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Venezuela orders soldiers armed with assault rifles to impose price controls

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Venezuela: price controls don't work
Assault weapons vs Amazon and Ebay: socialism in practice

From the left-leaning USA Today.

Excerpt:

 Thousands of Venezuelans lined up outside the country’s equivalent of Best Buy, a chain of electronics stores known as Daka, hoping for a bargain after the socialist government forced the company to charge customers “fair” prices.

President Nicolás Maduro ordered a military “occupation” of the company’s five stores as he continues the government’s crackdown on an “economic war” it says is being waged against the country, with the help of Washington.

Members of Venezuela’s National Guard, some of whom carried assault rifles, kept order at the stores as bargain hunters rushed to get inside.

[…]Images circulating online as well as reports by local media appeared to show one Daka store in the country’s central city of Valencia being looted.

“I have no love for this government,” said Gabriela Campo, 33, a businesswoman, hoping to take home a cut-price television and fridge. “They’re doing this for nothing but political reasons, in time for December’s elections.”

Maduro faces municipal elections on Dec. 8. His popularity has dropped significantly in recent months, with shortages of basic items such as chicken, milk and toilet paper as well as soaring inflation, at 54.3% over the past 12 months.

Economists are expecting a devaluation soon after the election, likely leading to even higher inflation.

This will surely encourage more businesses to come to Venezuela to create jobs, and compete with other businesses in order to lower prices and increase quality for consumers. Oh wait, no it won’t. It’s just going to causes businesses to scale back, expand in other countries, and go out of business entirely – taking jobs with them.

The real face of communism
The real face of communism

Earlier, Venezuela nationalized some oil drilling plants, as well:

Petroleos de Venezuela SA, the state oil company, seized about $1 million worth of equipment from Superior Energy Services Inc. (SPN:US), the Houston-based company said.

PDVSA expropriated two hydraulic units that were idled after the Caracas-based company missed payments, Greg Rosenstein, head of corporate development, said by phone from New Orleans. The units operated in eastern Venezuela’s Anzoategui state, Associated Press reported Nov. 1.

[…]Under President Hugo Chavez, who died of cancer in March, Venezuela initiated a nationalization process, seizing assets from companies including Exxon Mobil Corp. (XOM:US) and ConocoPhillips. (COP:US)

Schlumberger Ltd. (SLB:US), the world’s largest oil-services company, said in March it would reduce work in Venezuela because of mounting overdue payments from PDVSA. Schlumberger subsequently reached an agreement and announced on May 24 that it would provide a $1 billion rolling credit for a joint venture in Venezuela.

That will encourage oil companies to come to Venezuela and pay royalties to the government, and give jobs to more Venezuelans. Oh wait, no it won’t. It’s just going to cause companies to scale back their investments, expand in other countries, stop hiring, lay off more people, and pull out of Venezuela. I’m sorry but this is standard leftist economic policy.

Are Barack Obama and Hugo Chavez very different?
Are Barack Obama and Hugo Chavez very different?

Remember the last time that Venezuela seized privately-owned oil companies? They eventually had a nice explosion at the oil drilling facility, because the government doesn’t know how to run a business better than the people who created that business. You can see it today here, as Obama nationalizes the health care industry and tries to substitute his own web site. He thinks he knows how to create web sites. The man who has never run so much as a lemonade stand in his entire life, and is an authority on how to read a teleprompter and play golf. You do NOT put people like this is in charge of the economy.

Comparing Chile to Argentina and Venezuela
Comparing Chile to Argentina and Venezuela

The strange thing is that the economies of Chile embraced free market capitalism, free trade, private property, and the rule of law. Unlike Venezuela and Argentina, they are doing vastly better economically. Look at that chart, which I got from libertarian economist Dan Mitchell. You can’t refute that, because economics is real. No one can hide from the facts.

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Healthcare.gov enrollments fall far short of Democrat Party estimates

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Can a bunch of pot-smoking socialists do math? The Wall Street Journal says no.

Excerpt:

Fewer than 50,000 people had successfully navigated the troubled federal health-care website and enrolled in private insurance plans as of last week, two people familiar with the matter said, citing internal government data.

The figure is a fraction of the Obama administration’s target of 500,000 enrollees for October. The early tally for the HealthCare.gov site, which launched Oct. 1, worries health insurers that are counting on higher enrollment to make their plans profitable.

The administration had estimated that nearly 500,000 people would enroll in October, according to internal memos cited last week by Rep. Dave Camp (R., Mich.). An estimated seven million people nationwide were expected to gain private coverage by the end of March, when the open-enrollment period is set to end.

[…]So far, private health plans have received enrollment data for 40,000 to 50,000 users of the federal marketplace, the people familiar with the figures said.

HHS spokeswoman Erin Shields Britt said Monday she couldn’t confirm the enrollment numbers.

Meanwhile, Breitbart is reporting that new web site is up that provides about 90% of the Healthcare.gov functionality:

Even as President Obama has issued a constant refrain of how upset he is that his Obamacare website doesn’t work and promises that he’s on top of the fix, three 20-year-old website designers in San Francisco made a working Obamacare website using Healthcare.gov’s own code. They did it in only three days.

The three web developers who created the site, HealthSherpa.com, programmed it to do much of what Healthcare.gov, the Obamacare website, is supposed to do.

The enterprising young men whipped up their version of Obamacare in just days working in their off time.

Unlike the Obamacare website, Ning Liang, George Kalogeropoulous and Michael Wasser’s new site shows Americans the info they really want to see. Signing onto their site will show visitors healthcare plans and pricing that is available. All you do is enter your zipcode, and there it is.

The three are continuing to tweak their site to give visitors even more information, too. Just after their site went live, they added a section that will help visitors find out if they qualify for a tax subsidy.

[…]The only thing the site doesn’t do is connect visitors directly to the insurance companies so that visitors can actually buy a policy.

 

Taxpayers spent $500 million dollars on the Healthcare.gov web site. Maybe we should have just let the private sector handle health care, instead of letting government take it over and kicking thousands of people out of their health care plans, with many millions more to come in 2014. I guess I don’t see the point of politicians, who have no demonstrated capabilities in IT project management, software design or programming, take over a private sector health system that is the envy of the world.

Commentary

Can naturalistic theories account for the minimal facts about Jesus’ resurrection?

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Here’s a neat post from Ichtus77 on her blog of the same name. She lists 12 facts that are admitted by the majority of New Testament scholars across the broad spectrum of worldviews, including atheistic scholars.

Excerpt:

I am studying “the twelve facts” and want to get down what I’ve got so far. After the facts are displayed, we’re going to turn the whole thing into a logic puzzle.

Here are the 12 Facts:

  1. Jesus died by Roman crucifixion.
  2. He was buried, most likely in a private tomb.
  3. Soon afterwards the disciples were discouraged, bereaved and despondent, having lost hope.
  4. Jesus’ tomb was found empty very soon after his interment.
  5. The disciples had experiences that they believed were the actual appearances of the risen Christ.
  6. Due to these experiences, the disciples lives were thoroughly transformed. They were even willing to die for their belief.
  7. The proclamation of the Resurrection took place very early, from the beginning of church history.
  8. The disciple’s public testimony and preaching of the Resurrection took place in the city of Jerusalem, where Jesus had been crucified and buried shortly before.
  9. The gospel message centered on the preaching of the death and resurrection of Jesus.
  10. Sunday was the primary day of worshiping and gathering.
  11. James, the brother of Jesus and a skeptic before this time, became a follower of Jesus when he believed he also saw the risen Jesus.
  12. Just a few years later, Paul became a believer, due to an experience that he also believed was an appearance of the risen Jesus.

These are the facts that you see admitted in debates by atheistic historians, like in the debate between James Crossley and William Lane Craig. These facts are admitted even by most atheist historians because they pass standard historical criteria, like early dating, embarrassing to the author, appears in multiple sources, and so on. Secular historians don’t accept everything that the Bible says as historical, but they will give you a minimum list of facts that pass their historical tests.

The resurrection puzzle is like a Sherlock Holmes mystery. People deduce what happened from the evidence that is considered to be unimpeachable. The “minimal facts” that EVERYONE accepts. You can even see secular historians assenting to these facts in academic debates like the one I linked above.

So the approach is like this:

1) Use historical tests to get a small number of undeniable historical facts
2) Try to explain the undeniable historical facts with a hypothesis that accounts for all of them

Like Sherlock Holmes says: “…when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

It’s the Sherlock Holmes method of doing history.

So, Ichtus77 lists the minimal facts, and in the rest of the post she surveys the following naturalistic hypotheses to see how well they can account for the minimal facts listed above.

Here are the naturalistic theories:

  • The Unknown Tomb theory
  • The Wrong Tomb theory
  • The Twin theory
  • The Hallucination theory
  • The Existential Resurrection and the Spiritual Resurrection theories
  • The Disciples Stole Body theory
  • The Authorities Hid Body theory
  • The Swoon theory
  • The Passover Plot theory

The main way that scholars argue for the resurrection is to list the minimal facts, and defend them on historical grounds, then show that there is no naturalistic hypothesis that explains them all. The naturalistic theories are impossible. Once you have eliminated them because they don’t account for the minimal facts, you are left with the resurrection hypothesis. Elementary, Watson, elementary.