VENEZUELA’S NEW DECREE - TS

POSTED ON JULY 30, 2016 BY SCOTT JOHNSON IN SOCIALISM, VENEZUELA

VENEZUELA’S NEW DECREE

In his column “Socialism for the uninformed,” Thomas Sowell observed: “socialism sounds great. It has always sounded great. And it will probably always continue to sound great. It is only when you go beyond rhetoric, and start looking at hard facts, that socialism turns out to be a big disappointment, if not a disaster.”

Sowell cited the slow-motion catastrophe in Venezuela as a case in point: “While throngs of young people are cheering loudly for avowed socialist Bernie Sanders, socialism has turned oil-rich Venezuela into a place where there are shortages of everything from toilet paper to beer, where electricity keeps shutting down, and where there are long lines of people hoping to get food, people complaining that they cannot feed their families.”

All is proceeding as Sowell foretold. This week’s news brings the latest chapter in Venezuela’s descent. Andrew Pestano reports for UPI: “At the end of last week, Maduro signed a decree that would give Venezuela’s Ministry of Popular Power for Social Process of Work the ability to order any Venezuelan with the physical or technical capabilities to join a government effort to work in the agriculture sector for up to 120 days.” If you have a problem with that, they will help you get your mind right.

Pestano adds that “Venezuela’s farming association in June said only 25 percent of the country’s agricultural land is being used to farm.” Gee, why would that be?

Richard Washington’s CNBC report on the decree includes a link to the text of Resolution No. 9855. Amnesty International drew attention to the decree in a press release and accordingly generated the news stories on it. It condemned the decree as “unlawful” and “effectively amount[ing] to forced labour.” The press release serves a useful purpose, but the organization doesn’t seem to have a handle on the applicable principle of right that socialism in general, or the decree specifically, violates.

Hillary and the Democrats’ guano mountain

JULY 29, 2016 BY BOOKWORM 4 COMMENTS

Looking back at the Democrat convention, I couldn’t get an image out of my head. Imagine, if you well, the vast, lonely ocean. In the middle of the ocean is what looks to be an island. Closer inspection, though, reveals that it’s actually a tiny, barren rock that, over the years, has been covered with layers and layers of guano (that’s bird poop, for those who don’t recognize the term). There’s so much guano there that, from afar, it looks as if that rock is an actual landmass on which one could survive.

Now picture in your mind a shipwrecked man swimming to that island, certain that he’s found a safe haven until he’s rescued. He gets near the island and reaches out to grab hold of it to lever himself onto the land, only to discover that he’s got nothing but a handful of bird poop. He reaches out again, only to have more bird poop. Frantically, he claws at what he thought would be his salvation, only to find himself surrounded by greasy, stinky, floating mounds of the bird poop that he’s peeled off the guano mound. There is no island, there is no relief. There is only drowning in fecal matter.

That’s the Democrats and Hillary. They’re trying to sell us on the fact that she’s the perfect candidate: experienced, temperamentally sound, and protecting all of the right people, from women to blacks to gays to Hispanics. Sure, she’s been investigated endlessly for scandalssince the 1980s, but that, they insist, is the product of a combination of right wing conspiracies and a few unfortunate mistakes on her part. For example, as a liberal earnestly told me, it was just a mistake when, after having signed off on a security briefing about protecting State Department communications, Hillary decided to conduct all of her business as Secretary of State on an unsecured server in the bathroom of her home, and it was just an accident when she instructed people to copy classified documents off of the State Department server and upload them onto her system.

And so the Democrats swim through the electoral ocean, exhausted, but consoled by that solid rock of Hillary-ness that they see just beyond them. But that rock is 98% guano. Try to grab hold, and you’ll end up with a handful of

• Watergate (from which she was fired after allegedly takingdocuments from the file, among other things);
• Whitewater;
• Rose Law Firm bills;
• Travelgate;
• Bimbo eruptions;
• A failed healthcare initiative;
• A tenure as US Senator during which she accomplished nothing;
• A stint as Secretary of State during which she dropped the ball on radical Islam, turned Libya into an ISIS haven, allowed Putin toexpand unchecked, sold out American interests to foreign powers in exchange for cash to her and her husband, gave away all of America’s secrets;
• A post-Secretary career spent amassing tens of millions of dollars, many for very expensive speeches to banks; and
• The world’s most cold, grating personalities, one so robotic that her supporters spend inordinate amounts of time convincing voters she’s human.

Bird poop. An ocean of it. That’s what the Democrats are swimming towards to fulfill their dream of a safe political haven. And all they’re really getting is a tiny, poop-stained rock in the middle of floating fecal matter.

Posters 07/30/16

Hillary - 2016 DNC (gifs)

Hillary - 2016 DNC

Socialism for the Uninformed - TS

Socialism for the Uninformed

Thomas Sowell

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Posted: May 31, 2016 12:01 AM

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Hill's Dreams Shattered?

Socialism sounds great. It has always sounded great. And it will probably always continue to sound great. It is only when you go beyond rhetoric, and start looking at hard facts, that socialism turns out to be a big disappointment, if not a disaster.

While throngs of young people are cheering loudly for avowed socialist Bernie Sanders, socialism has turned oil-rich Venezuela into a place where there are shortages of everything from toilet paper to beer, where electricity keeps shutting down, and where there are long lines of people hoping to get food, people complaining that they cannot feed their families.

With national income going down, and prices going up under triple-digit inflation in Venezuela, these complaints are by no means frivolous. But it is doubtful if the young people cheering for Bernie Sanders have even heard of such things, whether in Venezuela or in other countries around the world that have turned their economies over to politicians and bureaucrats to run.

The anti-capitalist policies in Venezuela have worked so well that the number of companies in Venezuela is now a fraction of what it once was. That should certainly reduce capitalist "exploitation," shouldn't it?

But people who attribute income inequality to capitalists exploiting workers, as Karl Marx claimed, never seem to get around to testing that belief against facts -- such as the fact that none of the Marxist regimes around the world has ever had as high a standard of living for working people as there is in many capitalist countries.

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Facts are seldom allowed to contaminate the beautiful vision of the left. What matters to the true believers are the ringing slogans, endlessly repeated.

When Senator Sanders cries, "The system is rigged!" no one asks, "Just what specifically does that mean?" or "What facts do you have to back that up?"

In 2015, the 400 richest people in the world had net losses of $19 billion. If they had rigged the system, surely they could have rigged it better than that.

But the very idea of subjecting their pet notions to the test of hard facts will probably not even occur to those who are cheering for socialism and for other bright ideas of the political left.

How many of the people who are demanding an increase in the minimum wage have ever bothered to check what actually happens when higher minimum wages are imposed? More often they just assume what is assumed by like-minded peers -- sometimes known as "everybody," with their assumptions being what "everybody knows."

Back in 1948, when inflation had rendered meaningless the minimum wage established a decade earlier, the unemployment rate among 16-17-year-old black males was under 10 percent. But after the minimum wage was raised repeatedly to keep up with inflation, the unemployment rate for black males that age was never under 30 percent for more than 20 consecutive years, from 1971 through 1994. In many of those years, the unemployment rate for black youngsters that age exceeded 40 percent and, for a couple of years, it exceeded 50 percent.

The damage is even greater than these statistics might suggest. Most low-wage jobs are entry-level jobs that young people move up out of, after acquiring work experience and a track record that makes them eligible for better jobs. But you can't move up the ladder if you don't get on the ladder.

The great promise of socialism is something for nothing. It is one of the signs of today's dumbed-down education that so many college students seem to think that the cost of their education should -- and will -- be paid by raising taxes on "the rich."

Here again, just a little check of the facts would reveal that higher tax rates on upper-income earners do not automatically translate into more tax revenue coming in to the government. Often high tax rates have led to less revenue than lower tax rates.

In a globalized economy, high tax rates may just lead investors to invest in other countries with lower tax rates. That means that jobs created by those investments will be overseas.

None of this is rocket science. But you do have to stop and think -- and that is what too many of our schools and colleges are failing to teach their students to do.