Socialism Failed in Venezuela, Keep it out of America
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While the story today is of the demise of the Maduro regime, the more important story is will America defeat socialists abroad and vote in socialists at home? The voters in New York City likely just want free food and haven’t concerned themselves with the consequences of who will make that food.
Thanks, or no thanks, to our public school system young people seem to have absorbed the paradise version of socialism but not the horror or carnage that has inevitably come with socialism. Instead of Mao’s famines, they vaguely argue for “socialist” Sweden or Denmark whose leaders keep trying to explain to Americans that they are in no way socialist.
A Gallup poll shows that 51 percent of young American adults (age 18-29) have a positive view of socialism. Though the famines and killing fields of socialism are well documented, American youth blithely accept the utopian promises of “fairness for all.” Or as Mamdani puts it “the warm embrace of collectivism.”
Ultimately, any government that wishes to “own the means of production,” must first take them from who currently owns them, which inevitably requires state violence.
As the Maduro regime ends, Americans and Venezuelans, should heed the words of Professor Lahoud of the Universidad Central de Venezuela: “I have known the reality of the failure of socialism in my own flesh. And as I live in Venezuela, I want to sho that this is an absolute failure always and everywhere. Socialism, whatever form it may take, only brings economic destruction and worsening of the conditions of life.” Socialism under Maduro created an economy where 87% of Venezuelans descended into poverty and the average person lost 30 pounds (unintentionally).
It is, and always will be, more difficult to sell an abstraction such as freedom. It is always easier for the demagogue to peddle something for nothing