2006-10-04
The Real Devil: Hugo Chavez's War on Wealth
The problem with socialism is that you can't hurt those evil rich bastards without hurting "the poor" even worse. With capitalism, meanwhile, rich people can only make money selling goods and services to people who have money to buy. Thus people under a free market economy inter-depend on each other for their own prosperity. Why does oil-rich Venezuala have so much rampant, stagnant poverty despite its oil riches? Easy answer: socialist policies. But poor people often find it irresistable to vote (those who enjoy the right to!) for promises of "sharing the wealth." Socialism succeeds only in one thing: making its advocates feel good about themselves.
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2 comments:
"Manuel, who's never been to school, lives in a tin-roofed shack with walls made of slabs of half-inch-thick wood, cardboard and flattened oil drums. His "house" clings precariously to La Vega, one of hundreds of hillside slums that dot Chavez's oil-rich capital."
You can find kids in Mississippi living in similar conditions. You can find kids in urban Detroit who have just as much poverty. There are millions of homeless and impoverished people in the United States with no social safety net to help them out of their predicament.
How do you explain this contradiction to your notion that capitalism is the answer to the world's needs and socialism is not. There are poor people in every nation.
Your capitalist heaven hasn't helped the poor people of the US. According to the US Census bureau, there are still 37 million Americans who live in poverty. Why hasn't capitalism helped them?
Mississippi is rich in natural resources. Michigan has thousands who are rich off the wealth of the manufacturing sector, but the rate of poverty is still high.
You can't blame socialism for poverty. Capitalists are poor too.
Nadir: Capitalism does not promise to eliminate poverty. Yes, you can find poverty in capitalist nations. But capitalism merely promises to out-deliver socialism... and it does. This is why despite the existance of poverty in capitalist nations, poor people there never immigrate to to socialist nations; meanwhile, poor people in socialist nations constantly immigrate to capitalist nations -- all of which contain poverty. Does the Detroit area have Venezuelan immigrants? Yes, even here in the currently economic worse part of the US, we have Venezuelan immigrants. In the US booming economic areas there are substantial numbers of Venezuelan immigrants. Does Venezueula have any US immigrants, even from Detroit? No!
The poor people in the US are not poor due to lack of tax-funded programs. Although some are poor despite their own best efforts, the overriding explanation for poverty in the US is poor behavior on the part of "poor" people.
It remains nearly irresistable for most people to see a "poor" person and conclude, "I -- or a government program -- can save that person." Yet from personal experiance most of us eventually learn that the only people we can help are those who are helping themselves.
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