Norway Is Far More Socialist Than Venezuela
Norway Is Far More Socialist Than Venezuela
Matt Bruenig January 27, 2019
As the United States begins its effort to depose Venezuelan president Nicholas Maduro, the discourse is plagued by the perennial question: what is socialism? Venezuela helps illuminate this question because many pundits commit to the claim that Venezuela is socialist before committing to a specific definition of socialism. This unfortunate order of events then requires them to retroactively identify specific things that they say make Venezuela socialist, but then those things exist in other countries that they refuse to call socialist.
The weekend provided two prime examples this. To start things off, Bryan Caplan wrote, in reference to those claiming Venezuela is not real socialism, that:
Link to tweet
Caplan does not elaborate on how he distinguishes the Nordic countries from Venezuela or even what he considers socialism. But anyone who objectively compares especially Norway to Venezuela would find the two countries are quite similar and that in fact Norway is far more socialist under conventional definitions of that term.
More:
https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2019/01/27/norway-is-far-more-socialist-than-venezuela/
= new reply since forum marked as read
And predictable.
When the USSR crashed and burned, with its various satellite countries, the response was, "Well, that's not *real* socialism." Vietnam? No, it's Viet-nah-m. China? Hey, it's capitalist. Zimbabwe's socialism was just totalitarianism, nobody ever bought the lie--apart from millions of people--that Mugabe had socialist tendencies. It's like the Maoist Shining Path, they were actually cat herders and we misunderstood them as "Maoist" when they were actually "miao-ist".
Every failed attempt at socialism isn't a failure of socialism at all. It doesn't matter that the country at issue was a great example of socialism, according to its leaders and supporters (both in-country and out) ... When the country was doing well and helping "the people."
And there are always excuses--almost always rooted in scant data--about how the socialist country's problems aren't really because of anything internal to the system, but saboteurs, inside the country and out. Until those arguments seem to fall a bit flat.
In the case of the USSR, there's an additional complication that's arisen over time--if you hate the US enough, you want to blame it; but at the same time you don't want to give the US credit for getting rid of a corrupt, hateful government. So while it may have been a CIA plot in 1991, and Afghanistan helped demoralize the country, by 2011 it was an entirely internally-driven collapse and by 2018 Afghanistan played no role. Then again, by 2011 it was clear that the USSR wasn't really just the USR, no more "socialist" than the GDR was "democratic" (that each were both, by their self-definitions, doesn't matter).
There's always a suitable definition and enough counterexamples to appear to constitute evidence that the government doesn't play much of a role in the economy.
Otherwise we have economics x politics (read that as "cross" and not "times"
and when it suits us, it's all economics, and when it's not, it's all politics. It's what happens when people don't keep straight that economics and politics might be interconnected (when politicians control economics or vice-versa) but otherwise, socialism and political systems are typically not that tightly coupled. It's just that once you get control economically it's easy to let that spread into having political control; and when you have tight political control that's reasonably unconstrained, it bleeds over fairly quickly into economic control.
