You Gotta Wonder

Welcome to today's episode of:

What F#$&*%! Planet Is This Person On???

I really like the folks at EvolveFISH.com. They sell a wide range of humanist stuff, including some really cool bumper stickers, pins and t-shirts that really send the christo-fascists into a first-class, eyeball-popping, rectum-contracting tizzy. Even much of their anti-Bush, anti-capitalist stuff is amusing. But while looking through new products last night, I found this description of a bumper sticker praising Venezuela's soon-to-be president-for-life, Hugo Chavez:

Viva Chavez! Viva Venezuela! sticker.
With 10 landslide election victories behind him, President Hugo Chavez is using Venezuela's oil revenues to liberate the poor - building schools, hospitals, transport infrastructure, housing and food programs. No wonder Dick Cheney is planning another attempt to assassinate him....Premium quality, political anti-Bush liberal sticker¹.

It's not so much the fact that whomever wrote this likes what old Hugo is doing: they're certainly entitled to their opinion, and as far as I can tell Venezuela wouldn't stop them from going on down and joining the "revolution". I'll even, for the sake of brevity, grant the author the claim that Chavez has 10 legitimate landslide victories to his credit (although I find that a hard one to swallow -- it's virtually impossible in any truly free electoral system to be elected leader of your country 10 times in a row). But what really got to me was the phrase "liberate the poor". I may be the last of a dying breed, but this quasi-moralistic assertion that socialism is somehow noble because of it's concern for the poor (and also immune to critique for its heavy-handed, oppressive methods) really must be challenged.

I say this for a simple reason: redistributing income NEVER ends poverty. If it did, the former Soviet Union, Maoist China, Zimbabwe, Cuba, a whole host of African countries, India, and our very own United States of America would be bursting at the seams with people who had lost the ability to comprehend the meaning of "poor". It may temporarily alleviate the poverty of certain individuals at the expense of other individuals, but it's not a viable long term solution, because at some point there just isn't enough wealth to confiscate and redistribute (we won't even get into internal corruption). Moreover, if I'm a wealthy person and can read the handwriting on the wall, I do have the means to split -- and take my means with me. Venezuela's oil wealth may mask the problem for a while, but unless Chavez has a sound, wealth-producing economy to loot, the party will be over sooner or later. History is replete with examples of socialism failing - again and again - precisely because you can't redistribute wealth that doesn't exist. Whether it's a complete and total economic collapse or just a slow death like Germany is going through lately, socialism only works if there's a productive, wealth-producing group of people who can be continually bled to support the parasites. Too many parasites kill a host.

But what really blows my mind is that there is a hard-core group of Marxists (or neo-Marxists) out there who are just completely blind to at least 100 years of evidence showing this to be true time and again. It's almost as though their hatred of capitalism, achievement and markets (or their inability to succeed in free society) compels them to advocate economic policies that most harm the group they claim to care so much about (i.e. "the poor".)

Now if you really care about the poor, what you want them to have the following:

1. A governmental system where the rule of law is established and upheld
2. Private ownership and control of capital
3. Individual ownership of the fruits of one's labor
4. Free and open markets
5. The incentive of accumulated wealth to drive people to succeed

This has also been shown to work time and again. Look at how capitalism and markets have economically invigorated Asia. Nowadays, even Communist China is lifting people out of poverty, and it's not by government decree. Granted, everyone isn't getting rich at the same rate, but it's a hell of an improvement over the pre-WWII conditions in those countries where virtually everyone was equally destitute.

In other words, while no economic system is without its inherent problems, capitalism has a far better track record of creating more wealth for more individuals (and that includes formerly poor people moving up into the middle class and beyond) than ANY other system in human history.

I'd much rather be liberated from an oppressive government and take my chances on my own in a free-market economy than rely on my president to save me. And quite honestly, that applies to George Bush as much as it does to Hugo Chavez .....

Viva libertad! Viva capitalismo!

(1) Footnote: I always hear demopublicans accusing the republicrats of being "mean spirited". While I find the whole debate about "meanness" more suitable to a Sunday school class than politics, I think it's a bit of a stretch to claim that even old Shotgun Dickey would organize the assassination of a foreign head of state for "building schools, hospitals, transport infrastructure, housing and food programs". In fact, it strikes me as a rather "mean", ad hominem attack.