Whatever happened to the Chavez/Maduro supporters around here?

They would be here, but they're only halfway through the Caracas bread line

The bread line caused by Obama, Hiterly and the CIA blowing up the economy?

Ok. Everyone is getting plenty to eat. The stores are full. No one’s starving. The capitalists are refusing to produce goods, causing artificial shortages. And when they import goods, they divert almost all of it to Colombia or the Black Market.

How bout if you economic geniuses tell me how you can have mass shortages in a capitalist economy? And capitalists run the whole Venezuelan economy.

I’m waiting. Come on, geniuses, let’s hear how you get mass shortages of goods in a free market economy. It’s not even possible.

OK, this one isn’t satire, apparently. Capitalists in Venezuela aren’t permitted to function as capitalists. They don’t have access to raw materials either foreign or domestic, and they’re only allowed to sell below their costs production. Thus there’s no production. It’s true that a lot of production is diverted to Colombia or (more commonly) the domestic black market, but the chavista idea that the producers are diverting it isn’t correct. Rather, it’s the people who arbitrarily have first dibs on buying at ridiculously low mandated prices (typically the government’s most fervent supporters, curiously enough) who are doing that.

Not one thing you say here is true.

The stores are full. There are only shortages of a few things, and those tend to be basic items. There have been deliberate and artificial shortages of other things such as toiletries, medical goods, etc. This was all done to blow up the economy to get rid of the Chavistas. They have raids every week of warehouses full of hoarded goods. The last raid captured 21 million syringes. There are lots of people with plenty of money who want to buy stuff. And there are shortages. What sort of crap is that? So produce goods to supply the people with dollars waiting to buy stuff. Capitalism 101.

The oppositon has admitted many times that they are sabotaging the economy. The latest one was when an opposition leader said they were “boycotting the economy.”

What you say is nonsense. They have access to all of the goods they need to produce anything they want. Anyway the stores are full. Just not of the stuff people want to buy at the prices they want to pay. 95% of the goods in the stores are not covered by price controls. Price controls only cover a few basic goods. The prices are too low, but the government keeps raising the price controls to deal with business demands.

This entire crisis has unfolded as Maduro has stocked his government full of rightwingers from the business community and opposition. So this “failure of the Left” happened under the watch of rightwingers. Maduro has seriously caved to many of the demands of the Opposition. In fact a lot of people think he is a sellout. So this crisis happened after Maduro met demand after demand of the opposition. But the Opposition are like Republicans on Steroids. They keep moving the goalposts.

You know why those price controls were put in in the first place? Because the Opposition tried to blow up the economy. They had a lockout strike 10 years ago in which they shut down the economy by closing the doors of their businesses. This created artificial shortages and inflation raged. So Chavez put in price controls. They’ve since been lifted on many goods. So the Opposition forced the price controls in the first place.

You are wrong that goods are not diverted from production. The government gives dollars to import goods. First of all, the business sector generally takes these dollars and either invests them overseas in the US or diverts them to the money black market where they can sell them at a markup. So a lot of the dollars to import stuff are immediately diverted to the black market. In fact, the business sector is not producing anything. They would rather just play the money market. What goods are produced are diverted immediately to the black market or shipped to Colombia for a markup.

Fully 35% of goods imported are immediately diverted to Colombia where they can sell them for more money.

This whole mess is caused by a black market in currency which is a whole other ball of wax. This was caused by currency controls, but those were put in due to opposition meddling too. The opposition was shipping their money out of the country to the US instead of investing it. It’s called capital flight. Chavez put in price controls to stop that as he had to. Venezuela continues to lose $50 billion/year to capital flight. It’s still a huge problem. The currency controls were no big deal for a long time until the oil price blew up, then everything went to hell, and a black market for currency rose which screwed up everything.

Really this whole mess has been caused by the decline in oil prices, which incidentally was done by “leftwing” heroes like Obama and Hitlery. They negotiated a deal with Saudi Arabia to spike production to crash the price of oil. The purpose was “screw Russia.” A secondary purpose was to screw some other US enemies like Venezuela. So it’s the US and your pals the Saudis who crashed the price of oil as part of a scam to crash the Russian economy.

Price controls only cover maybe 5% of goods, and even that is iffy. So rice is covered, but a rice dish with chicken in a package is not. So chicken is covered, but not rotisserie chicken which the stands have plenty of. True there is a low profit on the price controlled stuff.

The capitalists had been refusing to produce this stuff as soon as the controls went in because the profit margin was too low. They could make a profit, but not enough of one. So the government was importing all that stuff on the price controlled list. Then the oil price blew up and the government went broke, so they had no money to import price controlled stuff. So shortages. Then a lot of planned sabotage.

PS you realize that the markets in the wealthy and middle class areas are full, right? Including all that price controlled stuff. There are no shortages of one thing, not even price controlled stuff, in the wealthier areas. Tell me how this is because capitalists can’t function.

The main problem is the black market in dollars. The way to deal with that was to float the currency, but Maduro did not have the balls to do it. This is a policy failure, but it’s not leftwing or rightwing. But to float the currency is a tough decision and it would hurt a lot of people. They did a partial float though. The black market dollars are now worth 4X the government rate, but before it was 90X the official rate.

Seeing as price controls only cover a small % of items, where do you get off with this “price controls ruined the economy” stuff.

Besides a lot of the price controls allow for a modest profit. I think some are below the cost of production but not most. And Maduro keeps raising them anyway.

Keep supporting fascists abroad while opposing them at home. It’s a grand tradition in the Democratic Party all the way back to 1900.