“I’m a bachaquero and I want to change”. Easier said than done.
There’s no doubt about it: The central government has a huge “bachaquero” problem, that is, thousands of people buying regulated goods and reselling them at black market prices to make ends meet. Instead of attacking the roots of this problem, that is, the spectacular price distortions that make waiting in line one of the most lucrative jobs this side of drug-dealing, Nicolas Maduro thinks that an upcoming “wipe-bachaqueo-out” plan (similar to his current crackdown-on-crime plan) will do the trick.
However, a couple of Chavista mayors have a different idea for curbing bachaqueo: Public shaming. How does this work? Well, let me tell you…
Juan Carlos Sánchez, mayor of La Victoria (Aragua State) started applying his “Cero Bachaqueo” policy earlier this month, which includes “moral sanctions” against those detained by the local police: Dressing perpetrators in orange jumpsuits (similar to those used in prisons) branded with with the phrase “I’m a bachaquero and I want to change” (Soy bachaquero y quiero cambiar) across the back. As punishment, they are made to clean up the streets of the town.
Sánchez´s plan got the attention of human rights NGO Provea, which pointed out that that local mayors have no legal power to impose such punitive actions, since, in fact, only the Judiciary does. In a series of tweets, Provea asked People’s Ombudsman Tarek William Saab to intervene in the case. Surprisingly, William Saab agreed with Provea’s stance and prompted mayors to stop what he considers a “humiliation”. It remains to be seen whether this announcement results in concrete actions.
Especially because another mayor has already followed Sánchez´s steps: Puerto Cabello’s (Carabobo State) Rafael Lacava joined the bandwagon (with his own version of the orange jumpsuit included) and says that the plan has already produced good results. Lacava even shared details on his Twitter account of their biggest sting so far, the detention of a woman who sold diapers through social networks (a lady Lacava refers to as the “bachaquera 2.0.”). As for Lacava´s opinion of William Saab’s cease-and-desist request? He doesn’t like it. Check out the tweets below. No translation is needed.
Even if such moves are public relations panaceas that avoid the core of the problem, the standoff between Chavista mayors and the central government does pose an interesting thought experiment about decentralization. It is rare to see public officials on the same side of the political divide at odds with each other, and challenging one of the very institutions that Chavismo has worked so hard to destroy: separation of powers between levels of government.
Bachaquero-shaming will not eradicate the black market of consumer goods, nor will it deal with long supermarket queues that have become our daily slice of life. But it has certainly proven an effective headline grabber for those who promote it. And in this electoral year free-for-all, it wouldn’t surprise me if more mayors got behind sensationalist measures like this one. Because, yes, all publicity is good publicity, but its even better when it serves to distract Venezuelans from questioning the true roots of the problem. And they’re already proving me right.
Dehumanizing “bachaqueros” is not exactly the best way to deal with them… verdad, Diosdado?
Caracas Chronicles 
Venezuelan law ( and I forget the specific legal source of the rule but I know it exists) explicitly prohibits punishments which are ‘infamantes’ , i.e. which have the deliberate intent or effect of visibly exposing the person being punished to public contempt or ridicule , this article has its origins in the enlightnement rejection of old cruel european punishments such as branding people in the skin or having a woman publicly shorn of her hair.or putting people in stocks where they could be ridiculed and insulted by passers by . Having people wear orange uniforms imprinted with some insulting legend is infamante , therefore forbidden by Venezuelan law , there is no difference between that and the long cone hats that in medieval times jews had to wear or which during the time of the chinese cultural revolution alleged counter revolutionaries were made to wear. Its another sign of the barbarity of our current regime , also of its flagrant comptempt for the Rule of Law.
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Perhaps they should try this approach. This store celebrated their “10,000th” shoplifter in a pretty funny fashion.
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That, and the fact that there was no trial before deciding they are guilty.
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I must live here in the Dark Ages in Georgia, EE.UU. because our State and local laws allow incarcerated non-violent and well-guarded violent offenders to wear prison attire and clean the State road and highway shoulders. The prisoners wear a reflective vest that has “Dept of Corrections ” emblazoned. The roads/highways in the Southern states are spotless. The irony is that prisoners have to win a spot on these crews with good behavior etc. Southerners just love Infamantes. I feel so ashamed that VZ is taking the higher moral ground on this issue. Not.
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Ah Bachaqueros!
My favorite topic.
The day people understand that Bachaqueros are not the bad guy, but the heroes that perform an important service even as they are harased by the government and hated by the people,is the day people will know that controlled prices are the problem not the solution.
When a government decrees a low price they are also decreeing the eventual scarcity of that product.
Low prices seem so nice because you may think you are paying less but what you do not pay with money you pay with time. Wasted time.
Bachaqueros only flip the equation back to just money, no wasted time. A valuable service for those willing to pay.
Time has different value for different people. The unmeployed has no problem spending hours in a queue. But others just cannot afford to do so. For them Bachaqueros provide an essential service. And remember those people also have a right to buy their food.
Some people think Bachaqueros drive up the prices. Not true. They do not set the prices at which they sell. It is the final buyers, the consumers, who determine the price they are willing to pay. Because if no one paid their prices they would not sell.
Some may argue that they increase the scarcity by hoarding the products. Also not true. Bachaqueros sell everything they buy. If anything they reduce the scarcity; by selling at higher prices they reduce overconsumption. The ones that increase the scarcity are those that buy at a low price (and have time in their hands).
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“Heroes”
Let’s not get carried away.
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Yes, because a person who gets into a store and buys the entire stock before anybody else can arrive, just to extort 10 times that much money, is a “hero”, in the same way the enchufado owners of the dollar black market and gasoline smugglers are “heroes” too.
Sure, amieres, sure, keep believing that little grey lie there.
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They do not extort anyone, you do not have to buy from them, just go and make a line.
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Lines created by bachabasuras to obligate me to buy frfom them, and that’s not an extortion.
Right, ssuuuuuure.
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Listen to this economy professor (In Spanish)
From minute 5:10
From 6:30:
“Many of you, your families owe their lives to the so denigrated speculator.
… In every square of every city of Spain there ought to be a monument to the speculator… a statue”
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Do not bother, we had this conversation in a previous post. This ralph guy does not really understand the issue at hand. He is a chavista at heart.
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The people who seems chaviztas at hearts are the defenders of the “criminals by hungry”
Of course, the vivismo criollo vibrates inside your very hearts. As being a buhonero is accepted but not legal, the decent people has to accept too the whole subspecies of buhoneros too, all of the at the margin of law. Neither the buhoneros nor the bachaqueros are in the frame of order and law.
The issue here is not about economy, it is about law enforcement and seeing.
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There are lots of people who dont get it because they are not very adept at reasoning things out and what they really like is the vehement venting of their spleens and insulting and bashing other people for their opinion . blogs offer them an outlet for that . This blog is better than most precisely because it has lots of people that are good at what you do pollux ,reasoning things out , of course sometime you may incurr in some error , thats humanly to be expected but you do exercise your thinking mind in setting your views which is praseworthy.
Yesterday talked to a mechanic in a queue , he tells me bachaqueo has become a ‘rosca’ , a full time business occupation , his two mechanic helpers ( with steady jobs) turned in their resignation recently to become full time bachaqueros, they pay 20.000 bs a month to certain counter ladies to tip them off when new products are coming and help them out when they go in a grup to make their purchases . Meantime many people make their queues only to find in the end that the products are gone , bought by droves of bachaqueros who got there first . By the way we werent able to buy anything because the stuff was sold out before we got to the door , happened to me the day before too. the mechanic wasnt very happy.
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If you think the lines are long now, put all the bachaqueros out of business and all their customers in those queues and you’ll see bigger, angrier mobs of el pueblo
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A fundamental law of economics:
“In a free market, there is no such thing as a shortage, there is only a price.”
Venezuela proves that, eventually, supply and demand revert to the fundamentals.
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Venezuela proves that a group of assholes can transform supply and demand into extortion and theft.
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Who do they extort and who do they steal from?
No one.
A bachaquero is no different from your supermarket or your bodega. They also stock up with goods they buy low and then sell high.
Anyone can go to a farm and buy produce from them. You’ll find much lower prices that way.
You could also go to the Quinta Crespo market.
Yet people happily go to the supermarkets that sell several times higher.
Why?
It is convenient.
You do not have to drive for hours back and forth to find your goods.
Bachaqueros provide exactly the same service and people buy from them for exactly the same reasons.
The only difference is that there is an absurd law the criminalizes a perfectly normal and important activity.
If it were legal to sell at any price, there would be no bachaqueros, higher prices (not as high as the black market) would be paid at the supermarket and there would be no scarcity.
In other words: normal life.
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]Amieres : Do you think ticket scalpers perform a useful economic function in the US ?? Im not sure most people see it that way . Scalpers take steps so that tickets become artificially scarce before they have to . (absent scalpers early purchase of tickets you could probably purchase one a short time before the event ) ,Reminds me of a celebrated ancient greek philosopher (also a sharp business man) who anticipating a big grape harvest , leased in advance most of the wine presses in Attica so that when the winegrowers went to press their grape harvest they discovered that the price of the wine presses was incredibly high. also of the time I think the Soros bros tried cornering the worlds silver market to gain very speculative profits . Business practices which deserve little applause anyway you look at them .
What makes the bachaqueros situation different is that many of them engage in the practice just to survive , because inflation has become so rampant that what they normally earn is not enough to live on. and also that the main reasons for the shortage is not what they do ( although they do contribute in a small way) but the regimes irrational policies on exchange rate and price controls and their persecution of private business producers and irresponsible populist subsidization of the economy .!!
The analogy with people who go to Quinta Crespo or direct to the farmers to buy their food is not necessarily valid , in part because the things you mostly need are not available in Quinta Crespo in sizes suitable for retail consumers , and because you cant get bags of harina pan or processed rice or white sugar in a farm , getting to the farms isnt easy and the road transport of foodstuffs is rigurously controlled by the govt.
Im simpathetic to the plight of bachaqueros who engage in the practice to survive a difficult situation which is not of their making , but generally buying stuff so that they become unavailable to other purchasers , creating an artificial shortage so they can later sell the stuff at speculative prices is not my idea of a praiseworthy economically useful practice.
The question of paying someone to take your place in a queue poses a very different moral dilemma , one which Profesor Sandel of Harvard has dealt with in numerous lectures and in some of his books : I would refer you to him to examine the subject . .
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“Do you think ticket scalpers perform a useful economic function in the US ??”
Yes I do.
“Im not sure most people see it that way”
That is exactly the point of these “mini-lectures”.
Economic thinking is not intuitive.
You need to rationalize hard to get it.
But science is always like that.
Economics is a science that affects everyone.
“Scalpers take steps so that tickets become artificially scarce”
Scalpers do not make tickets scarce.
They sell everything they buy.
Yes, they sell at a higher price for a select market:
those that are willing to pay more for scarce tickets.
They are paying for being late.
Yes, I know I used the word scarce.
But it is not the scalpers that made them scarce.
It was the other people that bought earlier leaving only a few tickets.
Now the few tickets left have a higher value.
Naturally, like with any scarce good.
The real problem with scalpers is that they can also defraud people.
That is because their activity has been criminalized, and so there is no protection for buyers.
Logically it should be the venue sellers that raise the ticket price not the bachaqueros/scalpers.
For instance they could implement a bidding system for the last tickets.
But they are not allowed.
So the scalpers step in.
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Sorry amieres,
Either buhoneros (street vendors) don’t offer the same service as the formal commerce or in the same conditions.
Bachaqueros, indeed a subspecies of buhonero is an unfair competitor, they uses the public space for which formal economy and residents pays taxes, they don’t pay taxes by its revenues as the formalized commerce, they don’t offer any warranty for the goods or services done, they don’t follow any labour, sanitary, public-order or goods-transportation regulations.
How could you dare to equalize the bachaquero/buhonero with the commerce?
Buhonerismo (submerged and non-taxable non-regulated commerce) is NOT a legal activity, from where since when it has became legal? It never was, it is not yet.
They don’t extort or steal, but they do many other felonies from privatization of public space to fiscal fraud.
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I think your beef is with buhonerism.
Would you be OK with bachaquerism if they paid taxes and rent, offer guarantees, deliver to your house?
Bachaqueros cannot do all that because they operate outside of the law.
What makes bachaquerismo illegal?
The government’s prohibition to sell at free market prices.
That criminalization of a natural commercial activity is what creates all those negative aspects you mention.
By the way, it is the same prohibition that creates the scarcity, the black market and the bachaqueros in the first place.
Eliminate the prohibition and all the problems go away. (not buhonerism, that is another problem)
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No, buhonero and bachaquero are the same thing adapted to another environment, the one is a subspecie of the other in the frame of evolution.
Being buhonero is not a legal activity and there’s a lot of national and local regulations against being a buhonero. Other thing is the chronic lack of enforcement of that regulations.
Why there’s no bachaqueros at Sabana Grande? Because in Sabana Grande there’s law enforcement of the very same regulations that applies in Baralt Avenue, but Jorge doesn’t apply them there, and let buhoneros to exist at Baralt.
Of course i would agree with stock holding and selling with utility making prices (that is the activity a bachaquero illegally perform), that is that everyone does. But only if they became regularized, pay their taxes as everyone, rent a local, and pay for the services society and the State offer to their activity, the same rules as every other entrepreneur.
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Amieres, just explain it’s supply and demand, demand and supply, as age-old as when commerce was simply barter. Supply and demand meet at a point called price. It’s not an individual/collective moral decision. The many different economic systems and their permutations provide the structure in which supply/demand/price operate, as has always been, and always will be the case. Si le pica a uno, que se rasque….
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NET.,
Tú sabes muy bien que para que esa máxima del punto de equilibrio entre oferta y demanda en el mercado requiere de que haya:
a) libre oferta
b) libre demanda
c) competencia perfecta
d) igualdad de condiciones entre los agentes
Eso es de economía básica.
En la emergencia económica en Venezuela no hay libre mercado porque no se cumple ni la libre oferta, ni la competencia perfecta, ni la igualdad de condiciones entre los agentes;.por lo cual los precios no se fijan en el punto de equilibrio de oferta y demanda. Lo que hay es un mercado no regulado, donde se acuerdan, quizás, siempre que no haya cartelización, que en Venezuela todos sabemos que siempre la hay, porque nadie vende por debajo de lo que venden los demás para competir.
Es lo mismo que en el caso del precio del dólar, Cuál es el precio del dólar? el de equilibrio de mercado de oferta-demanda? No, porque dónde está la libre oferta? Hay acuerdo de precios, sí, pero sujeto a una referencia tipo cartel, porque todo el mundo mira en internet a cuánto lo cotiza Dolar Today y a partir de allí negocian los implicados.
Y a lo que yo me refiero no es a esa paja del equilibro económico, el peo de ponerle una braga a los bachaqueros es que ellos infringen la ley, por lo tanto les es aplicable una sanción, el alcalde tiene la potestad de acuerdo a la legislación y está en la obligación de aplicarles alguna sanción.
Que vengan a justificar que violar la ley por hambre o por supervivencia es válido, ya es por un peo cultural, moral y ético de ustedes. La economía nada juega en eso.
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Interesante que menciones esto:
“Tú sabes muy bien que para que esa máxima del punto de equilibrio entre oferta y demanda en el mercado requiere de que haya:
a) libre oferta
b) libre demanda
c) competencia perfecta
d) igualdad de condiciones entre los agentes”
La ley de la oferta y la demanda es una ley tan cierta como la ley de gravedad.
No requiere de ningunas condiciones para funcionar.
El precio siempre está determinado por la oferta y la demanda. Punto.
Hay que considerar que el precio no es necesariamente monetario.
Hay otras formas de pagar, algunas no placenteras.
Me imagino que a lo que tu te refieres es a la idea de que la libre competencia hace que los precios bajen.
Pues eso simplemente no es cierto.
Todo depende de quien esté compitiendo.
Si compiten los vendedores, entonces si, el precio baja.
Si compiten los compradores el precio sube.
En tiempos de escasez los que compiten son los compradores.
Los precios van a subir.
Eso es lo que se ve en el mercado negro.
Y te voy a decir algo muy importante:
los que fijan los precios en tiempos de escasez…
son los compradores, no los vendedores.
Esos precios a los que venden los bachaqueros,
son fijados por los compradores.
No por los bachaqueros.
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“How could you dare to equalize the bachaquero/buhonero with the commerce?”
I dare equate bachaquero/buhonero with commerce because what they do is exactly the definition of commerce:
DEFINITION of ‘Commerce’
The conduct of trade amongst economic agents. Generally, commerce refers to the exchange of goods, services or something of value, between businesses or entities.
Read more: http://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/commerce.asp#ixzz3idy6gwEf
Follow us: @Investopedia on Twitter
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Legally, commerce is the interchange of goods and services performed as a regularized activity that has to see and fulfill with a lot of regulations, is subject to taxes as an economic activity and needs of a permission to be performed.
That is commerce.
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La libre competencia no siempre hace bajar el precio, la libre competencia lo que da es variabilidad al precio, al producto y a los atributos del intercambio. Si tu recorres una calle de buhoneros donde se vende productos regulados, notas uniformidad de precios, y no necesariamente porque los tipos se pongan de acuerdo, cosa que puede ser, sino porque están metidos y forman parte de una mafia que es la que uniformiza los precios.
Es posible regatear con los tipos? una de las actividades que marca el precio de equilibrio, lo que estoy dispuesto yo a pagar y lo que está dispuesto él a percibir. No, te manda a comprar al de al lado que tiene el precio igual, el mismo producto, porque además no hay variedad de productos, porque no hay libre oferta.
Todos venden el mismo aceite de 0,5 litros, todos venden el mismo pote de champú, todos venden el mismo paquete de azúcar comprado en el mismo establecimiento a precio regulado.
No hay libre mercado, sólo hay un mercado no regulado.
Y obvio que los precios van a subir, porque la carestía y el acceso a los productos va a complicarse, con lo cual habrá menos condiciones de libre mercado que fijen ningún equilibrio. El mercado será más y más cartelizado porque lo manejarán las mafias y los agentes menores quedarán fuera. Es como el tema de los raspacupos, antes había una oferta mayor de dólares al menudeo porque muchos podían viajar, ahora pocos, y los bien conectados consiguen boleto, tarjeta del banco del Estado y cupo activado para ir a raspar y vender dólares al menudeo, con lo cual el precio va para arriba.
Con la cartelización que va a venir, por mera lógica ecológica del mercado, donde los grandes desplazarán a los pequeños haciéndose con los nichos, aunque aumente la oferta, no se percibirá mejoría en la escasez ni en los precios en la calle, porque las mafias dosificarán y manejarán los precios en la calle.
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Por ahí me decían:
“Los consumidores finales los que determinan el precio? Si, claro! Te piden por 1Kg de azúcar 150 Bs y tú le dices no, pana yo te pago 60 a ver si te lo venden.””
y es buena acotación porque me permite aclarar:
no es con el regateo que el comprador determina los precios.
No es que dice “yo quiero comprar a tal precio”.
No. Es al pagar, que está diciendo: “ese precio es aceptable”.
O, al no comprar dice: “está muy caro”.
Lo otro obviamente es que no es una sola persona que determina el precio, son el conjunto.
El mecanismo es muy simple, los bachaqueros no pueden quedarse con el producto indefinidamente.
Si nadie les compra, rebajan el precio, ceden al regateo.
Además no importa si hay cartel o monopolio,
porque en un mercado de vendedores
los precios SIEMPRE los determinan los compradores.
No se imagine que con eso quiero decir que ese es el precio que desean pagar los compradores,
No. Es el precio máximo que pueden pagar, el que les duele, pero que pagan.
Los vendedores siempre van a buscar ese precio doloroso
porque cuando los compradores compiten alguien va a pagar ese precio.
Y si no, pues lo bajan un poco.
Así funciona el mecanismo.
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“No. Es al pagar, que está diciendo: “ese precio es aceptable”.”
Tu mentidera es compulsiva, definitivamente.
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“Who do they extort and who do they steal from?
No one.”
Lie, they are stealing and extorting from everybody who has an actual job and can’t go at 3am to stand in line to get to the products first.
“A bachaquero is no different from your supermarket or your bodega. They also stock up with goods they buy low and then sell high.”
Another lie, bachabasuras are another group of law breakers for all the items Pollux1006 has explained in the other replies.
“Anyone can go to a farm and buy produce from them. You’ll find much lower prices that way.”
Yet another lie, because not everybody can pay for a trip to Timotes, Guárico or Apure to get a kilo of beans, nor go to the Paveca’s factories in Carabobo, besides, from many years ago, major sellers and importers only distribute to businesses with fiscal RIFs of juridical names, stuff that people with no companies don’t have.
“You could also go to the Quinta Crespo market.
Yet people happily go to the supermarkets that sell several times higher.”
Lie again, supermarkets are forced to sell stuff at fake regulated prices, because it’s much easier to enforce that absurd into people who have actual fiscal information record and are legal, established businesses.
“Why?
It is convenient.
You do not have to drive for hours back and forth to find your goods.”
The most laughable fallacy, I don’t need to drive when I can walk five blocks to buy the stuff I need in the nearest legal market, the problem comes when a group of bastards came yesternight and set camp there just to empty the place as soon as it opens.
“Bachaqueros provide exactly the same service and people buy from them for exactly the same reasons.
The only difference is that there is an absurd law the criminalizes a perfectly normal and important activity.”
No, bachabasuras are criminals who extort from working people with the aid of the scarcity and monopoly conditions created by chaburro regime.
“If it were legal to sell at any price, there would be no bachaqueros, higher prices (not as high as the black market) would be paid at the supermarket and there would be no scarcity.
In other words: normal life.””
You contradicted your own assumptions in this last paragraph, that’s what happens when you try to excuse an abnormal and in this case, a criminal behavior, on the basis of fallacies and lies.
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A short, to the point lecture on the subject. Must be translated to spanish
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Ah Bachaqueros!
Mi tema favorito.
El día que la gente entienda que los bachaqueros no son los malos de la partida sino los heroes que prestan un importante servicio publico, mientras son atacados por el gobierno y odiados por todos, será el día que la gente entienda que los precios controlados son el problema no la solución.
Cuando un gobierno decreta precios bajos al mismo tiempo están decretando la eventual escasez de ese producto.
Los precios bajos parecen chevere porque uno puede creer que está pagando menos, pero lo que no se paga con dinero se paga con tiempo. Tiempo perdido.
Los Bachaqueros solo revierten la ecuación a pagar solo con dinero, no tiempo perdido. Un servicio valioso para los que estén dispuestos a pagarlo.
El tiempo tiene un valor diferente para distintas personas. El desempleado no tiene problemas pasando horas en una cola. Pero otros no pueden darse es lujo. Para ellos los Bachaqueros proveen un servicio esencial. Hay que recordar que esa gente tambien tiene derecho a comprar su comida aun cuando no tenga el tiempo.
Algunos creen que los Bachaqueros aumentan los precios. No es cierto. Ellos no dictan los precios a los que venden. Son los compradores finales, los consumidores, quienes determinan el precio que están dispuestos a pagar. Porque si nadie pagara sus precios se les quedaría fría a mercancía.
Otros dirán que los bachaqueros aumentan la escasez al acaparar los productos. Tampoco es cierto. Ellos venden todo lo que compran. En realidad ellos reducen las escasez; al vender caro reducen el consumo excesivo. Los que aumentan la escasez son los que compran barato (y les sobra el tiempo), ellos tienden a comprar demás.
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Amieres, well-said. The bachaqueros perform valid economic intermediation for increasingly-scarce basic consumer products, especially for those holding full-time jobs, living in rural/non-urban areas with difficult/costly access to usually urban scarce product distribution centers, etc. BTW, Maduro just announced another of his not-to-be-observed decrees–3 yrs.’ prison +fines for bachaqueros, which are “parasitic neo-liberal capitalistic speculators” bent on destroying the fine social fabric of this marvelous Bolivarian Socialist nation.
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Eso!! Gotta love our Bachaqueros.
Juan Luis Guerra should have come up with a sure-fire hit song “La Bachata del Bachaqueo”. Twitted the idea to him last year..
I commend all of those brave, rebel souls, last bastions of true Capitalism, defenders of the most basic, natural laws of Offer&Demand.
The ultimate equalizers, thanks in great part to the insufferable Colas, and thanks to our brave Bachaquero Entrepreneurs, the Chavista Regime, or the most radical part of it, at least, will soon fall.
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Isn’t orange the colour used for prisoners in the USA? I do not recall any other reference to other force using orange uniforms but for the Islamic State, which probably decided to copy it from the US Americans after the Guantanamo images. THE IRONY.
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but this orange has strong pink undertones, and as such, acts as a cultural shaming, more on men than women, much like the pink underwear that is (was?) issued to men in U.S. prisons.
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And there’s the case of pink jumpsuits, like those imposed by notorious Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio.
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I think it’s not for the shaming. Pink (Baker Miller Pink) has been used in prisons because the color was assumed to affect the behavior and make the inmates weaker. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWFOr557uzc
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Might be the case in the USA. I am not so sure if that was what was in chavistas’s brains. Call me biased.
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I think it all has to do with visibility. Pretty hard for an escapee in orange or pink to disappear into the crowd.
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To me it brings to mind the literary reference of the classic “The Scarlet Letter” by Nathaniel Hawthorne and the concept of “public shaming”.It didn’t work then, will it work now?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scarlet_Letter
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Kepler, you hit the nail on the head. In this day in age, parading people around in orange jumpsuits for propaganda value is just…mentally disturbed.
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I read someones opinion saying they choose orange to tie bachaqueros image to Voluntad Popular. It makes sense in terms of govmt propaganda machine
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Arresting a few hundred of these people will accomplish nothing.
There is just too much money to be made.
When products arrive at the local stores you see all sort of vehicles full of women & children arriving.
Buses, open trucks, taxis.
They have been alerted by the zamoras waiting all day in front of these stores.
These groups are run by indivuals who pay these people a stipend to stand in line and then turn over the products.
They move them from store to store following the delivery routes.
It’s big business Venezuelan style.
Things are going to get much worse.
There is vurtually nothing arriving in the country.
Current stocks will disappear very soon.
I see big social upheavals in late August – early Septiembre.
The PSUV may have a plan B but they better roll it out soon.
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pusv’s plan B is called “Bulletanol”, which includes a high percentage of lead, with parts of powder and mindless hatred, with a spoonfull of dementia for good measure.
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“They have been alerted by the zamoras waiting all day in front of these stores.”
I’ve seen this mistake a couple of times in other posts by different people and, for your cultural enlightenment, it’s not “zamoras,” it’s “zamuros,” which means vultures or buzzards.
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Maybe he wanted to say “zamuras” as “she-vultures”
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And then we wonder why the entire Planet is laughing at Cubazuela.. It has become the premiere Clown Nation on the planet. Another # 1, besides inflation, longest produce queues and highest crime!
We are the biggest, Worldwide Joke, a huge “hazme-reir”, greatest piece of entertainment since Tom & Jerry or Seinfield.
Ask anyone anywhere, from the Philippines, to Spain, of course, to the USA to any Latin American country… Masburro and all of our incredibly Ignorant, shamefully under-educated corrupt “officials” are the hilarious talk of any town, from Amsterdam to Santiago de Chile. Everyone I know in Miami, from all over the world, can’t stop laughing at this kind of surreal, weekly stuff, all of them avid Dollar Today readers by now!!
They pity Kleptozuela, of course, but mainly, they can’t stop laughing, can’t wait to see what’s the next public aberration, the next Galactic Embezzlement case, the next soap-opera of our retrograde, primitive and decadent Third World.. We have become like an international Zoo, a major attraction of all media.
And some detached, “serious”, intellectual economists or statisticians, or international finance “analysts” still worry about the laughable, useless “publicacion de cifras bancarias” segun las “Constitusion Bolibanana”.
We should be analyzing this unique, impressive histrionics phenomenon, unprecedented in modern history instead. We need those numbers and all our vital media ratings data now! Let’s write a letter demanding them from the TSJ and Conatel, another fine ‘intitusion rebolusionaria’!. Our international Comedic Media ratings are through the roof!!
“Soy Bachaquero y Quiero cambiar” .. you’ve got to be kidding..
http://www.soloenvenezuela.org/
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Hazme llorar mas bien.
Seeing Venezuela is like having a drug addict child or an alcoholic parent, no matter what you say the self destructive march is unrelenting.
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La lujosa vida de los cachorros del chavismo en Barcelona: http://www.elmundo.es/loc/2015/04/25/553a764622601db37e8b4580.html
¡Ay, Lacava! ¡Qué demagogo eres!
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Remind me to tell you some day about what Rafael was like at UCAB (he was a classmate, and a friend).
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Ya va… he was your classmate as in, you studied Economics together????
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A medieval spectacle and a flagrant human rights violation. That, BTW, comes from the people that made that stupid law that forbids showing the face of criminals on the news.
Meanhile trucks full of food and other scarce goods go to Colombia every week, with the blessing of the Nazional Guard.
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“…the people that made that stupid law that forbids showing the face of criminals on the news.”
I guess that specific law comes from before chaburrismo, I’m not sure…
On the other hand, we’ve plenty of examples where they show the face of prisoners to instigate the maximum amount of hatred and shaming against them, so the crime here is double just for the hypocrisy.
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Estos pendejos ni siquiera se pasan los memos entre ellos, recapitulemos un poco:
* Exministro eduardo samán (de mierda), se burla de la gente al clamar que “la oligarquía debe dejar de llorar por los comerciantes informales, nuestro gobierno bolivariano no hará nada nunca contra ellos porque ellos son el pueblo”. Es decir, que los chavistas defendían a los acaparadores, si eso servía para “hacer sufrir a la oligarquía” que todos sabemos que oligarca es todo el que no es chavista. Para este fantoche que era más chaburro que la mortadela podrida, los bachaqueros son buenos.
* El capo “funsize” saca a relucir su fachocastrismo mugroso, escupiendo su discursito de incitación al odio mientras agita su juguete porno favorito. Para el narcocadivero, los bachaqueros son malos, claro, si no son los de su nómina, que sabemos que los tiene, porque el bachaqueo a gran escala es como lo de los dólares y la gasolina, todo es propiedad de los enchufados, esa es la propiedad privada que el chaburrismo sí respeta.
* El alcalde que fué pateado por la mortadela para dejar en la gobernación al asesino ladrón ameliachchch ahora expone al escarnio público y a posibles agresiones, como linchamientos o que les metan unos tiros, a una gente que tomando en cuenta el historial del chavismo, no nos consta que sean culpables de un carajo, porque pudieron simplemente levantarles una olla podrida sembrándole alguna cosa o bien exigiéndoles sobornos que no pudieron pagar.
* Y el defensor del puesto sale ahora a decir que esa medida de sometimiento al escarnio público es mala y violatoria de los derechos humanos, claro, muy cómodo defender esos derechos así, pero mientras tanto, que Simonovis se pudra en una celda por una década, que a Afiuni la violen y la muelan a palos por cumplir con su trabajo (Soltar a alguien que no tuvo ni una audiencia en dos años y medio…), o la aplicación sistemática del genocidio por medio del uso de los colectivos paramilitares de malandros armados hasta los dientes por el mismo gobierno con fines de control político, no es algo que le competa al defensor del puesto, no señor.
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Ah, coño, ya va, me acabo de enterar que el bolsa defensor del puesto se contradice él mismo, diciendo que “el que defiende a los bachaqueros no está en su sano juicio”
http://www.noticierodigital.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1101417
El chaburrismo a estas alturas de verdad que parece un corral lleno de gallinas descabezadas.
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El principio legal que prohíbe las penas “infamantes”, es decir, que causan deshonra, es el art. 44.3 de la CRBV que reza:
“La pena no puede trascender de la persona condenada. No habrá condenas a penas perpetuas o infamantes. Las penas privativas de la libertad no excederán de treinta años.”
Uno de los cuales deben ser de los primeros en ser reformados porque en mi opinión impide la aplicación ajustada de penas que se necesitan en la actualidad, porque además están las perlas del muy laxo Código Civil en cuanto crímenes mayores como homicidio, violación, narcotráfico, tráfico de personas, y tal.
art. 15 del Código Penal
“El condenado a prisión no estará obligado a otros trabajos sino a los de artes y oficios que puedan verificarse dentro del establecimiento, con la facultad de elegir lo que mas se conformaren con sus aptitudes o anteriores ocupaciones.”
Y todo el Título 8vo sobre la concurrencia de penas. Que impide que se sumen las penas y las limita o a 30 años o a la suma de la del delito más grave + la mitad aplicable al segundo más grave.
Ahora bien, eso implica que, a los convictos no se les puede poner a hacer ningún trabajo de utilidad que no sea “…lo que mas se conformaren con sus aptitudes o anteriores ocupaciones…” y limitado a las “…artes y oficios que puedan verificarse dentro del establecimiento…” Con lo cual, si no quieren hacer nada, no hacen nada. Lo que es inadmisible a mi entender.
Y un criminal puede matar y torturar a 100 personas y sólo se le aplicará hasta 30 años por todas ellas, o como suele ocurrir, 25 – atenuantes porque es un joven – reducciones y rebajas + 1/2 de la pena computable por tortura o por privación de libertad y pasa lo de los asesinos del caso Berry-Spears donde la mayor pena fue de 27 años por robo, homocidio calificado de dos personas, agavillamiento, conspiración para delinquir, daños físicos y psicológicos a un menor de edad, etc…
Sobre la cuestión de si los alcaldes tienen o no la facultad para hacer lo que están haciendo, sí la tienen, porque los ejecutivos municipales tienen la facultad de imponer sanciones, no tienen la facultad de imponer penas, pero sí sanciones; cosa que no es nueva. Jorge Rodríguez también aplicó y aplica una sanción a los que son atrapados in-fraganti deteriorando espacios públicos en Libertador, los ponen a barrer y pintar calles.
Lo que no puede hacer el alcalde, por aquello de la “pena infamante” es ponerle el cartel que diga “soy bachaquero y quiero cambiar”, pero ponerle una braga, darle una escoba y ponerlos a limpiar no se considera infamante, ni lo somete al escarnio público.
Tarek Músculos debería dejarse de hipocresías y si quiere ser tan papista con el artículo 44.3 debería serlo con el resto del artículo 44, y los 45 al 49 de la misma constitución.
Y amieres, discrepo nuevamente de tí y todos esos hipócritas que exculpan a los revendedores de su pobre ética y débil moral. Porque:
1) En situación de emergencia económica, como la que tiene Venezuela no hay reglas de mercado, justo en estas ocasiones es que debe haber un Estado que intervenga, porque tanto la cartelización como la emergencia económica son contrarias a la libre competencia, y libres oferta y demanda condiciones ambas necesarias para la libertad de mercado. Ese argumento es tan cínico y aberrante como aquél del difunto que decía que se justificaba el robo por hambre. A ese paso también se justifica la invasión por necesidad, la violación por un queso prolongado y la dictadura por la debilidad mental del pueblo.
2) La venta ambulante sin permisos para ello, y especialmente de alimentos y productos sanitarios es un delito, por tanto merece sanción, y no lo digo en el marco de la ley de precios justos, sino de otras más viejas.
Y si, claro que la causa de la situación de emergencia económica es el modelo económico y el cuento de los bachaqueros es un paño caliente más, pero en una sociedad donde el “vivo” debe ser redefinido como lo que es, un “corrupto” un delincuente más; no cae mal que se apliquen sanciones a delincuentes, y si son capturados in-fraganti, no sólo les aplica la sanción impuesta por el ejecutivo municipal en sus atribuciones de urbanismo, tributos, orden y salud públicos, sino que deben ser pasados a fiscalía para que ésta les aplique cargos y las penas accesorias relativas a los delitos contemplados en las leyes.
Ya quiero ver si el gobierno va a dejarse llevar por la hipocresía del Defensor del puesto o por el clamor electoralista de hacer algo inmediato y publicitario como sancionar a los revendedores de productos básicos.
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Gracias Pollux por la excelente y minuciosa explicacion , una vez mas queda al descubierto la desfachatez con la que el regimen infringe el Estado de Derecho y maltrata la dignidad del Venezolano !!
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On a more serious note though, how can anyone in a half-civilized, semi-educated country begin to understand why such surreal, draconian, barbaric, yet hilarious “laws” are actually conceived and actually deployed in the “real” world, during this “modern”, cybernetic 21st Century?
Even worse, why do they even work, why don’t people revolt, why are they submissive about these un-freaking-believable “laws” or “medidas”??
When puzzled or in doubt, trying to understand the latest weird shit about Venezuela, 2 essential pieces of criteria never fail, solid common denominators everywhere:
1/ Massive ignorance, enormous lack of Real education.
2/ Interstellar Galactic Corruption, viral Kleptomania.
Now you can understand any insane, surreal, perplexing phenomena or inexplicable conundrum , even the latest Orange Bachaquero Public Shame T-shirts.
“Because, yes, all publicity is good publicity, but its even better when it serves to distract Venezuelans from questioning the true roots of the problem. And they’re already proving me right.”
Correct. As usual, believe it or not, there’s a method behind the madness. Why does it work?
Not always pure ineptitude, incompetence, pure theft and corruption, or even “catatonia”, no. The Kleptozuelan Dictatorial Regime regime is indeed incredibly stupid, inept, inefficient, highly delusional and utterly corrupt, of course, but they know their incredibly ignorant, massively brain-washed, painfully under-educated target Pueblo-People.
Heck, these “officials”, starting with our retarded highschool dropout, ex- bus driver “president”, they often come from the same ignorance, poverty, lack of real education, blind piranhas on the lose, if you prefer. But they know their own people. Their “pueblo” psychological issues since the Spanish Colonial conquests, since the Ad/Copey government, a 4-decade alienation of the average populace, they know their weaknesses, their feelings and how to exploit them with incredible, barbaric stuff like International Economic Wars from the Ultra-Right-wing Capitalist Imperialists, or these “shameful” “Bachaquero” prison-orangeT-shirt accusations or “community service”..
Y la gente se cree esa vaina, y se lo calan, casi 17 años despues. Like Zombies, docile, brain-washed ignorant sheep.
As the popular Llanero aphorism goes, these hilarious, surreal “officials “Conocen a su Ganado”:
Modern Kleptozuelan Cowboys know their Cattle.
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Venezuela cannot feed itself , it is wholly dependent on food imports , imports have to be paid in dollars , the regime thru its control of oil revenues is the sole possesor of dollars , there are not enough dollars to meet all the food needs of the population , so the government rations the access to those food stuffs and uses a large part of those dollars to keep the population fed with the most basic stapples , because the exchange rate it has decided to use is irrational and it applies irrational price controls that involves indirectly a heavy subsidy of the price of those imported food stapples , absent such subsidy most people , specially the poor would be unable to pay for those stapples and perhaps face starvation, this would have the effect of turning the mass of the populaton agaisnt the governent and create the danger of an uncontrollable social explosion . Thus the government must keep a tight leash on the volume of stapples that are sold at subsidised prices , so that there will be enough to avoid a situation they very much fear.
Bachaqueros buy subsidied stuff they dont need to consume , gaming the rationing system so they can resell them at a much higher speculative prices . in doing so they sabotage the rationing system , making it more difficult to spread the thin capacity of the government to feed everyone with subsidised prices . that is why they try to persecute and punish bachaqueros.
There are many small time bachaqueros , but there are also organized webs of large time bachaqueros , many of them smuggling subsidised goods abroad , the former sometimes get caught , the latter have enough clout and influence within the system so that they cannot really be controlled . Small time bachaqueros are just like the ticket skalpers like they have in the US , who buy tickets for sports or other events at the standard cheap price and resell them to people who have been unable to find tickects at a much higher speculative price. The assumption is that if scalpers didnt exist there woud be many more tickets to go about and every one would be able to buy tickets at the standard price , scalpers dont just profit from selling scarce tickets , they help cause the scarcity themselves ,
Of course bachaqueros deal with food , with mass needs , with starvation , with basic stuff to make speculative gains , while US scalper deal with suplerflous stuff , with access to sports or musical events , so its difficult to judge them with the same perspective , but the basic ecnomic structure of the operation is the same .
Complicating things of course is the fact that the government irresponsible behaviour is the main cause of the shortages , of the need for a rationing system , of the need to subsidize prices of the whole mess , Most of the people who are caught in the disastrous situation the regime has created are acting as bachaqueros to protect themselves , there are many poor families who can only meet their daily needs by engaging in the bachaeuro business . So they are acting in ways which ordinarily are considered criminal but which they have to do in order to survive , using as vindication that phrase that Chavez used that what a needy person does to feed its family is no crime . !! So ironically one might see the regimes (largely failed ) persecution of small scale bachaqueros as giving a lie to Chavez famous phrase.!!
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1)-If you are poor becoming a bachaquero is probably the best way to protect yourself from the devastating inflation. It’s a game of ‘con real y medio, con real y medio compre …’
2)-The idea of chasing small time bachaqueros is bunk. Just remember what chasing of small time drug dealers in the US has done. We’ve filled the jails with millions of people, mostly poor and never affected the drug supply.
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I have waited in line for up to 2 hours (I avoid really long lines). While waiting in line I can see bachaqueros with inside connection taking out item through the loading docks. It’s happened to me, at least twice, that by the time I get to the front of the line the store has run out of the product I was waiting to purchase. Therefore, I have no sympathy whatsoever for those bachaqueros.
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Your frustration is legitimate, but you must agree that the brunt of your anger should be directed to Chavismo. Bachaqueros are just unpleasant flies over a pile of shit.
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Yes, it is frustrating to wait in line for nothing.
But it is not the bachaqueros fault. It is actually the other people’s fault.
Which other people?
– The ones that arrived earlier at the line.
– The ones that buy from the bachaqueros, because they are willing to pay more.
In short. All the people that ate the food you wanted to buy.
Not the bachaqueros.
Yes, some bachaqueros have inside contacts and that seems unfair.
Others just make their line, ahead of you.
But they do not buy for themselves. They buy for the other people.
It is the other people’s fault.
The other people that eat.
And when you get the product, then it is your fault that someone else did not get it.
That is scarcity. People compete for scarce products.
The bigger the scarcity the more ferocious the competition.
The more violence, the more corruption, the more unfairness, and the more hunger it generates.
But it is not the bachaqueros fault.
They did not create the mess, they are actually, easing it. A little bit.
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“But it is not the bachaqueros fault. It is actually the other people’s fault.”
¿Porqué los defiendes tanto? Da a pensar que que tu o alguien en tu familia es uno de ellos….
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Lo que le pasa es que él niega de forma rotunda y tozuda que existe una mafia de acaparamiento y monopolio de extorsión en la que están más del 75% de los bachaqueros, financiada y protegida desde el mismo régimen chaburro.
Los susodichos “humilditos que se están quedando pobres y roban para poder comer” no llegan ni al 20% de los bachaqueros.
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There is a topic dear to some legal philosophers , they study court decisions and discover that sometimes there are ‘no right answers’ , that court decisions can go different ways and still be grounded in perfectly logical legal reasoning . Our laymans assumption is that there is always one wrong answer and one right answer to all problems , but these legal thinkers dont see it the same way. They can identify cases where more than one right answer is possible using accepted legal standards of reasoning .
What is true of the epistemology of legal cases is also true of many moral conumdrums , you have situations which pit different equivalent moral principles against each other , so that an opinion or judgement can be held to be both right and wrong at the same time , depending on the moral principles which inspire such opinion .
I fear that the small scale bachaquero problem is one such problem , one can feel that if they act on the basis of need what they do is if not laudable condonable , and at the same time that there is something wrong in gaming their access to a rationing system so that they get goods which they dont need but which they can resell at speculative prices ( preventing some of those that need them from being able to access them ) , specially if they are driven primarity by sheer greed !!.
Quite separate is the issue of whether it is practicable to persecute the small time bachaquero, it certainly is not easy , but I dont buy the argument that because an effort is not a total success then we must do away with it , because IF it is able to diminish the volume of goods which are taken out of the system to be sold in informal markets , then it serves a real purpose and can be defended from the perspetive that it would be worse but for such effort being made.
To give an example , Im told that a clever thief will enter my home and rob it regardles of how many alarms and bars I put in its windows , and yet I know that it is more likely that my home will be robbed if I do not protect it with such security measures , so even if those measures dont absolutely protect my home they do lessen the risk that it will be robbed which is a good enough inducement to taking such measures..
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Hello Bill,
When you an army of willful volunteers that will for whatever motivation do an action it is very hard to stop. I would insist to make the comparison with small time drug dealers. No matter how many you jail, there is another one behind ready to take his place.
Law tries to direct a society to certain behaviors, but at the end it must reflect the state of the culture. Drugs have become socially acceptable, so filling jails with poor saps is not working. I do hesitate on making drugs legal as it implies a society acceptance of clearly destructive behavior. The truth is that I don’t know what to do here.
I have thought that the public health model done in tobacco is more effective by coming to a consensus that there is nothing good in it and you are sick if you partake. But here is the catch it is a cultural shift that precedes enforcement.
In contrast with tobacco and drug use, the bachaquero problem is easy to solve, remove the economic incentive that Chavenomics has built by restoring the price system.
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Well there is always more than one way to skin a cat and although most people seem to think that the harshest methods are the most effective very often they are not , once read a book by an american author entitled ‘nudge’ where he proposed more psycologically subtle methods for changing the behaviour of people, perhaps those should be explored more frequently .
Having said that if coercion is part of the answer to dealing with a problem then I wouldnt balk from using it provided there were no other more effective methods available .
The other thing is that sometimes one should not go for a perfect results solution , because a perfect solution is in practice unattainable or where the cost of pursuing it is too high , what you want then is to control it so that the damage it can cause is minimized . To use a metaphor diabetes is usually considered a crhonic uncurable illness but it can be treated so people can lead near normal lives.
Of course the above comments adress the drug addiction problem not the bachaquero problem which I concurr with you is best addressed by going for the root cause .
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SOY BACHAQUERO Y QUIERO CAMBIAR…. mis bsf a usd
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I tend to agree with Amieres about the bachequeros. Consider the following scenarios and then ask yourself how you feel about each one from a moral perspective:
1. A woman asks her sister to babysit while she goes to the store to buy necessities. While she is there, she finds harina and buys more than she needs, but gives a part of it to her sister to say thank you for taking care of her baby while she was gone.
2. A woman asks the neighbor’s daughter to babysit while she goes to the store to buy necessities. While she is there, she finds harina and buys more than she needs, but gives a part of it to the neighbor’s daughter to pay her for her time taking care of her baby.
3. A woman asks the neighbor’s daughter to babysit while she goes to the store to buy necessities. While she is there, she finds harina and buys more than she needs. She sells the extra harina to her other neighbor at a marked up price and uses the profit to pay the babysitter.
4. The woman finds harina and buys more than she needs, but trades the extra with her neighbor for toilet paper, which she couldn’t find that day.
5. The woman sells the extra harina (marked up) to one neighbor and uses the money to buy toilet paper which the store didn’t have that day (also marked up) from another neighbor.
I could go on, but the point is that the woman in the last scenario is now a “bachequera”. I am pretty sure no one would have any moral qualms about the first scenario. So, at what point from 1 to 5 did she cross the line?
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Nice mental exercise.
It illustrates why buying for someone else even if it is not for profit is not that different from bachaquear.
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Amieres : I guess that given those examples I too would have a hard time setting a clean line between bachaeo and barter and personalized impromptu trading , I guess one way of tryign to set out a more distinct line would be to think of bachaqueo as a systematic practice whereby one or more persons buy on a regular basis subsidized controlled goods for the purpose of reselling them for profit (usuallly to third unrelated parties/in a public market ) , the punctual trading and barter of goods is inevitable given the irrational way in which the govt imposed system operates but strictly speaking it might scape characterizacion as bachaqueo .
I must confess that I too have ocassionally engaged in the batter and purchase of goods with other people who have access to goods I cannot purchase and dont need and viceversa. of course always on a strict reimbursable cost basis excluding any profit .
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I like your “confession”.
That is another problem, people see profit as a bad thing.
Without profits there would be no bachaqueo.
There would be no commerce.
There would be no production.
There would be no civilization.
We would back to being hunters and gatherers.
Talking about bachaqueros I would like people to imagine lines in the supermarkets filled with:
– doctors
– nurses
– school teachers
– firefighters
– engineers
– managers
And then imagine people needing surgery, children with no teachers, fires breaking out, constructions stopped, companies halted.
Are bachaqueros essential or what?
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*”I like your “confession”.”*
What a pretty little way to position yourself as a “higher, more evolved being” by claiming everybody is in the same level of rot and muck than criminals are.
Well, it’s not pretty, it’s disgusting.
*”That is another problem, people see profit as a bad thing.”*
No, a lot of venezuelan people have been raised under the stupid idea that “work is a punishment, a humiliation, is a thing reserved for the stupid and fags, whoever avoids work and exploits others is the smartest, the coolest, the VIVO”; that’s where the “profit others do for a work” is seen as something bad, because someone who’s raised to hate work, will see the ones that work as stupid imbeciles who don’t deserve anything for their work.
“Without profits there would be no bachaqueo.
There would be no commerce.
There would be no production.
There would be no civilization.
We would back to being hunters and gatherers.”
Again you are wrong, trying to stick the extortion that is bachaqueo among normal, logical stuff like commerce, production and civilization, claiming that people would revert to hunters and gatherers. Bachaqueo is the exploitation of others by gargantuan mafias fostered by the all-powerful “government”, Venezuela is reverting to the times of invading hordes that destroyed and enslaved, because they saw working as a punishment for the weak and defeated.
“Talking about bachaqueros I would like people to imagine lines in the supermarkets filled with:
– doctors
– nurses
– school teachers
– firefighters
– engineers
– managers
And then imagine people needing surgery, children with no teachers, fires breaking out, constructions stopped, companies halted.
Are bachaqueros essential or what?”
This is the same fallacy that every chaburro has tried to use as an excuse to continue bachaqueo-ing, trying desperately to separate themselves from the same criminals they claim they hate with passion.
Without bachaqueros, there would NOT EXIST ANY LINES AT ALL TO BUY BASIC STUFF IN SUPERMARKETS, because the amount of people buying AT THE SAME TIME would be less than 20%, that is a basic queue theory, less people gathering for one product or service get served faster.
You say that if people that work would go and buy their own stuff, then the world would fall apart, no, and I’m by this point trying my best not to recriprocate you this disgusting insult, and ask you, HOW THE FUCK PEOPLE THAT HAVE AN ACTUAL WORK WEND AND BUY THEIR GROCERIES BEFORE, HUH? Yeah, THERE WERE NOT 5-HOUR, 2-KILOMETER LINES FOR THAT, you know why? Because people just bought what they needed, in the middle of that disgusting capitalism chaburrismo hates so much, because capitalism itself was the driving force to keep a stable production of these products, so those doctors, nurses, firefighters, teahcers and others you mentioned knew they could go any weekend (OR ANY DAY) to buy what they wanted because they knew the products would be there by the time they arrived to buy.
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“Without bachaqueros, there would NOT EXIST ANY LINES AT ALL TO BUY BASIC STUFF IN SUPERMARKETS”
So you do think that bachaqueros somehow create scarcity.
You believe that without bachaqueros there would be no lines to buy milk.
I am sorry but you have it backwards,
bachaqueros are the result of scarcity not the cause.
Everyone knows that.
“THERE WERE NOT 5-HOUR, 2-KILOMETER LINES FOR THAT, you know why?”
Yes I do know why.
There was no scarcity.
Hence no lines.
Probably you want to know why there was no scarcity.
Because prices were not regulated.
Here is how it works:
Regulated prices
-> production drops—>SCARCITY
-> demand rises —–>SCARCITY—> Black Market (bachaqueros)
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Keep repeating to yourself that bachabasuras are good, go ahead, maybe that helps you relieve the mental punch you get everytime you’re getting ripped off your money from those dirty bastards.
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Amieres : Sorry to enter the fray this far back , but I was away , of course profit is a good thing , its the basis of trade which is essential to all productive economic activity , I am totally in agreement that profit should remunerate those benefits you recieve from others , thats the way the mind of people work when dealing with strangers , If I however where to sell to another fellow queue companion what I dont need but can buy at the regulated price , I would feel embarrased to treat such gesture of solidarity as if it were a business for me , I am not a tradesman living from the sale of foodstuffs , some things you do from solidarity to other human beings and others you do for a retribution you have earned . So profit making is the key principle that guides the economic behaviour of people when dealing with people with whom they have no spontaneous sense of solidarity . Venality is essential to human society but there are areas of life where it doenst apply .That is what repels me sometimes from the way some people in the US treat all things in life on a business basis, there is a sphere of venality and there is another one for solidarity . and a boundary , a dividing line betwen them may not always be easy to establish , but however fuzzy its always there.
Also venality can express it self two ways , there is a retributive venality , where you give and take and there is a predatory venality where you seek to take uncosnciounable advantage of anothers need or ignorance or bargaining weakness to maximize your gain , the latter I view with little sympathy. I myself have never practiced it even where conditions allowed me to.
On what constitutes trade , in law there is a division between commercial activities where the pursuit of profit is undertaken professionally and civil transactions (like selling your home or car every so many years) where although you may aspire to a profit you do not engage in such ‘profit seeking’ transactions systematically on a professional basis , No doubt in my mind that Bachaqueros for the most part are engaged in a form of retail commerce. I personally never use bachaqueros. If we cannot buy stapples ourselves or thru the web of family and personal relations we do without . In fact I have never needed them.
I dont think that much of the bachaqueo going on is essential for the working of the economy but have great tolerance for the less fortunate members of society to engage in it if only because it would be inhumane to have them starve or suffer more penuries than they already suffer by preventing them from engaging in it. .
I learned something when dealing with a large Japanese companies , they kept on their payrolls people they might replace using less people with different qualifications . Their work did not suffer the least , but they sacrificed a bit of gain out of loyalty to their employees which I found very respectable .
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I pretty much agree with most of what you are saying.
Regarding the Japanese company I think there is a lot of value in that practice.
It may not be readily apparent but loyalty has great value.
Somewhere in these comments I mentioned
that the price paid for something
is not just monetary.
There is time. Hardships like legal and personal consequences.
There is also loyalty.
I personally think bachaqueo is essential for those that are not as fortunate as you are that can do without their services.
You do well not to use their services.
But there are those that cannot spend the time in the lines and do not have a network of support like you do and just cannot go without the product, for instance baby formula.
Regarding the “predatory venality where you seek to take uncosnciounable advantage of anothers need or ignorance or bargaining weakness to maximize your gain”
What creates those “bargaining weaknesses” is the situation.
The scarcity.
If you really need a product, lets say milk,
the bachaquero provides you two options:
a- Pay 70bs + 3hours of queue at the supermarket
b- Pay 600bs and no queue from the bachaquero.
The two options are tightly linked.
Option b) only exists because option a) exists.
Some people would take option a), others would take b).
It all depends how much value do those 3 hours plus the uncertainty have for them.
Uncertainty is a big factor because the 3 hours or the milk are not guaranteed in option a).
Those that take b) are probably happy b) is available
because, for them, a) is simply a worse option.
That is the good thing about a free market economy it provides different options for people different needs.
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There are no other options.
Bachabasuras come and take every other option available away, to force other people, who have actual works, to buy from them.
It’s an extortion, enforced with the help of the dictatorship itself.
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The line gets crossed when not only the woman in your example buys “A few more packs than she needs”, but 357 more people come the same day, before her, and deplete the whole stock of the products within miles, just to resell them at 10 or 20 times the marked price, at the other side of the street, because fuck it, buying from someone all the product, so I can turn around and squeeze millions for it is a great business model according to your logic.
Bachaqueo is all about hoarding and holding the monopoly, they are extorting money from people who actually work and have a need they couldn’t possibly cover by any normal means (Aquiring the products from people who have legal, established businesses)
Bachaqueo happens when the dictatorship enforces down your throat a sickening policy of being obligated to buy from their hired hoarders because you aren’t allowed to get the product from anywhere else.
Bachaqueros are garbage, but they are still human, some could spat that they deserve a lynching, a bullet or being shamed and treated like shit like it happens now (chaburro justice style by the way), the laws have the appropiate punishments applicable to those scumbags, punishments that aren’t applied because the greatest bachaqueros/hoarders are plugged in the regime itself.
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La línea se cruza cuando no sólo la mujer en tu ejemplo compra “unos paqueticos más de los que necesita”, si no que el mismo día llegan 357 más, antes que ella, y se llevan todo el inventario de productos en kilómetros, sólo para revenderlos a 10 y 20 veces el precio marcado, en la acera del frente, porque qué carajo, comprarlo todo, para darme la vuelta y exprimir millones es un gran modelo de negocio según tu lógica.
El bachaqueo se trata de acaparar y mantener un monopolio, están extorsionando dinero de gente que sí trabaja y tienen una necesidad que no pueden cubrir de ninguna otra forma normal (Como lo sería comprar de un negocio legal y establecido)
El bachaqueo se da cuando la dictadura te empuja por la garganta la asquerosa política de obligarte a comprar de sus acaparadores tarifados porque te está prohibido comprar el producto de ningún otro lado.
Los bachaqueros son basura, pero siguen siendo gente, alguien podría espetar que merecen que los linchen, les metan un tiro o que los pongan al escarnio público y ser tratados como mierda como sucede justo ahora (El estilo chaburro de justicia por cierto), las leyes tienen los castigos apropiados aplicables para estas escorias, castigos que por cierto no se aplican porque los bachaqueros/acaparadores más grandes están enchufados al mismo régimen.
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“Bachaqueo is all about hoarding and holding the monopoly”
Not true.
Bachaqueo is one of the activities with more competition.
There are bachaqueros everywhere, of all sizes and colors.
There is no monopoly.
Also they do not hoard they sell everything they buy as fast as they can.
That is the opposite of hoarding.
“they are extorting money from people who actually work and have a need they couldn’t possibly cover by any normal means. (Aquiring the products from people who have legal, established businesses)”
Now think about this one for a moment.
If these people cannot buy from “legal, established businesses” and there were no bachaqueros…
what are they supposed to do?
starve??
These people that you mention are precisely the ones who are grateful bachaqueros exist.
They are the ones that prove bachaquerism is an essential service.
They do not feel extorted.
Yes, no one likes high prices.
But those are not created by the bachaqueros, it is the scarcity.
Bachaqueros do not set the prices, these buyers do.
“Bachaqueo happens when the dictatorship enforces down your throat a sickening policy of being obligated to buy from their hired hoarders because you aren’t allowed to get the product from anywhere else.”
Not true.
Black markets happen when there is scarcity.
There is no law that says you can’t buy from “anywhere else”.
Is just that there is no “anywhere else” to buy from.
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Your tiny habit of ignoring what you want from reality is really chavista.
Let’s deconstruct and, again, destroy your reply, one part at a time:
“Not true.
Bachaqueo is one of the activities with more competition.
There are bachaqueros everywhere, of all sizes and colors.
There is no monopoly.”
More than 85% of bachaqueros are sponsored and supported by enchufado mafias, what you say about “all sizes and colors” is bullshit.
Yes, there IS monopoly, go to Puerto Ordaz, where there are THREE persons who control ALL the illegal hoarding of basic products, you know how much they ask for a stupid pack of diapers, smartypants? Four thousand (4.000) which equals to FOUR MILLIONS of the old ones.
The monopoly is ENFORCED, another proof is that you can’t send ANY REGULATED PRODUCT by any courier service, not MRW, nor Domesa, nor Zoom, NONE, Zilch. In fact, you can’t even take the products yourself to another place, because you risk having the products confiscated by nazi guards at any alcabala, and you risk getting hauled to a prison for “smuggling”, that applies to toilet paper, diapers, medicines, and many more products.
“Now think about this one for a moment.
If these people cannot buy from “legal, established businesses” and there were no bachaqueros…
what are they supposed to do?
starve??”
If bachaqueros didn’t descent like a marabunta on every legal business place, emptying every shelf by dawn, people would be able to buy from these legal businesses, you are implying that supermarkets never get restocked and that bachaqueros don’t get their products from there, but from some nebulous, non-existant source.
“These people that you mention are precisely the ones who are grateful bachaqueros exist.
They are the ones that prove bachaquerism is an essential service.
They do not feel extorted.”
A load of lies, worthy of rizarrita’s ministery, really disgusting, I answered this on the paragraphs above, people are extorted and ripped off their money.
“Yes, no one likes high prices.
But those are not created by the bachaqueros, it is the scarcity.
Bachaqueros do not set the prices, these buyers do.”
“these buyers do” Is a reflection of the incredible amount of ignorance or dissociation you’re showing on this topic, which equals to the vomit-inducing chaburro behavior of victim shaming, where according to them, the affected people are the only ones guilty for it, because somehow they “deserve it”
“Not true.
Black markets happen when there is scarcity.
There is no law that says you can’t buy from “anywhere else”.
Is just that there is no “anywhere else” to buy from.”
Again, you’re as wrong as giordani “quiero tres ferraris” and maburro with his stupid “economic war” lies, I already told you that chaburros are forcing people to buy from their bachabasuras, because they don’t allow you to get the product from anywhere else, but you choose to ignore everything I said and stick to your stupid thesis of “people are screwing themselves just because they want to”
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Todo lo que han comentado amieres, renacuajo67 y otros más no es más que basura y el aupamiento de prácticas viciadas. Independiente de que el bachaqueo sea promovido por el gobierno, la situación económica y toda esa vaina, ser un buhonero es una actividad que infringe la ley y no debe ser permitido, ni menos aceptado socialmente.
Desde la ley no hay diferencia entre el buhonero que vendía mercancía hace 10 años proveyéndose en el mercado mayorista a precios iguales a los del comercio formal, y el que hoy llaman bachaqueros que compra en los mercados regulados del gobierno y vende en un esquema de precios de mercado no regulado, que no es libre, porque libre mercado y mercado no regulado no son la misma vaina.
Pero claro, ahora la lógica de mucha gente es justificar la delincuencia, la estafa y la corrupción.
Con esa lógica, no entiendo qué tanto le critican al chavizmo, si el chavizmo es la ideología de la tolerancia de las conductas delictuales, o es que ahora para identificarse con “el pueblo” consentimos y somos condescendientes con:
a) la venta informal fuera de la ley,
b) el robo de la electricidad y agua potable
c) la apropiación indebida del espacio público
d) el fraude fiscal
e) la contratación en régimen inferior al mínimo legal
f) la aplicación arbitraria y desequilibrada de la ley
Dígannos pues cuándo prevemos pasar a la aceptación social de
g) la apropiación indebida de la propiedad privada
h) el tráfico de personas
i) la violación de la morada y las libertades individuales básicas y
j) el establecimimento de la esclavitud
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Tu problema es con los buhoneros.
O más bien, con la parte buhoneril de los bachaqueros.
Creo que hay que diferenciar que hace diferente a un bachaquero de un buhonero cualquiera.
El bachaquero compra productos regulados y los vende a precios de mercado libre, lo que algunos llaman, no sin razón, exorbitantes.
La mayoría de la gente no tiene problema con los buhoneros (no es tu caso ya lo sé).
Los ven como una molestia menor y a veces una conveniencia, como comprar unos tostoncitos a un vendedor en la autopista.
La clave de su negocio es precisamente la conveniencia y los bajos precios.
TODO EL MUNDO tiene problemas con los bachaqueros.
Sienten que suben los precios, crean colas, crean escasez, extorsionan a la gente.
Si los bachaqueros fueran legales, vendieran en locales comerciales, pagaran impuestos, derechos de frente, dieran garantías, entregaran a domicilio y dieran buen servicio con una sonrisa, le gente seguiría detestando a los bachaqueros.
Pero ninguna de las cosas de que se les acusa es cierta.
Y ESE es el problema que yo tengo con los que detestan a los bachaqueros.
No contigo que detestas es a los buhoneros.
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Simple, porque el venezolano se caracteriza por su débil y sesgada ética.
Les molesta que les vendan caro pero no les molesta que no participen el igualdad de condiciones en el mercado. Es como el que se molesta porque le suben el recibo de la electricidad y recibe apagones y dice “Jesse grandísimo HdP!!!” pero va y le compra al carajo que en su kiosko se roba la luz en la calle.
O peor, cosa que pasa bastante en el interior, pagas un recibo bien caro del agua potable en tu domicilio, pero tienes cortes y mala calidad o ni siquiera tienes el servicio, pero llevas a lavar el carro en un autolavado ilegal, que se roba el agua, no paga impuestos ni tasas de uso y además cuando enciende las bombas destruye la infraestructura cascarosa de abastecimiento de agua potable.
Por eso a la gente no le molesta el buhonero pero sí el bachaquero, porque le cobra caro algo que cree que debería venderle más barato, el problema de fondo independientemente de la situación económica, es que la gente es permisiva con la actividad. La actividad es la misma, lo que cambiaron son las variables del entorno.
Y sobre que si la gente detestaría igual al bachaquero así se integrase al comercio normal, pues eso es falso. Aún no he visto ningún ataque a por ejemplo los que venden televisores a precio de dólar negro a pesar de que puedes ir a hacer tu cola o pegarte a algún enchufado para que te venda un televisor chino importado por el gobierno por un décimo del precio. El único que los tilda de especuladores es el gobierno y aún así, veo televisores con PVJusto de 1,5 MM de VEF, equivalentes a un Haier que podría conseguirse (con buenas conexiones y enchufes rojos) en menos de 30mil.
Y eso por una razón, la gente entiende que el que paga impuestos, empleados, servicios, no tiene dólares para importar y además está siendo perseguido constantemente por el gobierno tiene que vender caro. En cambio, como el bachaquero se lo ve como un carajo que sólo invierte el tiempo y el precio de lo que pagó, pero le vende N veces por ese precio, la gente considera que la ganancia es desmedida, exorbitante y no justa con respecto a lo que el tipo invirtió. Sea verdad o no, no interesa.
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Es que el carajo se bota por defender a esos ladrones, parece que fuera que tuviera familia metida en ese peo, que no son nada comparados con los bachabasuras que tienen escuadrones de motorizados que persiguen las cavas por kilómetros, con hordas y hordas de gente que les pagan para que se sienten a pernoctar frente a un mercado para llevárselo todo cuando llegue, con varios choros armados para robar lo que pueden comprar los que no son de la horda, pero que igual quiere justificarlo.
O pareciera que como él gana más de 80-100 millones mensuales, pues “no le molesta” ir a que le roben dos tercios de esa plata haciendo un mercadito pajúo que con las mentiras de precios regulados sale en menos de 10 mil pero que a precios de mercado debería estar rondando tal vez el doble, pero para evitar sentir que lo están robando, pues dice que es algo válido y legal.
Ahora el carajo sale y compara los bachabasuras con empresas legales como los de mensajería o un tipo con una pizzería que reparta a domicilio, una comparación bastante pobre y falaz, porque como se ve no existe todavía al primero de esos carajos que tenga monopolizado todo el ramo y de paso monopolio forzado por el chavismo como pasa con los bachabasuras. Si de verdad no existiese un monopolio, la gente podría DECIDIR ir a un mercado legal y comprar sus vainas (que escaseen no viene al caso) o pagar veinte veces el costo de un producto por un piche flete de dos cuadras.
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Well, by reading this alert, intellectual blog, the “stupid” and “inept” Chavista regime succeeds again in its primitive, obvious objectives:
1- Create false “enemies”, huge smoke screens and phantom mirages.
2- Create conflict and division within the local populace, even within Chavistas.
3- Further divide everyone, even within the opposition, to weaken and conquer.
4- Divert the public attention from the real root underlying problems.
Gustavo said it best, except this latest trick works everywhere it seems, at all levels, even Internationally!
“Even if such moves are public relations panaceas that avoid the core of the problem, the standoff between Chavista mayors and the central government does pose an interesting thought experiment about decentralization. It is rare to see public officials on the same side of the political divide at odds with each other, and challenging one of the very institutions that Chavismo has worked so hard to destroy: separation of powers between levels of government.
Bachaquero-shaming will not eradicate the black market of consumer goods, nor will it deal with long supermarket queues that have become our daily slice of life. But it has certainly proven an effective headline grabber for those who promote it. And in this electoral year free-for-all, it wouldn’t surprise me if more mayors got behind sensationalist measures like this one. Because, yes, all publicity is good publicity, but its even better when it serves to distract Venezuelans from questioning the true roots of the problem. And they’re already proving me right.”
Gotta love the Bachaqueros, the annoying Colas, the Apagones and whatever kills Chavismo.
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Anything that serves to topple the regime is but another instrument to accomplish that objective, but that doesn’t mean that we have to “love” those instruments, they are disgusting and damaging, but they’ll serve to destroy chaburrismo.
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Soy bachaquero y quiero cambiar
Dólares…
Bolívares…….
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** “Soy bachabasura y quiero que todos me cambien todo su sueldo por tres pendejadas, o mejor, dos pendejadas que yo les permita comprar.” **
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Some define what bachaqueros do as commerce. I call it price gouging. As defined in the dictionary “Gouge means stealing by overcharging. If your local gas station puts the price of gas way up because a storm is coming, you may say that the station owner gouges prices — and that’s illegal” What I see is that we’re experiencing a major economic storm, and regardless what the root cause is, gouging is what bachaqueros do.
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What if there is a long line at the gas station
and you just cannot take the time to wait in line
because you have to prepare for the storm?
What if someone offers to queue for you, you know, for a price?
Is that price gouging?
or performing a service?
Because that is basically what bachaqueros do.
What is the difference?
The bachaquero does not prevent you from buying at the supermarket price.
Instead he offers you an option.
It is up to you to take it.
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Of course , it depends on the price being charged and on whether the person doing the queue doenst need the gas but is only doing the queue to press you into hiring him for an exorbitant price .
Lets assume moreover that when doing the queue to pay at the counter inside the store someone just gets in the queue together with his friends or relatives to make it longer so that you (being behind ) get impatient and buy the place in the queue from him . Would that be a fair trading practice or profiteering.??
Lets take a third example , during the Civil War if you were recruited you could hire someone to take your place as a soldier , I would say paying such person is Ok because he hasnt created the pressure , the pressure came from the outside so if he is prepared to take your place thats a service worth paying for.(Profesor Sandell from Harvard however has a different view) .
Another example a hurricane just passed thru your town and destroyed its water mains , the storekeeper is prepared to sell you 10 bottles of drinking water at 50 times its regular price , is that OK or is that profiteering .??
Generally when you take advantage of a persons in a situation of duress (which you may have contributed to creating) to charge him an exhorbitant price and thus make a ‘killing’ thats not judged very nice .
No easy answer to any of these questions .I guess every one has a personal answer depending on his ethical sensitivity.
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They do prevent me from buying at the supermarket prices. They DO buy more than they are allowed through their contacts at the store and sell at an overinflated price. That’s what I call gouging. At least to me what they do is akin to ticket scalping (also illegal, at least in the US) where one creates more scarcity on the relatively few available tickets so they can be sold at a much higher price. To me, creating an option means bringing to the market a new product of equal or better quality than the one already available, not removing the few items that now exist in the market.
“What if someone offers to queue for you, you know, for a price?” If the profit is reasonable I guess it may not be considered gouging, but still, I think it would still be illegal (in the US) for an individual to sell gas.
And, Amieres, since we are not going to convince the other of our point of view, we should just agree to disagree.
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“we should just agree to disagree”
Yes, but the debate is still fruitful. and do not be so sure neither can be convinced.
“still, I think it would still be illegal (in the US) for an individual to sell gas.”
He does not need to sell you gas, you can switch cars.
You’ll use his car while he queues at the station.
The point of the mental exercise is that this is clearly
a case where there is no price gouging
he did not create the bad situation
he is not forcing you in anyway to take the deal
you arrive at a mutually satisfactory price
(which can be really high)
or you part ways.
What he is doing is offering you an option.
take it or leave it
The others are not doing that
Would you rather he did not give you the option?
So this is just like a bachaquero offering
to make a queue and buy food for you.
You can refuse or accept the deal.
your choice.
if you buy from the bachaquero
someone else would get angry that the bachaquero
left him no food.
But it was not the bachaquero
it was you that left him no food.
If you refuse and prefer to make the line
then you can be angry that a bachaquero
is in front of you in the line and maybe left you no food.
But again it was not the bachaquero
it was someone buying from the bachaquero.
and believe me that someone has as much of a right
to buy that food as you do,
even if they have someone else make the line for them
See the problem is not the bachaquero
is the other people buying for themselves
because the real problem is the scarcity
if you eliminate all the bachaqueros and
lines would be longer
there would be more violence
more corruption
more hoarding
the situation would be much worse
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If they eliminate bachaqueros the queues which I make to buy the controlled goods I need would be reduced at least in half, there would be twice as many goods available for me to buy , i would stand a greater chance of finding what I search for . the hassle and discomfort of making a queue would be reduced , there would probably be less line jumping by one person bringing in 5 others that werent in the queue until the last moment adding to the time spent in the line , ther would be less disorder .
Thats the good part of any such measure , the bad part is that those people would cease to have the extra income that engaging in bachaqueo affords them, which would have them face greater harships to maintain themselves and their famililies .
In my books the bad part is one I would willingly suffer to help people in need not starve or suffer from increased want .
Maybe there is a gain for those who dont want to make any queues because they dont have the time or the patience for it , in having bachaqueros buy the food for later resale .Saves them the stress and effort of having to go from store to store searching for what they need , the prices to be paid would be much higher , but if your are full of money it wouldn matter to you that much . Of course with inflation being so high its not everybody that can afford buying things from bachaqueros except in a situation of extreme need .
So for the former group of people , short of money and prepared to go thru the hassle of going from store to store queing to buy needed goods Bachaqueros serve no useful economic purpose and on the contrary compound the discomfort of buying regulated stuff . For those who have the money but not the time or patience to search for different goods in different stores the Bachaqueros serve a useful function .
For those who like myself worry about the bachaqueros lack of money to maitain themselves in todays inflationary environment , even if they dont serve any useful economic purpose or only a marginal one , its ok to tolerate the activities of bachaqueros out of solidarity to their difficult lot.
In short to the questions made in this blog about the usefulness of bachaquero activities we have an ambivalent answer , its useful for some and probably not useful for many others .
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“If they eliminate bachaqueros the queues which I make to buy the controlled goods I need would be reduced at least in half, there would be twice as many goods available for me to buy , i would stand a greater chance of finding what I search for . the hassle and discomfort of making a queue would be reduced , there would probably be less line jumping by one person bringing in 5 others that werent in the queue until the last moment adding to the time spent in the line , ther would be less disorder .”
You are forgeting something.
All the products the bachaqueros buy are for someone else.
Eliminate the bachaqueros and those people would have to queue instead.
The lines would be much longer.
And of course the bachaqueros that are not making money
would have to do something else…
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Do you guys remember when Mercal and PDVAL
was an option for people to buy subsidized products?
People would make their lines and get cheap produce.
Those that did not want to wait would go to the supermarket.
With the controlled prices every supermarket became a Mercal.
But not only there is a need for subsidized products
some people still need to buy without long waits
Except now it is illegal
Hence the bachaqueros
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People who cant buy stuff the bachaqueros have bought before and made more scarce constitute at least a large part of the Bachaqueros customers. Do note bachaqueros make ordinary peoples visits to the supermarkets less efficient , because it makes it less likely that they can buy all the stuff they are looking for in each visit. so the absence of bachaqueros might help reduce the number of visits an ordinary purchaser has to make to the supermarkets to get what he needs .
The big difference of course between buying thngs at the supermarket and in a bachaquero stall is the cost, do keep in mind that for most people the problem is not simply finding stuff , its also paying for it , inflation has deeply eroded peoples purchasing capacity , buying from bachaqueros means having less money you need to maintain yourself and your family . This is a big point.
Bachaqueros not only make the visits to the supermarkets less efficient and thus more numerous by making the goods to be found there more scarce ( because of the bachaquero herds buying it ) they make life much more expensive at a time when most families have a hard time making ends meet.
Still to be admitted is that for people who cant be bothered to make the queues or dont have the time for it and have more money than the rest it pays to buy very difficut to get stuff from a bachaquero , so for that part of the population of course bachaqueros serve a useful function .
The characterization of them as the heroes of the hour because of their application to the virtues of capitalist trade is one most ordinary venezuelans would find grating . and yet they are only responding to the challenges of a situation which is not of their making ( even if they might contribute somewhat to making it worse) . Again to summarize: they are part of the problem and they are part of the solution , they make things worse for most and easier for many thus at least for the latter they do provide a useful service. !!
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“What if someone offers to queue for you, you know, for a price?”
Because go to “hacer bulto” and charge just to move your ass outta the way is perfectly legal and ethic, sure, bro.
“Because that is basically what bachaqueros do.”
No, bachabasuras go and “make bulto”, getting into the way, and charge for letting people buy what they need, it’s the same case that if a bunch of people came and blocked the main avenue in a town, then they charged every person that needed to go throught said street an exorbitant amount, it’s duress, plain and simple.
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it’s the same case that if a bunch of people came and blocked the main avenue in a town, then they charged every person that needed to go throught said street an exorbitant amount, it’s duress, plain and simple.
Like the GN or Army stopping traffic at an alcabala
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And charging you half of your monthly income just to get past the alcabala.
Alcabalas, or checkpoints, are useless for the supossed purpose they have been assigned, which is “help against crime”, cops and soldiers (and everybody else and their mothers) know that criminals NEVER go to the main streets of cities, where said points are located, instead resorting to lurk in residential areas where they can steal and kill at their pleasure.
So, cops and soldiers won’t patrol either, because they’re too damn lazy to do so.
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Let the record show my full support for Amieres’ Pro-Bachaquero stance.
There are other hidden benefits that these brave Entrepreneurs bring to the table:
1/ As Gustavo pointed out, the endless Queues are wreaking havoc even among Chavista ranks:
“the standoff between Chavista mayors and the central government does pose an interesting thought experiment about decentralization. It is rare to see public officials on the same side of the political divide at odds with each other, and challenging one of the very institutions that Chavismo has worked so hard to destroy: separation of powers between levels of government.”
2/ Arguably, the Bachaqueros keep the Colas nicely beefed up, pardon the pun, which seems to further infuriate everyone alike, including the majority of the Still-Chavista people in line.
Sorry, but last we checked, there’s still almost 30% of pro-government, pro-Maduro, believe it or not. Plus another 30% anti “burguesia”, anti “capitalism”, anti opposition, anti-Mud, who still LOVE el Comandante Supremo Chavez, love Populism, love Socialism and all that crap. That’s the majority of the people that you see, who voted Repeatedly vor Chavez, and even for Maduro and the PSUV, repeatedly, through almost 17 years.
Perhaps all of these Chavista, socialista people deserve a bit more Patria, huh? Perhaps they need to stand in line, under the sun, for a few more years, to see if they finally begin to comprehend, one hot summer day, that Chavismo and Populism are a stupid lie. Maybe it’s just some form of ironic justice for many of them, is it not. Let’em get really pissed off, fighting for harina pan like chavista primates.
After the next elections are stolen again, with any meaningless result, they’ll have plenty of time to think it over again, standing in line, day after day, as things continue to get worse. About 5 Million lobotomized people still continue to Leech and/or steal of the Dictatorship’s direct payroll. More than half of the ignorant, brain-washed, or corrupt populace still loves Chavismo and dislikes the opposition, according to the latest polls, published right here on CCS Chronicles. Nothing a few more months of Colas and Escasez can’t cure.
Love Bachaqueros.
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amieres doesn’t support bachabasuras because they somehow hurt the regime’s image, he supports them because he excuses and justifies their illegal extortion and monopoly claiming they are just “victims of circumstances”, which is a pathetic, disgusting lie, the same one that the putrid mortadela said in 1999 when he claimed that “stealing was okay if you claim you were hungry”
Also, economy doesn’t affect dictatorships, just look at cuba and norcorea.
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I suspect that most of the antagonism that we are seeing towards the bachaqueros is not what they are doing, but that they are doing it in our supermarkets. Be honest with yourselves. The bachaqueros are typically from the lowest classes of society. If they had skills and bit of dignity, they would probably be doing something else. These are the very people that Chavez wooed by promising and then giving free things. It never bothered us so much when they were queuing at their local Mercal. But, now they are invading our supermarkets, and bringing with them all of their squalling brats!
Ok, I don’t much like it either. But, what they are doing is taking advantage of stupid rules. And don’t forget that they are ones being hit hardest by the inflation. It is not immoral. If there is any immorality, it is on the part of the government that created this system.
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2 days ago, I found myself interpreting for a young Guinean lady, detained by the Department of Homeland Security here after seeking political asylum. She explained how she was separated from her entire village, quarantined by the UN helping forces, after an Ebola outbreak that killed her husband, mother and many more, causing a witch-hunt, and a mini-civil war against the helping doctors, whom many poor villagers thought were causing the epidemic with whatever evil curses.
Long story short, the place was ravaged by disease, war, famine, forced marriages, rape, and every other plague else you can possibly imagine. So the UN got her and others out of there, by plane, then buses, through Morocco, then Brazil, Mexico and finally the USA.
She related that her only means of survival for her and many others in such dire conditions was Bachaquiando!! of course. The men in the village would harvest corn or rice, in good times.. and the women would hold it, price it up a bit, waiting for the demand to rise, then resell it.
This economic barter practice is as old as any organized tribe in the world, centuries and centuries before the wheel or even controlled fire were invented. If there is “acaparamiento” or over-pricing involved, it’s the fault of the governing mystic Shamans or corrupt Chavistas, same difference.
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“…price it up a bit…”
For bachabasuras, “a bit” means “twenty to fifty times, after hoarding the entire crop”.
The only way bachaqueo would become worse, would be if bachabasuras outright steal the products from the people who managed to buy at gunpoint at the market’s exit, and I’m pretty sure they’ve been doing that for some time by now…
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Best. Headline. Ever.
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Ralph
Necesito que me ayudes a subir un post en ND
http://www.noticierodigital.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1101570&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0
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Yo no pierdo mi tiempo con los trolls de noticiero neurasténico, pero sí me río al ver como perico silva, perdedor pirata y los demás pendejos del ministerio de mentiras chaburro intentan molestar a los demás, y como terminan saliendo con las tablas en la cabeza cada vez.
Supongo que por la forma en que defiendes acérrimamente las conductas criminales (como el modelo de monopolio hambreador creado por el chaburrismo que llaman bachaqueo) bajo una moral difusa y con una sociopatía nauseabunda (como lo hiciste con el tema de las toallas sanitarias y los pañales en esta misma página, te lo puedo buscar si tanto quieres llevar), debes ser un posteador asiduo en ese lugar, más o menos como esos que se las tiran de que son muy “balanceados e iluminados por encima de los mortales” y que son unos chaburros de closet porque se aferran a que esa estupidez ridícula que llaman “viveza criolla” es algo bueno pero que en realidad no es más que ser un imbécil.
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Tampoco voy a picar el enlace, no es que desconfíe de tí…
…
…Pero dados tus antecedentes y tu postura en estos asuntos…
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El enlace es seguro,
en todo el caso el post se llama “yo si defiendo a los bachaqueros”
por si prefieres usar google
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Mira, para terminar de zanjar el peo, es cierto que los bachaqueros no son el 100% del problema, es verdad que la escasez es causada por las estupideces del régimen chaburro al haberse puesto a robarle las propiedades a los productores y al habernos montado esa mierda que es el control de cambio, pero eso es precisamente porque son pasos que realizaron para montar un monopolio para tener sometida a la gente.
El bachaquero en un escalafón es un tarifado del régimen, un carajo al que le paga un enchufado para que vaya a hacer cola y saque los productos que el régimen obliga a los comercios a regalar, otros escalafones de bachaqueo incluyen los “humildes” que no llegan ni al 20% que venden cuatro mariqueritas en sus casas, y los que están por encima que desvían hasta barcos cargados de containers de mercancías a otros países luego de registrarlas acá en Venezuela.
El chavismo obliga a la gente a que compre a los bachaqueros por dos razones, primera, porque el régimen, y esto lo dijiste tú mismo, PROVOCÓ la escasez al expropiar y montar control de cambio para ellos meterse esa plata, se le llama sencillamente “eliminar a toda la competencia”; y segundo, porque no dejan que ni puedas mover un frasco de mayonesa por una mensajería como Zoom, Domesa o MRW, y puedes preguntar en cualquier agencia de esa gente si puedes mandar productos regulados y te dirán de cajón que no, porque esa es una providencia que el régimen se sacó del trasero, para obligar a la gente a comprarles a ellos, porque de bolas, así me tuviera que pagar el flete desde otro estado, preferiría pagar 350 bolos por una caja con 20 pastillas de acetaminofén que dejarme robar más de 1000 que pretende un bachaquero que le pague cuando esa vaina tiene el precio risible de CINCO bolívares.
Es una mafia creada por el chavismo, a la cual se sumaron todas esas personas que no tienen ninguna ética ni moral más que la de “que se jodan todos menos yo”, que incluye justificar de cualquier manera posible lo que hacen para no verse como las plagas que son.
Ahora, tú saldrás a esta altura de nuevo a decir que es que HAY gente humilde entre ellos y tal, pues entérate, es a ESA gente humilde “y tal”, a los que están metiendo presos y mostrando como trofeos de cacería los sociópatas del régimen para divertir a las masas rabiosas que se regodean de ver sufrir a otra persona, como es el caso de este tema de la humillación y odio público al que son sometidos esos carajos con los monos naranjas, cosa que el régimen hace con dos objetivos, uno de ellos es quitarse del camino a posibles competidores para mantener el monopolio, y la otra es tratar de mejorar su imagen ante su susodicha base electoral, que aunque esos carajos hagan fraude y trácala pareja, aún consideran necesario que haya una cantidad de gente que de verdad vote por ellos, por lo menos para que salgan a hacer bulto sin tener que pagarles tanto.
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