Hey Paul—

I'm not aiming to insult you. I'm observing that you've created a filtering story through which you read the world such that socialism must always be bad and any evidence to the contrary is thrown out or minimized. You went on to do that exact thing here with Venezuela and Norway, where the entire thrust of your comparison and every single detail are 180 degrees backwards.

I never claimed that Norway was not a mixed economy, but you seem to claim that Venezuela is and was not a mixed economy just prior to its economic spiral. I hate to break it to you, but it absolutely is and was and mixed economy. You seem to have caught that they are both abnormally oil-rich countries and that one of them failed when oil prices crashed and the other did not. But why was that? You simply claim that it was because Venezuela did too much socialism and Norway did less socialism, but the problem is that you're not relying on any part of reality for that story. You're filling in the gaps with your predetermined conclusion. When you compare the two countries in the real world, the story is nothing like the one you tell.

Both countries had big nationalized oil reserves and oil companies, and both have made a large amount of income from those industries. So far, we're equally socialist. Venezuela decided to spend that income directly. Norway instead used it to build more state-owned wealth—that is, they used it to collectively own more of the means of production. Seems like on this count Norway is more socialist than Venezuela. That wealth fund I was talking about before produces dividends that are then used to fund spending aside from taxes etc. It was exactly this, the fact that Norway did the more socialist thing, that insulated them from the dive in oil prices. Venezuela, since it was relying on that oil revenue to finance immediate spending, panicked and just started printing money, causing an inflationary spiral.

I completely agree that Venezuela should have followed Norway's lead by buying up a more diverse set of capital to keep itself stable. Unfortunately for your narrative, though, that means I'm saying it should have been more socialist and put more wealth into government ownership. I think Venezuela made the wrong call, but it was also a more difficult one, so I ultimately get why the wrong call was made: Venezuela had a higher degree of poverty to start with and wanted to get the ball rolling on alleviating that problem but didn't have the kind of tax base Norway could rely on to finance that spending in the short term.

As for your claim about public ownership of stocks in the US, I agree that they're collectively owned: the problem is just that that collective ownership is very unequal! The goal would be to make that ownership equal by owning and controlling it all together, with the profits from capital flowing to everyone rather than to the tiny group of people who can stack up a huge pile of wealth for themselves.

I hope this helps explain what I was getting at: I don't think you have a bad mind, I think it's just a common feature of American politics to have a predetermined conclusion ("socialism is always bad") that then forces you to read reality in a certain way. What I hope you can abandon is the assumption that people become socialist because they're too young and ignorant about reality.