Why did Soviet Russia have breadlines?

OP is a fag

yeah but venezuela's economy heavily depends on oil. They subsidized food with money from oil

Except venezuela got hurt very hard. Let me explain why.

Instead of using oil money to invest in domestic production, the Venezuelan government used it to subsidise products bought from foreign markets. They did not nationalise all the domestic industry or agriculture at all, and the imports subsidised to be cheap as fuck wrecked the industry. Oil money is/was the majority of venezuelas government income, it is practically sitting on oil. When the oil price fell their wealth also fell drastically. Combine this with their idiotic "static exchange rate" which they are unwilling to make free-floating due to it hurting the savings of venezuelans (although it hurts more in the long run now) and the fact that due to this fixed rate, people sell Venezuelan goods in neighbouring countries for dollars to exchange on the black market and make massive profit, you have a recipe for disaster.

Also pic related. Capitalism does have breadlines and starvation. Many African countries with a net export of food face starving populations because the west pays more for the food they grow, and other parts of africa and the third world get so much free food aid that their own production can't survive commercially, similar to venezuelas situation.

Because there is nowhere to queue for bread in capitalism.

Yeah, the image is a meme

Asking questions isn't cherrypicking

Seems like most countries with market economies don't have many shortages

So shortages are a feature of market capitalism? I have never experienced any shortages.

Oil ought to be a bonus. Maybe the politicians promised too much

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Ignore second quote

From what I gather they called themselves socialist and tried subsidizing everything with oil money, rather than building a socialist economy. Surprisingly, taking the whole world by shock, when the price of oil tumbled this affected them greatly.

Pretty much every country in the world that has food shortages is capitalist you fool

capitalism over produces goods and then distributes them unequally, almost all shortages and famines in modern history are artificial and the result of for-profit capitalist policy decisions.
There is massive food insecurity in the poorest, most capitalist nations in the world right now. Not experiencing it personally doesn't make it not real.

Asking loaded questions that assumes falsely that Venezuela was fine before Chavez is cherry picking.

Porky bootlickers like you never hold capitalism to the same scrutiny as socialism

When you give away something for free people will form lines for it regardless of what this is. I've seen this happen in America when Wiener Schnitzel would give out free hot dogs for a day or when Baskin Robbins did this with a scoop of ice cream. People will take and wait for free shit if it's available.

The ironic thing is the same people who criticize free food in the soviet union and other "socialist" countries and "waiting times" for health care in other western industrialized nations often don't cite the fact that Americans have neither option and will just die of sickness and starvation in lieu of those options.

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It means they can't be very widespread. I don't see them or hear about them.

So there aren't shortages in developed market economies, just another continent on the opposite side of the world I have to believe your theories about?
Also surely you people don't believe in 'most capitalist'.

I'm allowed to ask about shortages without going on about how nobody is perfect and Venezuela was always bad for a long time

You can both have people not starve AND not wait in bread lines though

porky logic smh

Bread wasn't free in the Soviet Union
There might be systems where goods are free, but I assume 'wages' would be lower as well

youtube.com/watch?v=zJBjjP8WSbc

Sorry for the idiots. Most people assume you're just coming in to be obnoxious, but you have a pretty legitimate question. Have you taken a basic Econ 101 class yet? If not, are you at least familiar with the supply and demand curves?

Yes

In the UK foodbanks are very widespread, covered up, and hidden from view. The liberal media generally only wheel them out for good boy points.

Yourself included.

That's because you live in a developed Western nation, something the countries you mention in the OP are not.

It's not a shortage. A shortage is when demand exceeds supply and people can't buy food even though they have enough money.

I'm aware of foodbanks. I used to volunteer at a place they would store the food that was going to a foodbank.

But it's outside the topic of this thread

Yeah, if only they had some money, which is in abundance but outside of their pockets, the stupid idiots.
It really isn't, your argument has just fallen apart.

So are shortages more widespread in less developed capitalist countries?
Would there have been more breadlines in, for example, Great Britain in the 19th century?

I'm talking about even if you could give them money they wouldn't be able to buy things or they would have to wait a long time to buy things.
Hopefully now you understand what people are talking about

It depends - yes there are less developed Capitalist countries that don't import as many goods and don't have as developed domestic production so there are shortages of certain goods. Capital controls the world. There are ==artificial== shortages in less developed Capitalist countries nearly all the time.

Absolutely. Look into the Poor Laws.

* artifical

Wouldn't that just mean they have higher prices than they would otherwise?

What do you mean by this?
Monopolies creating artificial scarcities?

Oh, alright, this'll be pretty simple, then.

In the standard econ 101 model, a shortage is really as simple as the supply curve of a market shifting to the left while the demand curve stays where it is. That increases the equilibrium price, and you have your answer right there: in a free market economy, a shortage is dealt with by increasing the price until fewer people can afford it, and those who can afford it can't afford to buy as much.

Shortages of individual goods happen just as frequently in free market economies as they do elsewhere. Just last year there was an egg shortage in the US, but, the price mechanism hid the reality of the shortage; you'd only know about it if you kept your ear glued to the news.

gives a decent analysis of the Venezuelan shortages specifically. Because poor people were having trouble making ends meet, the Venezuelan government set a price ceiling on a lot of basic goods. When oil prices dropped and the Venezuelan economy ground to a halt, there was (predictably) a shortage of many basic goods. In a free market economy, prices would have skyrocketed to compensate, and there would have been a similar result; but the price ceilings that the Venezuelan government set made the reality of the shortage readily apparent. If the complications that described never happened, then things would essentially have gone down the same, except the shortage would have effected the poor much more than the rich.

Does that answer your question well?

By the way, shoutouts to Marxposter. Assuming you're the same one that's been around forever, it's nice to see that your posts are still 👌 quality.

The real world doesn't function like a neoclassical supply/demand graph, especially if the good in question is a necessary good.

Less developed country = smaller value of labour power which means employees are paid less. Being paid sustenance wages you sometimes can not afford to buy goods deemed social necessities.

No, he's been gone for months. It's sad I know.

Then you aren't real because they happen literally all the time.

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I am pretty sure this situation was explained earlier, though, but okay.

Price controls are easier to explain.
I suppose in Russia they had just set a ration level and then the ration level they had promised was too high for what could be produced?
That would fit with your model

I don't see why necessary goods would be any different.
It's obvious to me the price would just rise until supply and demand are the same
If the price is $5 and you sell out every day with a big line outside next day you try to sell it at $6.
You end up with high prices, not people going to shops and hoping to be the first person there, or people queuing waiting for something to arrive or be produced
Low wages don't answer it either

It could just be time lags and instability though, where the market doesn't equilibrium

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Southeastern_United_States_gasoline_shortage

Kek. I should also clarify. The detrimental effect from shortages is that people are not able to have things they need. Sure in the Soviet Union, this was quite prevalent. However, when we examine the Capitalist mode of production, we discover that there is not only production shortages which bring on this undesirable effect, but measly wages. This is what I mean by artificial - the effect is the same.

Are you familiar with sticky prices?

Anyway, when I said "artificial" I meant the actual effect (there is a shortage of goods available for the people), not the economic jargon.

You should really look into the basics of Keynesian theories on prices. Prices can often be infinitely inelastic.

We have waiting times in burgerland too though. Doctors rarely see patients the day they call in, and if you're getting something weird it can be weeks. And it's even worse with shitty health insurance, which dominates the market.

I know about sticky prices but I understood they were in the short term.
Like in that gasoline shortage, for example. If it had remained scarce for longer there wouldn't have been a shortage, just high prices.

Waiting times are shorter in the US, sometimes a great deal shorter. As far as I can tell it's a fact

Also if you analysed the Soviet system I'm sure you would find low wags there, as well, so it's not as if capitalism comes off worse

We're talking about shortages in general. I hope you realize that rationing wasn't brought back into the Soviet Union after 1935 until Perestrokia when Gorbachev tried to bring back Capitalism, leading to major economic destabilization and the dissolution of the union.

"Low wages" in the Soviet Union played a starkly different role than they would in a Capitalist country. If Soviet Union wages were "low", they would've been low because the productivity of the Soviet Union was lower and thus the value of labour power. I don't see what the point you're trying to make here is.

Or because the state was spending all of their money- after all, it has taken over all investment. And it also has no real incentive to pay them very much compared to spending money in a corrupt fashion.
Even if they were noble minded the worker now has a bill for investment coming out of his wages.

It's not only low productivity you can put it down to

Waiting times are shorter but also less people are using the services in the first place. If you
I think you're underestimating the sheer necessity of gasoline for life in america.

No, sure there were abuses in state spending. That's besides the point though, which is that the low wages were not preventing individuals from purchasing goods due to price ceilings in the Soviet Union. I thought we were talking about the rationing we saw in the Union, which low wages had no part in. Production was not geared towards producing for exchange as much in the Soviet Union as in say, Britain. Anyway, I don't have the information with me at the moment but there's a user on this board who has several graphs comparing Soviet Union wages with the rest of the world, and real wages weren't that much lower.

those are niggers, they don't count. I hope they have died of hunger

It's pretty common business practice to under produce an anticipated product to increase demand, for example when the Wii first came out Nintendo made so few of them they'd sell for double their value on ebay because it was so hard to find in stock at a store. This generated a lot of buzz because to a consumer a product that was selling out so fast must be great.

The Soviet Union had breadlines because state capitalism is even worse than regular capitalism. Venezuela has shortages because capitalist economies always respond to price controls with shortages.

Command economies have lots of problems. That's why I'm a market socialist.

Oh hey I just found a very recent example:
web.archive.org/web/20170118203514/http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2017/01/18/you-could-get-money-back-if-you-bought-milk/96710340/

YOU FUCKING SASANACH

Nintendo is still doing it to this point.
The NX, that NES thing, and even the 3DS this christmas sold everywhere.

You seem confused. On the one hand you seem to be saying the potato famine was a shortage, and on the other that it wasn't a shortage just the market not assigning resources correctly because the price of certain other types of food was too high

It wasn't a shortage of potatoes, anyway, because the reduction in supply raised the price so that supply and demand were equalised.

It wasn't a shortage of food because they could have solved it by giving the Irish more money, so that they could afford to buy, for example, grain that was being exported

Not this autist again.

Well, exactly.
The whole point of the potato-famine was potatoes were grown in home-gardens, being the property of the peasants themselves.
So when the famine hit, grain exports from Ireland were still massive and food production was still huge and thus the famine was completely preventable.
The only reason people died was that the free food was gone.

He's completely autistic about the word shortage, and will do all kinds of mental backflips to turn a famine into a whoopsy. It's kind of his thing.

Well, okay, let me just add that

UNDER CAPITALISM, THERE IS NO INCENTIVE FOR THE LAND-OWNERS TO GIVE THE PEASANTS MONEY TO BUY THEIR OWN GRAIN RATHER THAN JUST LET THEM STARVE AND REAP IN THE PROFITS ANYWAYS

That's all

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The porkocaust can't come soon enough.

2012 isn't "now", retard. Stop using outdated shit.