Venezuela becomes Atlas Shrugged, seizes auto factory
It will be interesting to see how the next few years for Venezuela unfold, as they are the real life Atlas Shrugged in progress.
- Hot
- New
- Categories...
- Producer's Lounge
- Producer's Vault
- The Gulch: Live! (New)
- Ask the Gulch!
- Going Galt
- Books
- Business
- Classifieds
- Culture
- Economics
- Education
- Entertainment
- Government
- History
- Humor
- Legislation
- Movies
- News
- Philosophy
- Pics
- Politics
- Science
- Technology
- Video
- The Gulch: Best of
- The Gulch: Bugs
- The Gulch: Feature Requests
- The Gulch: Featured Producers
- The Gulch: General
- The Gulch: Introductions
- The Gulch: Local
- The Gulch: Promotions
- Marketplace
- Members
- Store
- More...
https://www.prageru.com/courses/econo...
The government is just trying to justify it's own existence and growth. The more regulations there are, the more government employees there will be to inspect and enforce them.
In 2009 my father showed me a letter from the Obama administration saying that they were offering $225 for the $100000 in GM bonds that my parents had, and that my parents had better accept it. If they decided to sue, then the government promised in the letter to counter-sue. The threat was not implied; it was explicit.
Did anyone at GM speak out against the illegality of the theft bypassing the normal bankruptcy re-organization and legal allocation of assets?
Why would anyone at GM speak out? The bondholders and shareholders were getting short shrift while the employees (i.e. anyone at GM) were getting their retirement benefits at my parents' expense.
This is beyond bananas.
Not coincidentally, three of the four Venezuelan students in the program came to see AS1.
There is a lot you can appropriately explain about "how do you know" in scientific courses. Textbooks are notorious for asserting facts and principles with no clue about how they were discovered and validated, let alone explaining the nature of objective, contextual knowledge obtained by rational thought and procedures. The result is students permanently absorbing common fallacies of subjectivism and intrinsicism. The most that is provided, and then only occasionally, is throwing out a name and a crude summary of some experiment with no idea of what it took to figure out and do what was required, let alone how it validated a principle.
The philosophy professor spends more time on Aristotle than anyone else.
The non-philosophy humanities professor has been selected as the best professor on campus by both the faculty and the students. I have learned something in every discussion I have had with her.
I will not vouch for every humanities professor on our campus, but we have several with whom I am very satisfied. A third faculty member holds an annual event where students are allowed to have free BBQ ... but only if they give up their right to free speech. The students learn quickly that Ben Franklin was correct in saying that those who would give up their liberties for security deserve neither.
forms of socialism are there? I don’t know the answer, but it is many. And they’ve all
been tried with many variations and attempts at fine tuning to get just the “right” mixture
of control and human rights. How long and what will it take for people to understand that there is no form of socialism that can work for the betterment of human kind?
Is there anyone out there that feels as exasperated as I do?
You can guess the rest, and now we are faced with all the ills of socialism and it is happening before my own eyes, and the "people" from other failing states are moving here in droves to bring "enlightenment."
It truly is right out of Atlas Shrugged, almost word for word, and it's getting worse daily.
Even places in southern Utah where I once considered moving are succumbing to the lure of "free stuff" and the "green revolution."
They bring what they are fleeing, and it is so obvious to me, but not to others.
Galt's Gulch is the only reading that brings sanity to my increasingly dwindling freedom of choice.
Yes, I am exasperated, and that is the mildest term I use.
of Socialists and Communists.
----But even though socialism does not and cannot
work, people are going to keep trying it over and over as long as they accept its moral premises. In order to defeat that practice, we have to defeat the main, fundamental enemy, the altruist
morality. We need to uphold individual rights, and denounce their violation, not just go through complicated Rube Goldberg arguments about particular programs.
Senators and Representatives set their own salaries. What kind of idiocy is that? Senators whine they can't make it on $174,000.00 a year yet begrudged SSI recipients a cost of living increase two years ago and for this year gave a whopping 0.4%. Now that's not a 4 cents on the dollar but 4/10ths of a cent on the dollar raise which came out to about $4.00 a month. $48.00 a year. My rent went up $150.00 a month last year. My health insurance premium, thanks to Obamacare just went from around $1500.00 to $2162.00 a month! And I can't afford to go with a lesser policy because my daughter had a brain tumor at age 5 and now nearing 20 she has all sorts of issues. She receives one injection each month that costs $8500.00 without insurance so I'm stuck. We spend so much time fighting the insurance company and Medicare just to get things approved and covered that clearly should be but for some reason got denied we sometimes have no time for living! But what do you do? They have the power, you vote for someone that you hope will change things but they get there and it's one against the established system and soon they're playing the same game.
I think we need to shorten the terms to two years for everyone but POTUS. And we need a quick and dirty way to yank people out of office if they aren't doing the will of the people. We need an independent organization in the House and Senate to police them, to make the rules they play by, and enforce them, with severe penalties if they don't. And once we the people have some control over DC maybe they'll do us right. Otherwise nothing will change.
For Obamacare in particular, everywhere you turn you see arguments appealing to the "needs" of those who want government funded and controlled health care. Almost no one defends the rights and freedom of the individual, least of all Republicans.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-04-22...
http://insider.foxnews.com/2017/04/22...
Carlson accuses Rachel Maddow of MSNBC of blaming the Trump administration for some of its problems. Maddow's "argument" (if you can call it that) actually is that the Venezuelan oil company contributed $500,000 to the Trump inaugural and thereby deprived Venezuelan citizens of much needed help. Not quite blaming capitalism, but by innuendo, it amounts to much the same thing.
It's all the Capitalists' fault.
Sounds like Trump and the Republicans arguing for saving Obamacare instead of repealing it.
Thanks.
Trump is by no means an Objectivist, but he has become a sort of torchbearer for people who are tired of just working all day to support the socialist principles. Maybe that accounts for the intense hatred of Trump among the democrats. I have been amazed at the intensity of that hatred, particularly when he hasnt even done a lot yet
The Democrats hate Trump because he is in power and isn't them. He isn't Hilary or Bernie, they expected him to lose badly, and they have an entitlement mentality of being in control. They can't stand being out of complete power.
There are people who still idolize Trump despite the fact that he is not a defender of individualism and freedom and cannot think or speak coherently in his shallow, emotional, range of the moment outbursts. He is a statist, pragmatist who has been a 'liberal' all his life.
As current example he is trying to save Obamacare despite the Republican promises to repeal it. He has been on record of wanting government supplied health care for years before he ran for and demagogued his way into the Presidency, supported by frustrated people who don't know any better but knew they had to stop Clinton.
The uninitiated that take over GM won't last much more than 5 years, and will fall victim to tech innovation, and the inability to sustain a profit. Especially with novices at the helm.
Herb................everyone should read that sentence over and over again. You have posted the essence..........thanks. BT
I am interested in the mechanics of this. GE is a multinational company, owned by people around the world. It used its money to buy parts for a plant, workers to get the plant running, and probably the land on which it's located. The Venezuelan plant buys car parts using Euros an Yen, pays its local employees in Bolivares, and probably sells most of the cars to local buyers paying in Bolivares. Some of the plant's Bolívar revenue it uses to pay employees, but it has to change the rest to foreign currency to buy parts and pay back investors. The Venezuelan gov't interferes with currency exchange and foreign remittances, complicating paying vendors and investors.
So what exactly did the Venezuelan gov't do? Did it take legal ownership of the plant and the land it sits on? This seems like a minor thing next to interfering with paying vendors. Did the move also seize GM's local bank accounts? What did the Venezuelan gov't want with an auto plant? Now it has to run an auto business.
This article shows the Venezuelan auto industry was suffering, with total Venezuelan car production falling from 172k to 3k. The industry was on its bottom. Why would the gov't want to own an auto plant?
The seizure is not "minor" in comparison with the previous interference in business transactions. It is a new (for GM there), more egregious, criminal act by the government based on the same premises and is the logical end result.
It is irrelevant what "the Venezuelan gov't wants with an auto plant". We know what "the Venezuelan government wants" -- stop the statement there -- it doesn't matter what economic reason it might give for seizing a particular asset like an auto plant. "Don't bother to examine a folly, ask yourself only what it accomplishes". They have no rational economic motive; Ellsworth Toohey is in Venezuela.
A better question is "what was GM counting on"?
In defiance of Toohey's advice, I'm interested in learning more about the mechanics of this folly.
Let's break it up into A) the particulars (what I was calling "the mechanics"), B) the philosophy, and C) the excuses.
I don't care about C. Almost all thieves have excuses. B could possibly be interesting, but it's not what I'm talking about.
The particulars (A) is the part I'm interested in. This GM plant was struggling. The gov't has this ridiculous exchange rate that in no way reflects the market. Did the plant have some sort of deal with the gov't to get a better rate to pay foreign suppliers? Either way, I suspect the gov't milked them so badly in so many ways; which explains why they haven't produced a single car there since 2015. What were its 2,700 employees doing? I suspect supporting Venezuelan dealers, who employ an additional 3,900 people.
A court ruling in some lawsuit from the 90s caused (more likely was a gov't excuse for) the gov't to seize this plant and bank accounts. We don't know how much was in the accounts. The company has been losing money; I imagine it's not a fortune. If the plant hasn't produced a car in over a year, it would take significant investment to get it up and running again.
Did gov't officials come by the plant after seizing the accounts with a notice that this building belongs to us now? If so, did they ask them to get out of the building, to keep supporting the local dealerships, or did they just deliver the news with no desired action? Did they send some administrator by who would be able to sign paychecks, generate POs, enter contracts, and the like?
It doesn't make much sense because the company was losing money, not making any cars and was supporting Venezuelan dealerships. Now the gov't is the proud owner of a broken-down factory that was losing money. I wonder if the gov't knows about some assets it wants to loot and liquidate that may be worth enough to get it through a few more weeks of crisis. Maybe it was just a court flexing its muscle (unlikely), independent of national politics. It could be a political move to do something to symbolic to stick it to foreign corporations. No narrative I can think up makes sense to me.
There should be a separate thread, which I would not care to read, for the question "is stealing GM's property immoral?" and counting the ways we're are morally superior to thieves.
It would be interesting to hear from someone who knows something about the particulars of what they did and how they did it.
The details do not matter in knowing what to think of this. We know what the Venezuelan government is and the destructive consequences of its ethics as the cause. GM knew all about the "particulars" and it didn't help them because they ignored the principles -- which is why I raised the more interesting question of what were they counting on. Thinking in principles does not require and is not restricted to concrete bound details of the heist or counting the ways we are morally superior to thieves.
I do not know what they were thinking, but my guess is they wrongly thought the gov't would institute some reforms. It's like in the Star Trek episode Whom Gods Destroy when Kirk's mentally ill former colleague fiddles with a bomb and threatens to set it off. Kirk calmly says, "All I can say is if happens to me, it happens to you." In the show, the insane guy backs down and at the happy ending of the episode he begins responding to mental illness treatments. In real life, sometimes the insane guy goes through with the threat and sets off the bomb.
of the same policies. An economic collapse there or here will not teach people that the countries policies were wrong. Constructive policies follow from the correct philosophic
premises. Too few people understand and are committed to the correct principles and all the wrong principles are being taught the world over.
Objectivist principles are held by way too few people and they are being spread much too slowly.
Ayn Rand intended Atlas Shrugged to show her readers what happens when the mind is withdrawn from human society, and to explain the ideas that are required, not to advocate for a collapse as a means to educate.