And interesting that when she said "the rest of us", she did not include the factory builders who had also paid for the roads, etc.

When I started going to business school in 1970 (the school took bankruptcy after a few months), I started my carhop's job at night at approximately the same time. The school was run by a married couple. I heard the female
teacher bragging , "I never tip." She said management should pay the waitresses "a decent wage'. Now she did not say the government should do anything about it, but I think this is the idea held by a lot of people. They want mandatory minimum wage, and taxation for a welfare state, but actually tip anybody with their own money?! Ha ha! (By the way, I think tips should be earned, by taking out the food extra fast, offering to hand things to the customer, etc., not just given automatically).Still, there is a lot of this attitude on the part of altruists, for instance, the customers who hand out religious tracts as substitutes for tips.

The adoption of Socialism is cultural regression of the worst kind - government imposition on lower and lower living standards and all associated features of a society.
Creates more and more looters until everybody is one with no one left to produce any worthwhile product or and produt at all.

This reads a bit like the cultural regression in, “Altas Shrugged.”

The disintegration began when Chavez decided he didn't like the idea of sharing oil profits with the American companies that provided the expertise to produce the oil. He nationalized the oil industry and threw the American experts out.

Like most socialist giveaways, his decision worked, for a little while. The extra cash made it possible to dump lots of money into welfare projects. In fact he was so pleased with the result of his decision, he set about nationalizing all the industries that were partnered with Americans, to pull even more cash into the government, and it worked, for a while.

The problem nationalization created was that there were no indigenous experts to keep all these industries running. In short order, drilling rigs and pumps started breaking down, with no one to repair them. Oil production slowed, and profits shrank. Even native experts with operating knowledge were shoved aside, in favor of Chavez cronies, only making the situation worse.

Jobs started disappearing, requiring Chavez to increase welfare expenditures. Then he became ill with cancer, and made one of his worst decisions by selecting Maduro to take over until he recovered. Maduro's only working experience had been as a bus driver, until he caught Chavez's eye, and was brought into the team.

Chavez dying was the final blow for Venezuela, as the trust and agreements he had secured that enabled him to continue down the path of "Bolivarian" socialism was gone. Everyone knew Maduro was an incompetent. Chavez had tolerated some opposition, but Maduro knew nothing about how to play political games, and became heavy-handed, turning Venezuela into a police state. Maduro began frantically trying to gain control of all commercial activity, ignorant of the fact that centralized market control always fails. That sent the economy into an accelerated fall, so Maduro next tried to change the value of the nation's currency, making it essentially worthless.

This is the story for socialism. A lack of understanding of what makes a market work inevitably leads to disaster. The European countries that Sanders points to as "democratic" socialism are not socialist at all. They're capitalist welfare states.

Sounds like something Lenin could’ve easily said about his collective of factory and farm workers.

you can vote yourself into socialism...but you always have to shoot your way out of it....

It wasn't just one poorly-phrased statement. It was a rallying cry, liberals all over used it. Elizabeth Warren prominently made it:

"“You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did."

It was not a mistake, it was a deliberately framed attack on capitalism. It's the underlying argument why they own the fruits of your labor.

I like how he tricks you into having a little bit of socialist impulse with the narrative of the bonus checks. When I was in my 20s, if that had happened to me, I would have continued feeling the envy. I felt a bit of it as many of my colleagues made a million dollars on options by luck of working for small cap companies in frothy industries. But if it had happened where everyone in my office got more bonus than I did, I would definitely have been annoyed. I still feel that impulse, but I would not be annoyed now. I've been on the other side writing those checks. They're not magical. Sometimes the boss is wrong or his own reasons for doing what he does. I now have the equanimity to be happy with the deal I have or happy to go look for another deal but never doing a deal or working a job grudgingly. I like the story, though, because if I listen to it and imagine in happening, it would stoke a little of that socialist envy on a visceral level.

I think the video should have ended there before he went off and used SJW without irony.

It's a tribute to how amazing President Obama was that his critics still dig up this one poorly-phrased statement all these years later.

Me dino liked the start of the video with what looked like the business end of a flaring flamethrower followed by the constant backdrop of what made me think of a once thriving for business Venezuelan sea port on fire in the dark of night.
That very well symbolizes the end game of socialism to me.

We don't need a study. When children have to sell scrap iron for 17 cents to feed their family and women have to whore themselves to feed their babies, that does it for me.

Someone should do a full case study on the disintegration of the Venezualian econy under socialist rule. I don't have the total information I would need but I'm sure someone out there does. It would be very interesting to compare it with the other socialist failures over taime and across space.

The collectivist mindset can famously be summed up with what Obama said in 2012,

“If you got a business, you didn’t build that.”

Of course Obama wasn’t talking about your business was he? He was talking about roads and bridges, right? “That” roads and bridges.