POWERLINE sets the idea of “what socialism really is” when they note…
My one quibble is the assumption that Venezuela exemplifies income equality along with socialism. In fact, relatives and friends of the Chavez/Maduro regime have made off with billions while the majority went hungry. Socialism always leads to this kind of stark inequality. As I wrote at the link:
[T]hat is what socialism is all about: great wealth and power for a handful, poverty and humiliation for the vast majority.
Venezuela is in the midst of economic and social collapse. Which country do you think liberals would love to model our country after?
Rafael Acevedo is Founder Director of Econintech, and teaches at the Universidad Centroccidental Lisandro Alvarado in Barquisimeto. He is also Director of Politics of the Venezuelan Freedom Movement.
The longer speech by Rafael Acevedo of which the above is a truncation is HERE. Dinesh D’Souza’s wife ,Debbie D’Souza, a native Venezuelan, did a PRAGERU video as well:
Before delving into the below videos, one should keep in mind that what socialism does is produce giant monopolies. THAT is the theme you see in all socialist countries. Criminal, governemtn, or corporate monopolies — Milton Friedman:
We’ve read and watched the news of Venezuelan society collapsing under the weight of socialism. But how bad is it really? See this firsthand account from documentary filmmaker Ami Horowitz.
Many of America’s legal and illegal immigrants fled nations that were ruined by corrupt politicians and failed government policies. But once here, they support the same things. Why? Gloria Alvarez, Project Director at the National Civic Movement of Guatemala, explains. (Here is her interview on Dennis’ radio program.)
Is Bernie Sanders right? Are people living under socialism better off? Brazil is a good case study. Felipe Moura Brasil, a journalist and Veja magazine columnist, explains how his country has fared under socialism.
What is democratic socialism? What makes it different than regular socialism? Has it been tried? Could it work in the United States? Comedian and political commentator Steven Crowder, host of Louder With Crowder, explains.
Which is better: socialism or capitalism? Does one make people kinder and more caring, while the other makes people greedy and more selfish? In this video, Dennis Prager explains the moral differences between socialism and capitalism, and why anyone who wants a kind and generous society must support one and oppose the other.
Some people are not aware of the following idea… that is, that the Nordic countries can afford many of their wellfare programs in the past BECAUSE they do not pay for their defense. We do. (If you do not know much about this, see my post on “SCANDINAVIAN SOCIALISM“):
Was America once socialist? Surprisingly, yes. The early settlers who arrived at Plymouth and Jamestown in the early 1600s experimented with socialist communes. Did it work? History professor Larry Schweikart of the University of Dayton shares the fascinating story.
“The Progressive Income Tax” is one of those economic terms that gets bandied about, but few actually know what it means or how it works. This tale of three similar brothers with three different incomes (but one shared expense) helps explain the tax system under which we live. Adapted from an article by noted investor and economist, Kip Hagopian, and narrated by actress Carolyn Hennesy of “General Hospital” and “True Blood” fame, this animated story will change the way you think about how you pay your taxes.
Dennis Prager first read from an AP story about Jamie Foxx visiting the death hole known as Venezuela (see the Free Republic post: http://tinyurl.com/z8phhkz). Later in the show he actually gets a call from Caracas, Venezuela. I teared up a bit during the call, as did Prager apparently. Good stuff Maynard!
Here is Dennis’ Facebook comment:
Actor Jamie Foxx will pay no price for his visit with Venezuela President Maduro. A rare combo of doing evil — supporting a brutal dictator — and being stupid. Foxx will get picked up by a limo and go home to his mansion in California while the people of Venezuela starve and wait in line for toilet paper thanks to the socialist revolution.
Leftists don’t care about people, they care about ideas. This is Jamie Foxx. He care doesn’t care about the Venezuelan people. He cares about an idea. He loves the idea of equality. It’s painful. Just painful. Will there be a price paid for such radical stupidity? There is nothing a a left-winger could do that would elicit criticism.
Is capitalism moral or greedy? If it’s based on greed and selfishness, what’s the best alternative economic system? Perhaps socialism? And if capitalism is moral, what makes it so? Walter Williams, a renowned economist at George Mason University, answers these questions and more.
Cultural depictions of capitalism are almost all negative. There’s the Monopoly guy with the top hat and cigar. There’s Gordon Gekko saying, “Greed is good.” And, most recently, there’s the hedonism of the “Wolf of Wall Street”. The message is clear: capitalism is selfish. Socialism, or something like it, is selfless. In fact, the opposite is true. Renowned social critic George Gilder offers this startling insight: capitalism, at its core, is first an expression of altruism; that is, of giving. An entrepreneur can only succeed by satisfying a customer’s need. This is why capitalism, and only capitalism, can create the prosperity that all societies crave and why all other economic prescriptions are doomed to failure.
This election season there’s a lot of talk about corruption, about politicians being “bought and sold”, and about “crony capitalism”. What do those terms mean? Why should we care? Is there a way to reduce corruption and restore our trust in government? Author Jay Cost, staff writer at The Weekly Standard, answers these questions and proposes a solution that every society could benefit from.
Small businesses employ over 57 million Americans. And yet, the government’s taxes and regulations overwhelmingly favor big businesses at the expense of small ones. Why? Find out in this short video.
How big should the government be? And what is its proper role in the daily lives of Americans? The Left and Right have opposite answers.
From transportation to energy, and everything in between, should the government invest money in as many promising projects as possible? Or would that actually doom many of those ventures to failure? Burt Folsom, historian and professor at Hillsdale College, answers those questions by drawing on the fascinating history of the race to build America’s railroads and airplanes.
With the smartest experts and the best economists, could the federal government run the U.S. economy? Could it keep America’s $17 trillion economy going like a well-oiled machine? Steve Forbes, Chairman and Editor-in-Chief of Forbes Media, explains why no one person or group can “run” the economy, and why any attempt to do so can only make things worse.
Using an ancient Soviet method, 75% of Venezuelans have lost an average of 19 pounds and so can you! Who needs human rights and free press when you can get back to your old college weight? Watch the video and let Remy show you how it all works.
Dennis Prager first read from an AP story about Jamie Foxx visiting the death hole known as Venezuela (see the Free Republic post). Later in the show he actually gets a call from Caracas, Venezuela. I teared up a bit during the call, as did Prager apparently. Good stuff Maynard!
First, it was shortage of toilet paper. Then, a shortage of food. Now, Venezuelais facing a beer shortage.
The official excuse is that the country isn’t able to import enough ingredients, and that the evil farmers are holding out. As Lenin said of those evil farmers, they are nothing butpetite bourgeoisie. Why, they arethe dung of the devil!….
[From an older post] Protein Wisdom has this awesome post! Read the rest… linked at bottom:
In a move that will no doubt help further the Venezuelan government’s aim of establishing a socialist utopian republic, President Nicolas Maduro announced this week that grocery stores will soon begin the mandatory fingerprinting of customers. The peculiar initiative, which could be implemented by the end of the year, is meant to help combat the hoarding and smuggling of government-subsidized goods.
Venezuela exerts stringent currency and price controls on many products in an attempt to keep them affordable for its poorest citizens. Unfortunately, a staggering quantity of this merchandise ends up being secreted out of the country and re-sold at a profit in neighboring Colombia.
The oil-rich nation has been experiencing a chronic shortage of food supplies for a long while. Maduro, who succeeded the late Hugo Chavez, accused the political opposition last year of engineering the country’s shortages with the help of the CIA in order to undermine his government.
[…]
Faced with empty store shelves due to the combination of price controls, currency restrictions, and smuggling, Venezuelans are having a hard time finding the basics they need to live. The crisis has spurred the development of an app called Abasteceme (“Supply Me”), which allows shoppers to document and share where they have managed to find products.
The fingerprinting proposal, which critics decried as an invasion of privacy
Privacy? PRIVACY??!!?? What an out-dated, bourgeoisie, imperialistic, patriarchal notion! Honest people have no need for privacy!
Harruuummmmph.
and an attempt to institute a Cuban-style rationing program, would be similar to an anti-fraud system Venezuela currently employs during elections,
Voter id is only valid in Progressive socialist nations to keep enemies-of-the-people from reactionary crimes. Those of you in countries that have not repented of your oppressive capitalistic crimes must never, ever use ID of any kind when it comes to voting.
You see… down deep all these “freedom of speech” guys who say they are libertarian or for freedom of thought — are really small tyrant down deep. The Left always falls into what is in their nature.
Protein Wisdom has this awesome post! Read the rest… linked at bottom:
In a move that will no doubt help further the Venezuelan government’s aim of establishing a socialist utopian republic, President Nicolas Maduro announced this week that grocery stores will soon begin the mandatory fingerprinting of customers. The peculiar initiative, which could be implemented by the end of the year, is meant to help combat the hoarding and smuggling of government-subsidized goods.
Venezuela exerts stringent currency and price controls on many products in an attempt to keep them affordable for its poorest citizens. Unfortunately, a staggering quantity of this merchandise ends up being secreted out of the country and re-sold at a profit in neighboring Colombia.
The oil-rich nation has been experiencing a chronic shortage of food supplies for a long while. Maduro, who succeeded the late Hugo Chavez, accused the political opposition last year of engineering the country’s shortages with the help of the CIA in order to undermine his government.
[…]
Faced with empty store shelves due to the combination of price controls, currency restrictions, and smuggling, Venezuelans are having a hard time finding the basics they need to live. The crisis has spurred the development of an app called Abasteceme (“Supply Me”), which allows shoppers to document and share where they have managed to find products.
The fingerprinting proposal, which critics decried as an invasion of privacy
Privacy? PRIVACY??!!?? What an out-dated, bourgeoisie, imperialistic, patriarchal notion! Honest people have no need for privacy!
Harruuummmmph.
and an attempt to institute a Cuban-style rationing program, would be similar to an anti-fraud system Venezuela currently employs during elections,
Voter id is only valid in Progressive socialist nations to keep enemies-of-the-people from reactionary crimes. Those of you in countries that have not repented of your oppressive capitalistic crimes must never, ever use ID of any kind when it comes to voting.
You see… down deep all these “freedom of speech” guys who say they are libertarian or for freedom of thought — are really small tyrant down deep. The Left always falls into what is in their nature.
From the “I bet you didn’t know this” files via Breaitbart:
Bill de Blasio is not the only red coming to power in New York City. He will also be joined by a “progressive” majority City Council. Here is a sampling of three of those he will be working with:
—Melissa Mark-Viverito,
top contender for City Council Speaker, went down to Bolivia to campaign for that nation’s marxistdictator, Evo Morales, in 2009. Records of the infamous red narco-terrorist organization FARC show that ties between that organization and Morales stretch all the way back to at least 2003, with meetings organized in Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela between senior FARC operatives and Morales. That was two years before Morales’s Chavez-bought “election” in 2005, and the collaboration continues unabated.
a more quiet but equally radical sidekick to her husband Charles Barron. Their views, as voiced by Charles, include: “a special fondness for Castro because of the Cuban leader’s efforts to help several African nations, particularly Angola, in their march toward independence decades ago” (the late Bayard Rustin, a true civil rights champion and architect of the 1963 March on Washington, recognized the Soviet-Cuban rape of Angola as among the most tragic outrages in African history.
Far from any form of “liberation,” the Communist invaders aborted the planned democratic process, plundered the wealth of Angola, and resorted to indiscriminate force and even used chemical weapons. An estimated one million people died in the Angolan civil war. “Robert Mugabe is my hero, and guess what, so is Muammar Qaddafi!” Charles Barron declared in November 2011. In addition to being a tyrant in his own right, Mugabe is sheltering the former Communist dictator of Ethiopia who murdered over one million of his own people–a regime that was defended by Barron’s other hero Fidel Castro, bringing the number of black Africans murdered with Castro’s help to over 2 million. No comment necessary on Qaddafi. He has also expressed hatred of Israel, which earned Charles, a former Black Panther, the endorsement of former KKK leader David Duke.
—Margaret Chin,
former spokeswoman for the Maoist Communist Worker’s Party. She first ran for the City Council in 1991, but thanks to the activism of outraged Chinese-Americans and a man known to New York talk radio fans as “Jimmy from Brooklyn,” her attempt was defeated. In 2009, however, she returned and managed to win the election. It is a sad commentary on society that a longtime fanatical follower of the most tyrannical and bloodthirsty form of Chinese Communism–responsible for the death of some 70 million Chinese people and tens of thousand of Americans in Korea–could get elected on the 20 year anniversary of the Tienanmen Square massacre.
In 1983, Bill de Blasio took a student trip to the USSR. Now he and his allies are making the rest of us relive their youth.
Venezuela now following in the footsteps of the old Soviet Union
by Clifford F. Thies
France 24 is reporting that the police in Venezuela have busted an illegal warehouse, containing more than 2,000 rolls of black market toilet paper, and also literally hundreds of diapers.
With flour, sugar, cooking oil and all kinds of paper products in desperate short supply, the socialist government of Venezuela, is doing everything it can to minimize the human cost, including price controls, rationing, takeover of business, and now focusing the police and military on black markets.
Across the country, middle class people and not just the poor wait for hours in line to buy precious commodities, often having to roam from one store to another when they discover that the store where they had been standing in line has run out. The regime accuses its political opponents of hoarding, and blames greed, capitalism, the Jews, and the United States for the slow collapse of the economy.
Everybody happy, products available, harvest bountiful in the command economy… N’yet!
All this is as predictable as it is pathetic. But, it does remind us of some nearly forgotten jokes from the days of the former Soviet Union….