Or for an example even closer to home, how about Alaska, where they pay out a dividend to residents every year from oil revenue? Jesus Christ, it’s socialism! In the land of Sarah Palin, to boot!

Exactly. It’s a pretty textbook extractive state–who controls the oil gets rich when the prices are up, and when they go down everyone is screwed. And it is useful to point out that while there are piles of failed resource-focused economies on both the socialist and capitalist sides of the ledger, the two biggest…

Venezuela was fucked under capitalism, too. I love how people tend to have selective, and terribly short, memories when it suits their ideological outlooks. Or perhaps they never had memories to begin with, but simply chose to be completely fucking ignorant about everything other than the narrow target of their…