People are right when they defend the failure of places like Venezuela and Russia by saying it's not "true socialism". True socialism requires that everyone works and contributes to the common good, and that government is benevolent and honest and supportive of the people.

In real life that never works. People become disillusioned and won't work to support the lazy, the government quickly becomes corrupt, quality of life diminishes, and people become hostile to the system and the government.

That's where they are in Venezuela now ... the corrupt government can't fulfill their utopian promises, the system has broken down, and the people are pissed off and hostile. In other words, socialism has again failed, like it always will.

Socialism didn’t fail. That is true socialism with all the well known outcomes. It didn’t fail, it worked exactly as expected.

FIFY.

It's like the Bhopal Disaster.  India insisted that it's people had to be in key decision-making positions, and they were pushing for higher output and not wanting to do maintenance.  Union-Carbide didn't want to get cut completely out of their market, so they accepted the blame, but it was really the Indian administrators who fucked it all up (former father-in-law was a career Union Carbide employee and saw the interal reports on what happened).  Anybody who has dealt with Indians in IT has seen it happen numerous times, just not as dramatically (although I took great professional pride in demonstrating to a business owner how the VP of development and his Indian developers were lying about their progress, to see said VP walked out the door the next day after that business owner went to the CIO and CEO with our findings, the project was behind schedule and the VP was blaming everyone else, but they hadn't even run a basic HTML debugger on their login page, which revealed they still had hardcoded development server hostnames and a number of other issues, for something that had been promised to customers, we had to bust our asses for a week completely rebuilding that environment into something marginally functional, literally working in shifts 24x7 for that week to get it done).

Of course it has.  Just like the government took over food distribution to prevent hoarding.  Of course, if you don't vote the right way, you don't get your food ration...

Have they tried a tariff on anything containing both hydrogen and oxygen yet?

Bernie! Bernie! Bernie!

why would this surprise anyone? If they had to the libs wouldn't be able to build a decent usable pencil.

This is an excellent question, and one that deserves an answer. I'll give it a wing...

Communist/socialist countries have been funded by, primarily, US dollars for quite some time. If you take a casual glance, you will notice that the IMF, the World Bank, and the various development and infrastructure banks that make these transactions are themselves socialist organizations.

They know full well that these loans will never be repaid, but what does it matter when they are backstopped by the US taxpayer? Of course this neccesitates the US dollar's devaluation through inflation when we just print the money to cover the losses and bailout the banks.

So... BAM! It's actually a global socialist two-fer: redistribute wealth directly from prosperous countries to 'developing' countries. While at the same time reduce the standard of living in the first world, thereby making it easier to shift industrialized capitalist countries into the global socialist paradigm.

These people know exactly what they're doing and it's working well. They are embedded in global government and finance... make no mistake; in our own government and financial institutions... like intestinal worms in the swollen bellies of those ethiopian kids you used to see on TV.

BTW those very same Ethiopian kids were also 'assisted' by the world bank and IMF. Look how far it got them eh

Preach it.

How fo you run out of water in a country that is quite literally half rainforest?

Just how does one run out of water in a country that receives 36 to 40 inches of rain in a year? Oh, right, you have socialists run the reservoirs.

The same way you run out of water in a flood emergency like in Katrina or Houston or ____.  Price controls, the removal of profit, and thus the removal of incentive.

*sigh*

Alas, my evangel of liberty and free markets is lost on the ears that need to hear it. The world is doomed to a high tech, dark age feudalism I fear.

Buy cheap my friend, and stack deep.

Do so while your dollars can still buy what your betters permit you, and while you still have non government housing to stack it in. The land of the free and the home of the brave will have its own socialist tendencies come home to roost soon.

Forced labor to fix the pipes. That's the next step on the wonderful journey to Utopia.

We spent billions of dollars propping up Soviet Union during and after WWII. It's fucking disgusting the amount of resources and military equipment that was sent to them. Only for the commies to take over Eastern Europe.

Indeed. One might even go so far as to call it criminal.

Don't forget before ww2, however. Lenin, Trotsky and Marx were funded by US and other western banks to get their utopia up and running. The old USSR wouldnt have gotten farther than a piece of Wrigley's spearmint stuck to a white russians mink boots if it weren't for that.

X doubt

skill

we did the same thing with Germany in the 1920-30s - foreign investment is what drove the German economy to a recovery during Hitler's early years
of course, we let them crash to rock bottom before investing