest state and some of the most creative people in the world live in the Lombardy region of Italy.
5. Obama came to power on the back of a bad economy with a 10% unemployment rate . His 52% margin of victory is actually quite derisory under the circumstances. The poorer Hispanics were bound to vote for him, I too might have done so, if somebody offered to fix the mortgage. Too many Catholics find themselves stuck with smokestack America, from Michigan to Ohio and Pennsylvania. They must have chanced Obama after giving up on the Republicans who seem to have sold them out to free-trade ideologues.
1. Ok, sorry.
2. One only has to recall the fate of the Catholic and indeed all the religious peoples of Russia, Ukraine, Poland and Vietnam and in short wherever communism takes root.
But you undermine your own argument on this point when you state that the communists attacked all religions as a class, for you are admitting that Catholicism did not stand out above the others as enemies of communism.
3. The Catholic Church intervenes in elections all over the world
Ok, then does that explain why states with high concentrations of Catholics are usually left-leaning? Massachusetts is 50% Catholic and spent almost half a century electing one of the most prominent champions of abortion in the Senate - Ted Kennedy. Before Ted died he was even accorded the honor of receiving communion at a papal mass. source
Ted received communion at many other times in his career despite his promotion of abortion. What could the Vatican want from Ted that could override any concern over the "suffering little children"?
5. Those people in "smokestack America are often poor because of their history of voting for Democratic candidates. As a practical matter Michigan has been bleeding jobs for decades. Hell, those states have been bleeding jobs before the advent of global free trade. For every job that leaves the "smokestack America" for China one goes to the southeastern US. Even if we were to seal our borders to all imports, those states would still be bleeding jobs due to their high costs, with the jobs migrating to other states with lower costs.
Ivan, let me beat my point a little further. Take a look at this map on Wikipedia, showing which religion has a plurality in each state.
A couple things on the map stand out. First, Massachusetts comes across as extremely Catholic, and as we all know until recently Massachusetts had an almost perfect record of voting for Democrats. Second, the most Protestant region on the map is the South, and this is also one of the most conservative regions of the US.
Re: #2 above , there is something called "liberation theology" that has been popular in some parts of the Cath. church if not at the highest levels of the Vatican - this attempts to sort of mix Communism with Catholicism. You can pick and choose selective quotes from the gospels to support the position that wealth should be redistributed or shared with the poor.
In the US you had Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement along similar if slightly less radical lines. Again not necessarily supported at the highest levels of the US church.
Keep in mind that capitalism was a system invented in Protestant lands (though later spread everywhere), and the church never particularly embraced it, and for fairly good reasons - the more prosperous people are, the less they pin their hopes on having a better next life - the church does well where people are desperate. If there are Catholic lands that are wealthy today, it is in spite of (or at best in indifference to) the Church and not because of it. Bavaria's wealth has more to do with BMW than IHS. Most of Germany (including Bavaria) can be considered more post-Christian than Christian - only 13% of German "Catholics" regularly attend Mass.
K
Ronduck,
The thrust of your earlier post was that Catholicism was somehow partial to Communism. I had responded to that. For further proof see the preachings of Bishop Fulton Sheen which are available on youtube.
The type of capitalism that you seem to be advocating would have found little sympathy with the founding fathers. Jefferson was an agragrian, Hamilton an industrial mercantilist.
K,
Capitalism is a successful system, thus it has many fathers. Nonetheless in its present, acceptable form it is in the first place based on the successes of science and technology in forming matter and maintaining processes through the liberation of energy. Without these technical advances, the capitalist system would be stuck with production methods based on repression as was prevalent in the American South for the production of cotton, in the Carribean for the production of sugar and the latifundas and Minas Geras of South America. To complete the circle of misery, there would be periodic cullings caused by overpopulation. In other words, Capitalism would have fulfilled all the satanic prophecies that heralded its birth.
Naturally, the Church perhaps foolishly believing in the mercy of God wanted to have little to do with it.
Ivan,
An interesting analysis but I would say that the liberation of energy was just a side effect of capitalism rather than its cause. Capitalism made the industrial revolution inevitable and without energy there is no industry. But as we are seeing right now, energy does not have to come from any particular source - it can be wind or water or sun or whatever - if the demand is there, capitalism will provide the supply one way or another.
No need to worry about overpopulation under crude capitalism - in San Dominique (now known as Haiti), which was the richest colony in the Americas, the death rate among slaves exceeded the birth rate, requiring continuous importation of more slaves from Africa. Now that Haiti is an international welfare case, the population is out of control.
K
Ivan, most of the Northern states eliminated slavery before the Civil War, and they began industrializing before it too. The repression that occurred in the South and in the Caribbean occurred because a large part of the workforce there consisted of slaves. In a society of free men Capitalism works just fine.
In Haiti, we are confronted with the age old question: am I my brother's keeper?
Christian ethics might be inclined to answer yes, but pragmatists would add, only up to a point.
The earthquake aside (and I am glad we are helping them there), are we obligated to fund a non-selfsustaining population explosion in perpetuity? Is this part of "being my brother's keeper"?
And if not in Haiti, surely not elsewhere either.
There have to be limits and conditions on aid, except under the most dire circumstances.
Come 'normality' in Haiti, we have to re-think. Mind you, the old model (we give plenty of money, it gets stolen and exported) did reduce the population explosion that otherwise might have resulted.
Anon.
Food aid has only a marginal and temporary effect on demography. What will really increase Haiti's population is the public safety, political and administrative stability and order imposed by American forces.
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