What do you think about Venezuela capping profits?
Asked by
JLeslie (
65743
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November 20th, 2013
Here is an article. The government is clamping down on business, putting in ceilings for profits. If you have more info please provide it for us, and I am interested in opinions from the collective.
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25 Answers
If our government protected consumers like that, I would be able to actually fill a prescrition that costs over $350 a month. I can’t fill the prescription even though my doctor knows it will help me enormously – why? Because it costs $10 or less to produce, but the pharmaceutical company wants a huge profit. If I lived in Italy it would cost be $2
Yes I would love it if our government protected us from corporate thieves. But they don’t. In fact, I can’t even buy the medicine from another country for less than it costs here.
It’s very easy for companies to move money around instead of listing money as profit, they will expense it somewhere.
I am very interested in the situation. If a sucess FOR THE PEOPLE hopefully the US will buy aa clue.
I will be thrilled to see the results.
It’s positively reprehensible.
The fucking STATE literally dictating how far a company can go.
Philanthropist Andrew Carnegie is turning in his grave.
Who the FUCK are they to tell me how much I can have to give to my children or to the needy??
@KNOWITALL
Um, businesses are composed of people.
Apple has multiple bilions, it’s part of how they were able to exchange phones and cables for me without batting an eye.
@ragingloli
I wouldn’t expect any different answer from you.
@MadMadMax
You think it’s just chemicals, don’t you?
No costly research and development, no trials, no risking capital while waiting for the FDA to get off it’s ass…
@SecondHandStoke
What, waiting for the results before you start condemning it? Last time I checked, that is a good thing.
“No costly research and development, no trials, no risking capital while waiting for the FDA to get off it’s ass…”
All of that is part of the costs, you know, the c-word that you subtract from the r-word to calculate the p-word.
@SecondHandStoke With great income disparity. By the way, this isn’t about you, it’s about the entire middle and lower classes. I’m Republican, I understand capitalism and profit and stock, but corporate greed shouldn’t be more important than hungry and homeless children. If you don’t get that, I feel sorry for you, whether you’re in a ranch or a mansion.
@ragingloli
It’s a bad idea in principle as well, observation of results is not required.
Venezuela is a tyrannical dictatorship. It’s subjects are oppressed but are to busy looking at all their free shit to realize it.
This is why I never fill my tank at CITGO.
I’m shocked this question had to be asked.
”It’s a bad idea in principle as well”
As is employing chinese slave labour, and paying them so little that many of them are driven to suicide. You know, the thing that your Lord and God Apple does.
Apple (as is any company that manufactures in china&co.) is a slave driver machine that exploits millions, but its customers are too blind to see it over all the inferior tech toys they gobble up.
“Slave labor.”
I’m sure the jobless of the world find that offensive to the core.
Apple inferior?
Yeah, ergonomics, design and build quality are in the toilet.
What on Earth made you all think the entire world was going to develop at exactly the same rate?
The United States is still experiencing growing pains, but other nations wouldn’t?
China&co.? The relentless machine that cranks out the world’s majority of harmful counterfeit products?
”I’m sure the jobless of the world find that offensive to the core.”
You are sure of many things, no doubt.
@SecondHandStoke
I do not know how many, if any, unemployed people you have talked to, but the ones I have talked to all say that they are NOT willing to debase themselves and work for almost nothing just of the sake of working.
@glacial That means a lot to me, thank you.
@ragingloli
Yeah,
Why debase one’s self if they can live off the rest of the EU?
Yeah, let us just expect them to grovel before the feet of the fatcats and let themselves be treated like cattle.
That is what I call reprehensible.
@SecondHandStoke
“Venezuela is a tyrannical dictatorship. It’s subjects are oppressed but are to busy looking at all their free shit to realize it.”
Venezuela has the most advanced, well audited and transparent voting system in the world. One may not agree with the policy decisions of their incumbent government and president, but they have a mandate to do so that is far stronger than anything in the US or most of the rest of the world.
“The fucking STATE literally dictating how far a company can go.”
Ownership of private property, and any business upon which that ownership is based, is a privilege bestowed by the state and maintained through state power. The historical basis of private property was state coercion, and the transition to capitalism from feudalism required some of the largest transfer of land and wealth to the rich and propertied in human history—and all the misery and death that entailed—with people being beaten and murdered to move them off common lands and self-subsistence to become dependent on a wage working for rich industrialists in urban squalor.
So, when it comes to regulating private property—including profit caps and regulating prices— the state is well within its rights to dictate however it pleases, because that ownership is a privilege granted by the state in the first place, and one that the rest of society tacitly (and probably quite ignorantly) consents to.
I can understand why capitalists would bitch and whine about this, and frame this as some sort of abuse of power, but that’s because they’re protecting their interests, and in this case, it is helpful to completely ignore the historical narrative, and simply assume that their ownership of the means to wealth is an inherent right rather than a historical state coerced privilege established through death and oppression.
@Kropotkin Hear Hear, a privelage that can be given and taken away if abused, and there’s not a lot of us even on the right that would swear that it’s not been abused.
@Kropotkin
“Venezuela has the most advanced, well audited and transparent voting system in the world.”
All fine and good when the entire population doesn’t realize they are being bribed.
and he writes that without the slightest sense of irony
@SecondHandStoke I don’t know what you mean by “bribe” in the context you are using it in. I’m not sure what you mean by Venezuelan people being oppressed.
Is the oppression manifested through the communal councils? A huge experiment in participatory democracy, which has seen local people all over the country given the power to make decisions on issues directly affecting them and fund local projects to improve their housing and infrastructure?
Is the bribery in the form of spending based on the sale of Venezuela’s own natural resources, such as their oil, which is treated as a common wealth for all and not the privilege and monopoly of the few? Is that the bribe?
If Venezuela shows anything, it is how defying the Washington Consensus will lead to all sorts of accusations, negative propaganda and slurs against it, and subject the country to greater scrutiny and standards than almost anywhere else in the world.
Meanwhile.. countries completely on-board with the neoliberal economic model can be as corrupt, undemocratic. oppressive, and genuinely bribe their citizens as much as they please—as long as they implement the policies and regulations (usually lack of) to maximise the profits of multinational corporations. And any criticisms are mere footnotes, largely glossed over, sometimes accompanied with the vain argument that economic “liberalization” will lead to democratic reforms—eventually! Or, that political authoritarianism is just a necessarily evil in implementing the sort of capitalist liberalisation needed to “develop” their country—heaven forbid that it’s for anything socialist!
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