Sick Utopia

In my forthcoming (July 18) book, The Problem with Socialism, I describe how socialism is always and everywhere an economic poison regardless of the form of government.  Socialism is socialism.  As Frederic Bastiat explained in his classic, The Law, the imposition of one social “plan” or set of “plans” on all of the society – a defining characteristic of all varieties of socialism — will have the same effects whether it is instituted by democracy or by a dictatorship.  Obamacare is Obamacare regardless of whether it was imposed by democracy or by a dictator.

All of history has proven that the effects of socialism are always and everywhere mass impoverishment; the destruction of civil liberties; tyrannical government; a population dependent on the state for survival; and the enrichment of the ruling class.  Everyone is equally impoverished while the political elite live high on the hog, whether it is the Soviet Union, African socialism, Latin American socialism, or any other kind of socialism.

At best, socialism turns people into spoiled children constantly demanding more and more freebies at the expense of . . . . who knows?  At worst, it becomes a totalitarian nightmare where dissenters are mass murdered by the government water “her body is filled with small bubbles and they sting horribly.”

Like all other socialist demagogues, Venezuela’s wealthy, living-lives-of-luxury, socialist political elite blame all the disasters they have created on various bogeymen, from “the American government’s efforts to destabilize the country” (according to the New York Times), to “a drought that has crippled Venezuela’s ability to generate hydroelectric power.”  This last reason is reminiscent of how the Soviets blamed the results of their disastrous policy of socialized agriculture on seventy straight years of “drought.”

Just about anyone who is able to leave Venezuela is doing so.  So far, it’s a much easier task than leaving that other Caribbean socialist “paradise,” Cuba.

Venezuela has joined a very long list of countries whose economies have been utterly destroyed by just a few years of socialism.  Meanwhile, in the U.S. hordes of “millennials,” the first PC generation, a generation that has been indoctrinated since kindergarten in the alleged evils of capitalism and taught to worship Big Government as their savior, are wildly cheering a 74-year-old communist who wants to be president on the promise of making America the next Venezuela.  (Like the Soviet communists who called their government the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, not the Union of Soviet Communist Republics, I don’t distinguish between “communists” and “socialists”; they’re all the same gang of looters, frauds, demagogues, and tyrants).

The post Sick Utopia appeared first on LewRockwell.