• Tag Archives Venezuela

  • ‘Jack Ryan’ Gets 4 Pinocchios on Venezuela

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    Despite Venezuela’s track record of seizing the means of production of a multitude of industries⁠, there are still those who have trouble calling Venezuela a socialist state.

    The denials are getting more creative. The most recent comes in Jack Ryan, Amazon Prime’s hit show starring John Krasinski as the protagonist from Tom Clancy’s best-selling books.

    Venezuela and its suffering take center stage in the plot of season two. Jack Ryan, who in season one was a Ph.D. economist/CIA analyst who stopped ISIS from blowing up Washington, DC, is now a national security policy instructor in Langley, Virginia, home of the CIA’s headquarters. Speaking to a roomful of students, Professor Ryan explains why Venezuelans face suffering of Biblical proportions despite their vast wealth in natural resources (emphasis added).

    The fact is that Venezuela is arguably the single greatest resource of oil and minerals on the planet. So, why is this country in the midst of one of the greatest humanitarian crises in modern history? Let’s meet President Nicolas Reyes. After rising to power on a wave of nationalist pride, in a mere six years, this guy has crippled the national economy by half. He has raised the poverty rate by almost 400 percent. Luckily for the rest of us, he’s up for reelection.

    Did you catch that? The writers of Jack Ryan are unable to say what actually caused the humanitarian crisis in Venezuela. As Sean Malone explains in a new Out of Frame episode:

    In the real world, Venezuela’s problems have one, incredibly predictable root cause… And it’s not simply “corruption” or “nationalist pride.” We need to be clear about this.

    The cause is socialism.

    The show’s omission of this basic fact is jarring … but wait. It gets worse. Professor Ryan then goes on to describe Reyes’s political opponent.

    This is Gloria Bonalde. Now, Gloria is a history professor turned activist. She’s running against [Reyes] on a social justice platform and on the strength of, in my humble opinion, just not being an *sshole. (laughter)

    In Jack Ryan’s Venezuela, it’s those who promise “social justice” who are going to save the people from a humanitarian crisis. This turns history on its head.

    By making the villain of Jack Ryan a nationalist, the writers take a not-so-subtle jab at US President Donald Trump, whose “America First” slogan has been described as nationalism “that betrays America’s values.” (Trump also describes himself as a nationalist.)

    Hugo Chávez, however, was not elected on some “Make Venezuela Great Again” platform. Lest we forget, back in the real world, “social equity and justice” were precisely what candidate Hugo Chávez promised the people of Venezuela when he was elected in 1998 with 56.2 percent of the vote.

    To be sure, there’s a line between “social justice” and “socialism,” and it’s unclear precisely where Gloria Bonalde, the fictional presidential contender in Jack Ryan, stands (though her story is suspiciously similar to El Commandante’s). In any event, for Hugo Chávez the picture is quite clear. He crossed the line from social justice champion to socialist long ago.

    He set out to do precisely that, ordering the state to seize the means of production (sometimes using soldiers to do it) of whatever industries he could: steel, agriculture, shipping, mining, telecommunications, electric power, and more. In doing so, he brought about the misery Venezuelans now endure.

    Let’s be clear. Nationalism presents its own dangers. Yet these dangers are muted without state power, specifically nationalism’s common bedfellow: socialism.

    The fact that the writers of Jack Ryan cannot bring themselves to even use the word socialism to describe what is textbook socialism is disheartening. But the fact that they make Venezuela’s savior someone cut from the same ideological cloth as Hugo Chávez is a grave deceit.

    As Malone points out, the stakes are too high for such dishonesty.

    Literally millions of people have had to flee the country to find food and shelter or to avoid becoming another victim of Nicolás Maduro’s regime. We need to understand how and why this happened, and Jack Ryan doesn’t even try to get it right.

    Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it, the adage goes. Shows like Jack Ryan are making the job of learning it that much more difficult.


    Jon Miltimore

    Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. His writing/reporting has appeared in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, and Fox News. 

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


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  • The Linda Problem and Why Democratic Socialists Flunk Logic 101

    Posted on by Azrael Comment


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    Consider the following facts:

    Venezuela is a country with vast natural resources. Once it was one of the wealthiest countries in South America. Venezuela nationalized many vital industries such as oil. Price controls were instituted, and hyperinflation destroyed savings. Supermarket shelves emptied, and some even killed zoo animals for food.

    Malnutrition, even starvation, is common. Essential medicines, such as antibiotics, are unavailable. The ruthless despot who runs the country has stolen billions. He gives long speeches filled with socialist slogans and claims American interference, not socialism, has caused the failures of his regime.

    Which alternative is most likely?

    1. Venezuela is a failed socialist regime.
    2. Venezuela is a failed socialist regime, and the US caused its failure.

    No matter how you feel about US foreign policy, this is a question in pure logic. The question I posed is a variation on Nobel laureate in economics Daniel Kahneman’s famous Linda problem. Despite what many think, it is impossible for a conjunction of two events to be more likely than one event alone.

    Democratic socialist-leaning Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-MN) is sure that if Venezuela has failed, it is not the fault of socialism. Appearing on the television show Democracy Now, Omar reassured viewers that socialism has not caused catastrophic human suffering:

    A lot of the policies that we have put in place has kind of helped lead the devastation in Venezuela, and we have sort of set the stage for where we are arriving today.

    In other words, in Omar’s eyes, Venezuelan socialism hasn’t failed; the US has failed socialism.

    Juan Guaido has been harshly attacked by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). The DSA tell us their goal is to “make the world safe for democracy and socialism” and “help the Venezuelan people defend the gains made during Hugo Chávez’s presidency.”

    Omar’s more widely known democratic socialist colleague Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is waiting for her talking points. When asked if Maduro’s government is legitimate, she offers that she’ll “defer to caucus leadership on how we navigate this.” And as for Bernie Sanders, his support for Venezuelan socialism is well known. Sanders can’t even bring himself to call Maduro a dictator.

    In his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman explains the Linda problem he and his long-time research collaborator Amos Tversky created. They described “Linda” to a large number of students:

    Linda is thirty-one years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in antinuclear demonstrations.

    Then Kahneman asked, “Which alternative is more probable?”:

    1. “Linda is a bank teller.”
    2. “Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.”

    Kahneman was shocked by the large numbers of students who choose option 2, contrary to the rules of logic:

    About 85% to 90% of undergraduates at several major universities chose the second option, contrary to logic. Remarkably, the sinners seemed to have no shame. When I asked my large undergraduate class in some indignation, “Do you realize that you have violated an elementary logical rule?” someone in the back row shouted, “So what?” and a graduate student who made the same error explained herself by saying, “I thought you just asked for my opinion.”

    Given a more complex set of options, even 85 percent of “doctoral students in the decision-science program of the Stanford Graduate School of Business, all of whom had taken several advanced courses in probability, statistics, and decision theory,” shockingly “ranked ‘feminist bank teller’ as more likely than ‘bank teller.’”

    No wonder those like Congresswoman Omar find true believers in their eager audiences. Democratic socialists obfuscate cause and effect. To absolve socialism of any errors, they conflate facts with conjecture and then claim their conjectures prove socialism didn’t fail.

    If a democratic socialist is living in a rotting home, do they point to the neighbor’s barking dog as the cause of their trouble?

    As Kahneman puts it,

    When you specify a possible event in greater detail you can only lower its probability.

    Congresswoman Omar and the democratic socialists are human. As humans, we all look to confirm our biases. The logical fallacy that most fall victim to in the Linda problem, Kahneman observes, “remains attractive even when you recognize it for what it is.”

    Kahneman and Tversky call this phenomenon the conjunction fallacy. As Kahneman points out, we get sucked into the conjunction fallacy when our biases make the least likely outcome seem like a “better story.”

    If you ask, “Which alternative is more probable? Jane is a teacher. Jane is a teacher and walks to work,” responders don’t fall for the conjunction fallacy. Why not? The Jane problem, Kahneman writes, has “the same logical structure as the Linda problem, but [it causes] no fallacy, because the more detailed outcome is only more detailed—it is not more plausible, or more coherent, or a better story.”

    Congresswoman Omar’s whole political career depends upon never reminding others of socialism’s failures. She won’t be changing her story soon. Let’s forget Congresswoman Omar for a moment and learn from Omar’s absurd mistake. How do we overcome our need to make our story cohere with our preexisting biases?

    In his book The Black Swan, Nassim Taleb introduced the idea of a narrative fallacy to explain how our flawed causal stories of the past shape our views. For the true believers, socialism can’t be flawed; some external agent such as the US must have caused its failures.

    No amount of abstract theory or concrete evidence will change the mind of someone immersed in a narrative fallacy. On a personal level, people can continually rehearse stories that tidily explain their past and provide a bridge to a future devoid of opportunities to develop their potential.

    Which is more likely? 1. My past five relationships have ended in failure. 2. My past five relationships have ended in failure, and I will never find a partner.

    For a person who has a tidy story about their personal failures and/or being screwed by life, the conjunction fallacy might kick in; they may think alternative 2 is more likely.

    When you are ready to break your narrative, Kelly Boys in her book The Blind Spot Effect suggests asking these questions: “Is there anything about this thought that I’m believing because it’s an easy, coherent story? Is there more to the story than this?”

    Our own tendencies to jump into an easy story only impact our lives and those we encounter. We will all be affected by the inability of politicians to rise above their easy but flawed stories about socialism.

    Politicians feed off our own flawed narratives. And a flawed story about the efficacy of socialism can only be changed by the individual holding them. Yet, today, more and more individuals are being miseducated by professors as left-wing bias among professors accelerates.

    An individual immersed in faulty ideas may work on personal and professional development. A politician immersed in erroneous beliefs about socialism dreams not of learning but of applying coercive force to implement their destructive plans to control the lives of others.

    Barry Brownstein

    Barry Brownstein is professor emeritus of economics and leadership at the University of Baltimore. He is the author of The Inner-Work of Leadership. To receive Barry’s essays subscribe at Mindset Shifts.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


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  • Venezuela Reveals the Natural Progression of “Democratic Socialism”

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    Venezuelan opposition socialist affirming that our tragedy is not the result of applying a revolutionary, contemporary socialist program is invaluable to the leftist US press. Politicians and intellectuals are stifled by the Castroite intelligentsia of my country, and above them stands a supposedly moderate columnist at a flagship organization of leftist American news.

    Francisco Toro, writing in the Washington Post, tries to whitewash socialism in the wake of the destruction of Venezuela. He sends a message to “true believers” of the cause, from violent, hooded fanatics behind Soviet flags to eternally-offended worshipers of the ultra-left Senator Sanders or the comparatively moderate followers of Hillary Clinton.

    The official chronicler of the destruction of Venezuela at the hands of socialism now pleases the journalistic and cultural elites by saying Venezuela is not the ideal context in which to examine the effects of socialism. These minor arguments between believers matter. He can make his case without pushback. It is what they want to hear. For the mainstream media, it all boils down to: “he is in Venezuela” and he is saying “it was not socialism” that caused this ongoing tragedy.

    In the United States, more than in the rest of the world, the socialists— even radicals—flee from the pestilence and death of Chavismo that they happily applauded yesterday. And today, they hypocritically condemn it.

    The Venezuelan tragedy shows how a revolutionary socialist order that came to power in competitive elections can, in appropriate conditions, advance to totalitarianism.

    It demonstrates how it can transform democracy into dictatorship and plunge the economy into disarray. The threat of totalitarianism—and the material and moral misery that goes with it—lurks behind any democratic socialist regime, even in long-standing democracies with developed and prosperous economies.

    Although arguments—and facts—are irrelevant to “true believers,” it is worthwhile to review the two that Toro limited himself to:

    1. In all the countries of South America, socialist presidents have been elected this century without immediately having another Venezuela.
    2. It’s not because they were less radical. Evo Morales is a radical, and Bolivian democracy is inherently weak. He expropriated the hydrocarbons industry and others but said Bolivia now is experiencing economic growth and poverty reduction.

    According to Toro, Venezuela is a unique and unrepeatable case. The cause of our ills, he insists, is not the ideology that inspired each and every one of the actions of those who govern here but the fact that they are “anti-intellectual, authoritarian, and criminal.” Any ideology, says Toro, would end in disaster with people like that. And people like that, he insinuates, are leading the United States today. It is not Sanders but Trump whom Toro wants the Americans to associate with Venezuelan socialism. It seems like a bad joke, but it is not.

    Toro does not deny the widespread continental corruption of each and every one of the governments of the Sao Paulo Forum, nor does he deny the authoritarian tendencies of those governments. He dodges the current Nicaraguan tragedy by limiting himself to South America, and in doing so, he disassembles his own argument. Nicaragua’s socialist rulers are no less criminal nor less authoritarian than those of Venezuela.

    What saved other Sao Paulo Forum countries from disaster when they had perfect counterparts to those who have destroyed Venezuela? Less irresponsibility in public finances, Toro suggests (the only answer in which he does not contradict himself).

    He ignores the fact that if Chavez had done the same without causing hyperinflation, the outflows of millions of refugees fleeing from poverty in a country on the verge of famine would have occurred years earlier. Inflation prolongs an unsustainable public deficit over time. Hyperinflation is the inevitable outcome of insisting too long on the inflationary financing of the deficit.

    Nearly two-thirds of the Venezuelan economy disappeared in the 20 years of Chavismo power. It was socialism: pillaging of the private economy as state policy. Venezuelan hyperinflation resulted from disguising that repression and its impoverishing effects with unsustainable populist spending.

    The difference between Venezuela and the rest of the continent (I consider the definition of Toro’s socialist governments valid) would be that here we have suffered from more than half a century of uninterrupted socialist governments. Already in 1945, a group of military coup-backers arrived who believed in the state directing the economy and maintaining the monopoly of strategic companies. After that, no non-socialist presidents were democratically elected in either the 20th century or the 21st century.

    Of those who did serve as president, just one tried a very limited turn to market-friendly policies, and it lasted for just three years. Against him rose the arms, the pens, the platforms, the pulpits, and the checkbooks of the military, Marxist intellectuals, socialist politicians, the ranks of Marxist priests, and mercantilist businessmen. The determined return to customary socialism followed first. Then the jump into the void with the current radical socialism—and the misery.

    Insist for decades on more and more socialism. Deny that the resulting unproductiveness and impoverishment are the product of socialism. Do not allow another political alternative to moderate socialism other than radical socialism. Insist on legitimizing envy and resentment as a dogma in academia, culture, and entertainment. Pursue and censor everything that is not socialism in a broad sense. Do not base politics on reason but on feelings, mainly resentments.

    Regardless of the democratic development and prosperity of their society, sooner rather than later they will equal Venezuela in its misery. It is the lesson of the Venezuelan tragedy. Venezuela was among the most prosperous economies in the world. But over the course of five uninterrupted decades of socialist rulers who declared themselves democratically elected, this strong economy remained the reality from 1958 to 1988, doubtful from then on, and is a falsehood today.

    Venezuela proves that democratic socialism can lead to socialist totalitarianism if it holds onto power for long enough—and that the terrible long-term economic results of socialism will only be corrected democratically by voters who doubt socialism. What socialism does in the short term to reduce poverty will cause more and worse poverty in the medium- and long-term.

    What Toro tells us is that the virtue of the recent socialist wave in Latin America would be the reduction of relative poverty. But it’s only a matter of time. Venezuela has not happened in Bolivia because it did not happen in Venezuela between 1999 and 2014 but between 2015 and 2018. The only way to avoid socialist disaster is to abandon socialism in time.

    Venezuela shows that socialism requires time to reduce a prosperous economy to misery and rule over its ruins. With enough time in power, it will be irreversible. In contrast, the United Kingdom and Sweden are good examples of how to emerge democratically, over time, from the danger of elected socialism. Perhaps it will also be demonstrated in the countries of Latin America that have recently rejected socialist rule.

    The damage socialism can do and the time it requires do not depend on the “anti-intellectuals and criminals” being in charge. They depend on early institutional resistance to the worst of socialism.

    Not falling depends on the division of powers rather than votes. On the rule of law more than on one of opinion. On limits to power. And, above all, on the fact that the institutions are supported by norms and customs, values and beliefs internalized by the overwhelming majority of the population. It is what failed in Venezuela—little by little—for a long time.

    It can be repeated wherever they refuse to learn from Venezuela what most Venezuelans refused to learn from all the socialist regimes that reached totalitarianism—what some Venezuelans, like Toro, continue to refuse to see, even in the midst of this tragedy.

    Source: Venezuela Reveals the Natural Progression of “Democratic Socialism” – Foundation for Economic Education

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