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No Food, No Medicine, No Respite: A Starving Boy’s Death in Venezuela

Their starving has nothing to do with sovialism vs capitalism, it's the military being assholes demanding a cut.corrupt military leaders are holding back food shipments purchased from us. Us officials found out about it and started cutting them off, and now there is food rotting on docks.

I say we invade, blow the **** out of their military, and nip this in the bud.
 
Socialism gonna Socialism.
 
I'm always amused by the false and disingenuous equivalencies drawn between mixed market, capitalism based social democracies (such as the kind Bernie advocates) and fascist/totalitarian states with hard socialism that features predominant or wholesale government control of the economy; let's be very clear: they are not remotely the same, nor is the former some kind of guaranteed or probable slippery slope/stepping stone into the latter.
 
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Napoleon said:
That just isn't true. The motivation for innovation espoused by capitalist systems is money and often excessive profit in private enterprise. Capitalism discourages innovation that doesn't have profit-making prospects. For example, the pharmaceutical industry is more focused on developing treatments than cures because treatments are a more profitable innovation while cures can undermine the profitability of a pharmaceutical company. It also often makes the innovations that are produced within this system financially inaccessible to the masses. For example, taking a drug that costs $2 to produce but is then sold for $750 per pill ala Martin Shkreli.

Money is, of course, not the only motivation there is. Socialist systems encourage innovation for social good and wellbeing, science for the sake of science, and a variety of other reasons AND it makes those innovations accessible. Private industry motivated by profit making - which still happens in socialist economies - still has a role to play, but it isn't necessary for innovation. We don't even need to look beyond our own borders for examples that hold this to be true. It wasn't private enterprise that sent the first man to the moon or developed the first chemotherapy treatments. The innovations required to do those things were developed in this country by government run and funded institutions.
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This would be so much more powerful argument if you could include an actual innovation from a socialist system so we can evaluate such a phenomenon.
 
A lot of people here have a very black and white view of capitalistic & socialistic economies.
Countries are not either capitalistic or socialist. Some are more capitalistic than others, some are more socialist than others.
 
ashurbanipal said:
The entire country of Venezuela is not starving to death.
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"This is how bad things are in Venezuela. A toddler who scrapes her knee can end up fighting for her life. Conditions have been deteriorating in the country for months. There's a shortage of food, water and electricity. Basic treatments like antibiotics are hard to find. "
Medical Shortages Lead To Avoidable Deaths In Venezuela : NPR

The entire country is suffering. Medical treatment is horrible, food is scarce, water is bad. The situation is pretty dire, and no, poverty in the US does not compare.

And I've been one of those trying to get help for starving people in the U.S. There's less help than you'd think, but unless you have personal experience with doing that, you'll have those illusions.
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Why are the people you help starving? Are they addicts? Are they the children of addicts?
 
truthatallcost said:
Why are the people you help starving? Are they addicts? Are they the children of addicts?
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Some were, but only became so after losing their job and being unable to find another, getting evicted from their apartment or house, and basically finding no help anywhere. Some, however, were not addicts, but in the same basic situation. There were simply too many of them, and not enough resources to help them. Draconian laws against the homeless enforced by cops who just didn't care drove them out into the woods, where they would often die sight unseen. Happens all over Northeastern Oklahoma. My mom still lives there and she tells me that sort of thing is still happening. Churches run out of food, blankets, and medicine. The congregants of the churches that actually try to help those people are themselves not wealthy, and there is basically no government help at all.
 
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