Forced Labor in Venezuela

… Is like forcing someone with a broken leg to walk around on their hands.

Here comes my liberal, tolerant side. I guess Maduro has a sense of decency and can feel shame. I propose that he’s just poorly educated, the same as anybody who believes that if X needs to be done then of course government should try to do X. He’s poorly educated, that is, the same as most Democrats and many Republicans in the US.

It could be indecent and shameful (in this poorly educated view) not to try to use the tools at your disposal. Those tools naturally include government coercion for “public servants” in politics.

I’ve found this excerpt for a very good essay to be the succinct description of socialism. Although, it doesn’t address what is happening now in Venezuela with the “delay” in “the increase in wealth to be expected from the operation of the socialist methods of production”*

First, what is the best the socialists, in their writings, can offer us? What do the most optimistic of them say? That our subsistence will be guaranteed, while we work; that some of us, the best of us, may earn a surplus above what is actually necessary for our subsistence; and that surplus, like a good child, we may “keep to spend.” We may not use it to better our condition, we may not, if a fisherman, buy another boat with it, if a farmer, another field ; we may not invest it, or use it productively ; but we can spend it like the good child, on candy — on something we consume, or waste it, or throw it away.

Could not the African slave do as much? In fact, is not this whole position exactly that of the negro slave? He, too, was guaranteed his sustenance; he, too, was allowed to keep and spend the extra money he made by working overtime; but he was not allowed to better his condition, to engage in trade, to invest it, to change his lot in life. Precisely what makes a slave is that he is allowed no use of productive capital to make wealth on his own account. The only difference is that under socialism, I may not be compelled to labor (I don’t even know as to that — socialists differ on the point), actually compelled, by the lash, or any other force than hunger. And the only other difference is that the negro slave was under the orders of one man, while the subject of socialism will be under the orders of a committee of ward heelers. You will say, the slave could not choose his master, but we shall elect the ward politician. So we do now. Will that help much? Suppose the man with a grievance didn’t vote for him?
–Socialism; a speech delivered in Faneuil hall, February 7th, 1903, by Frederic J. Stimson

*”Socialism, in the sense in which Stalin has lately used the term, is moving towards communism, but is in itself not yet communism. Socialism will turn into communism as soon as the increase in wealth to be expected from the operation of the socialist methods of production has raised the lower standard of living of the Russian masses to the higher standard which the distinguished holders of important offices enjoy in present-day Russia.”

von Mises, Ludwig (1947). Planned Chaos

The government should’ve claimed it was voluntary, à la “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”

…. Meanwhile … a majority of “millennials” reportedly prefers socialism to Capitalism ….

To that extent, then, the Marxist Institute/Frankfurt School been/is effective.

But not even America’s is “magic dirt” — and they will, soon enough, be all out of other peoples’ great, great, great, great, great, great-grandchildren’s money. And what then?