FreeTalkLive rocks! said:
starcraft said:
Sorry to tell you mate, but Chavez has NOTHING to do with the oil price going up. Thatis based entirely on mideast strife and high demand in the Chinese and American markets. Chavez has no control over oil-price. As for the nationalising of private companies, Chavez has made Venezuela a capitalist's nightmare (intentionally), however this will be devastating for the nation long-term if he isn't removed soon. There are many surviving socialist/communist political nations, but there is not a single prosperous nation on the planet that has a socialist ECONOMY!!! For those of you that will jump at that, China has a capitalist economy and a communist political environment, and Cuba is not exactly prosperous. |
I like your post but I don't completely agree. Oil prices have gone up because of Chavez. He has nationalized his country's oil. This means it will take much longer for some of the oil in the area to be processed because he scared away the private companies that had or would soon have the tech to process the oil. About China, it doesn't have a capitalist economy. It has a mixed market economy but with even less freedom than the mixed market in the US. I agree that the actually economy in China is not run according to socialism or communism, though. |
Venezuela supplies 11% of the USA's oil and very little to anyone else. The only influence Chavez has on oil-prices is his vote within the OPEC group. Whilst he certainly hasn't voted to expand production (lowering prices), he's not done anything to push prices up either. The nationalisation of part of one small countries oil industry is not enough to push up world oil prices (not yet anyway).
About China, a market economy is a capitalist economy. It's getting to the point that one has more market freedom in China than in Russia. For my part, I believe that the first major stepping stone towards capitalism for China's economy was allowing foreign companies to invest in the domestic market without a domestic partner. The second will be the floating of the Chinese currency.
