One thing most of us likely can agree on is that this has
been a season of tragedy in the United States, most recently with the California
wine country wild fires, and before that the Las Vegas shooting, and the hurricanes.
Where disagreement thrives is on how we should respond to them.
During the presidency of Barack Obama our government took a
sharp turn to the left, a dramatic increase in the much more gentle leftward
drift it has been in for a long time. The election of Donald Trump was in large
measure a backlash against Obama’s socialistic ideas, the Democrats’
abandonment of many of the values normal Americans observe, and the prospect of
more of the same from Hillary Clinton.
So the voter’s said a loud “No!” to continuing the leftist
governance of the Democrats by electing a Republican president and giving the
GOP control of both houses of Congress. Unfortunately, what should have been a
concentrated effort to start restoring Constitutional government has been put
on hold by an obstinate faction of Republicans, some of whom have fallen victim
to their own liberal impulses, and others who have let their egos overpower
their sense of duty to their constituents, and have given in to hurt feelings
in reaction to Donald Trump’s tweeting addiction, which too often gets personal.
If there is good news in this scenario for traditional
Americans it is that the Trump presidency is not quite a year old, and there is
time for both Trump and many Congressional Republicans to put these personal feelings
behind them and get important things done.
But a sense of urgency about the Republican failures is
certainly justified. A recent poll shows that a disturbing percentage of millennials
would support an openly socialist candidate who follows in the misguided
footsteps of Obama and company, precisely the opposite of what our country
needs. If their voter participation rate increases, they could add significant
support for socialist government, so Republicans had better get busy undoing
the socialist initiatives and returning our government to its traditional,
constitutional orientation.
Perhaps a lesson in what happens to good people when they
are forced to live under the leftist, socialist prescription for governance will
help, and there is probably no better example than that of Venezuela.
“As with all socialist systems, present-day Venezuela is
marked by vicious poverty and a parasitical yet gilded ruling class,” wrote the
President of The Mises Institute, Jeff Deist. In “The Austrian,” the Institute’s
bi-monthly periodical, he wrote, “Sold to gullible Westerners as egalitarianism
and concern for average people, socialism always makes ordinary citizens far
worse off while destroying any hope for upward mobility. It is truly the
ideology of the 1 percent.”
Economist and philosopher Ludwig von Mises, after whom the
Institute is named, said this about socialism in his treatise “Human Action”: “In
a socialist economy it is only the government’s value judgments that count, and
the people are deprived of any means of making their own value judgments
prevail.”
Raphael A. Acevedo and Luis B. Cirocco are Venezuelans who
participated in this year’s Mises University at the Institute as presenters on
the subject of socialism’s impact on the lives of their country’s citizens.
They wrote an account of Venezuela’s slide from relative freedom to a socialist
hellhole for the current issue of “The Austrian.”
A hundred years ago the country began a lucrative period
when it entered the international oil race, Acevedo and Cirocco write, and
things were pretty good for a while, with not much government control of
economic interests. It even overthrew a dictator and became a democracy in
1958.
However, the first democratically elected president, Romulo
Betancourt, was a communist-turned-social democrat, and “he started destroying
the economic institutions we had by implementing price controls, rent controls
and other regulations we hadn’t had before,” they said, and then he created a
new constitution hostile to private property.
Betancourt’s successors continued his socialist tendencies,
and then in 1998 Hugo Chavez won election, promising to replace the country’s
light socialism with more radical socialism. After Chavez’s death in 2013,
Nicholas Maduro followed, and introduced a new constitution, which almost
totally abolished private property.
“So, socialism is the cause of the Venezuelan misery,”
Acevedo and Cirocco write. “Venezuelans are starving, eating garbage, losing
weight. Children are malnourished. Anyone in Venezuela would be happy to eat
out of America’s trashcans. It would be considered gourmet.”
And their summary of the country’s downfall: “As
Venezuelans, our poor understanding of the importance of freedom and free
markets has created our current disaster.”
We Americans have lost much of our freedom to government
over the decades, and that increased substantially during the tragic Obama years.
Today we find that heavy federal intrusions in the area of
healthcare through regulation and Obamacare raise prices and reduce access; the
EPA’s regulatory over-reach aimed at killing the coal industry put thousands
out of work; abundant welfare programs dampen the normal tendency of people to
take care of themselves; the federal government controls much of K-12 education
through financial “incentives” and Common Core requirements.
Republicans can and must address and reverse these trends. So
get busy.
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