To be fair, going by the track record, if Venezuela was an oil rich government under a U.S. supported authoritarian, Caracas would look more like Riyadh and there’d be no need for cruisers.
Not saying it justifies Trump’s action in the slightest. Just a point of order.
In line with your comment, I wish people that believed in the military industrial complex theory would look at the defense market cap more often and realize that, even in their own reality, their theory doesn’t make sense.
If money controlled politics to that degree, Trump already wouldn’t be in office right now because every large corporation would be fuming at his stock market nonsense with tariffs. Apple alone has a larger market cap than every public US defense contractor combined and wars tend to not do good things for the rest of the market.
Putting aside his made-up backstory, which is admittedly ad hominem, I've listened to his arguments, notably his video on debt and mortgages. It falls into the same trap as a lot of broadly populist economics - demonization of morally neutral economic concepts and focusing only on one side of the equation. This[1] entire video is him focusing on the bank side of a mortgage transaction, while never once considering the value given to the mortgage owner in being able to purchase an asset they never would be able to otherwise and gaining equity. Investment isn't just a hole rich people dump money into that prints stuff out for them and no one else.
Call it biased, but I'm also a priori skeptical of any public intellectual that points to their one pet theory as the cause of society's ills.
This is how I've felt about politics as of late. It's Logan Paul-KSI tier nonsense, but made worse by the fact that I can ignore Logan Paul and influencers. I can't ignore it when my government is run by an influencer.
Because the failures of the USSR occurred entirely within the USSR's borders, under its jurisdiction, and were entirely within its power to resolve. Meanwhile, the 9 million deaths of starvation you cite are across multiple countries with multiple overlapping legal regimes and are multi-causal, from corruption to war and failed states like Haiti and Syria.
There is risk to capital. The government does not bail out every business that fails. That's ludicrous. Investors like VCs can and do lose their investments all the time with no government intervention whatsoever. An owner is also risking in terms of opportunity cost - time lost to starting a business and failing is inherently riskier than working with similar talents and investing in safer assets like index funds for the potential upside of higher returns if the business succeeds.
Bootstrapped companies also come with risks to the founder's own capital and credit risk if loans are taken and the business fails to generate revenue to service them.
Not saying it justifies Trump’s action in the slightest. Just a point of order.