STORY: When Hugo Chavez became president in 1999, he promoted his “21st Century Socialism” as the great solution to alleviate all social ills. At the same time, he attacked America, capitalism, and democracy. The fruits of his brilliant solution rose no higher than all other failed socialist schemes.
Reckless government interference in the economy, rampant corruption, price controls on nearly all goods and services, a corrupted legal system, a lack of respect for property ownership and contracts, and the constant threat of government confiscation of wealth and property has almost killed prosperity.
Chavez trampled on human rights, outlawed free speech, abolished property rights, took over successful private businesses and nationalized them, exhausted the national treasure to build up the military, and made his neighboring countries angry.
In 2011, the country had the highest inflation rate in all of Latin America at 29 percent). The government-run infrastructure produced chronic power outages, shortages of food, housing shortages, escalating crime, and anemic economic growth outside of its oil-supported activities.
Venezuela’s oil industry produces almost 95 percent of its total export income, and provides 60 percent of total federal revenue. Even so, Chavez’s brilliant program forces the government to borrow money every year (he runs a deficit 5 percent of GDP), while creating a welfare class with 10 million of his 27.6 million below the poverty line.
On August 23, 2011, Chavez nationalized the gold industry. Foreign companies had to leave 50 percent of all the gold they mined inside the country. The only large foreign gold miner was Russia’s Agapov family, that produced 100,000 ounces in 2010. Chavez also withdrew $11 billion in gold reserves from U.S. and European banks so he could keep the metal closer to home. Chavez died in 2013, leaving an estimated $2 billion fortune to his family.733
COUNTRY: Vietnam (90.5 million)
BELOW POVERTY LINE: 9.6 million (10.6 percent)
WELFARE COSTS: not available
NATIONAL DEBT: $37 billion
STORY: Inflation is a continual problem for this repressed country, averaging more than 18 percent between 2006-08. By summer 2011, it jumped to 22 percent and was rising. The constant irritant to the Vietnam market was the government and its typical tyrannical manipulations—price fixing, regulation, subsidies, and ownership of business, enterprises, banks, and utilities. Corruption at all levels continued to be a big problem for this country of 90.5 million. The regime reaped benefits from the state-owned enterprises at the expense of the very workers it claimed to be rescuing from the ravages of the free market.
Vietnam depends on tourism and exports to bring needed growth, and has enjoyed an economic boom in recent years. This was the result of miniscule efforts to reform the economy and start benefitting from the fruits of capitalism, without admitting as much. In its proclaimed socialist society, the top producers are taxed at 35 percent and corporations at 25 percent. Everyone must pay a value-added tax on goods, and property tax. And, like everyone else, the government overspends every year and now has a national debt that is more than half its total output.
Without protection of private property rights, contracts, intellectual property rights, and a judicial system bogged down with corruption and manipulation, outsiders are wary of investing.
Withdrawal from compulsory care will be a long time coming for Vietnam, but signs of letting that wretched enemy called capitalism benefit all sectors in the country prove that the people may be open to something better than tyrannical socialism.
Historical Perspective: In 1994, R.J. Rummel estimated the body count from socialism’s tyranny in Vietnam to be about 1,670,000 since 1975.734
COUNTRY: Zimbabwe (12.6 million)
BELOW POVERTY LINE: 8.2 million (68 percent)
WELFARE COSTS: Not available
NATIONAL DEBT: $6 billion
STORY: This resource-rich country was once the breadbasket of the region before the regime of Robert G. Mugabe took power in 1979. His tyrannical rule has ruined the nation.
In 2000, Mugabe embarked on redistribution of the land. This drove out white farmers and ruined the economy. Massive shortages followed.
In 2005, Mugabe’s political machine corrupted the constitution so his regime could amend it at will. That same year he embarked on “Operation Restore Order,” and in the name of urban renewal he destroyed 700,000 homes and businesses of his political opponents and those who voted for them.
In 2007, Mugabe imposed price controls that panicked the nation, and store shelves were emptied in hours—and stayed that way for months. Inflation shot up to 1,700 percent and unemployment (and underemployment) stood at 95 percent.735
A rising political opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, was subjected to multiple arrests and beatings by Mugabe’s men. In 2007, for example, he was arrested and hauled to prison. When his wife saw him, he was sorely injured, with gashes and a swollen eye. A freelance cameraman, Edward Chikombo, smuggled in a camera and broadcast images of the injuries. Chikombo was later kidnapped and his body was found the following weekend. Beatings and killings have been typical of the Mugabe regime.
In the 2008 elections, neither man received 50 percent of the vote so a run-off election was going to be held. Instead, Tsvangirai was made prime minister and Mugabe was made president, the positions now held as of 2012.
HIV/AIDS is a massive problem, with an estimated 1.2 million of the population infected. Zimbabwe has the 5th highest death rate from AIDS in the world. Life expectancy is one of the lowest in the world, averaging 51 years for both men and women.
Zimbabwe is a source of men, women, and children trafficked for forced labor, drug smuggling, and sexual exploitation. Some of these are forced into South Africa for additional sexual exploitation.
Socialism Needs A Host: Three Examples
Like all other freeloaders, to stay alive socialism requires a rich mentor. Because socialism doesn’t innovate, invent, or produce, every system ends up with the consumers out-consuming the ability of the producers to provide. Regular infusions of cash or help is a normal activity for highly socialized nations.
All socialistic schemes rise on the backs of prosperity. Once free enterprise builds a strong economy, the socialists show up demanding equality for the lazy, the less fortunate, and the impoverished masses.
British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said it best: “Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They always run out of other people’s money.”736 Or, to paraphrase, socialism works until it runs out of other people’s money.
Cuba
In this small island where the Communist government sets wages and prices, where farmers are forced to produce without capitalistic profit incentives, the country is starving. Having lost its Soviet host to sustain them in recent years, the Cuban government has been forced to turn to free-enterprise economics.
“Despite being an agricultural nation with plentiful sun, soil and rain, Cuba produces barely 30 percent of the food it needs, due to an acute lack of resources and the inefficiency of its state farm sector. About 250,000 small family farms and 1,100 cooperatives till only about one-quarter of the land, yet still manage to outperform the state farms, producing almost 60 percent of crops and livestock, according to official figures.”737
In 2010, 4.1 million of Cuba’s 4.9 million workers were employed by the government. By 2012, the private sector jobs had grown to 1.1 million, a 16 percent improvement towards igniting the local economy.738
The Soviet Union
Before the USSR finally collapsed in 1991, common scenes in cities all across the land were the farmer’s markets. They were necessary to keep the populations fed. The government looked askance at these capitalistic activities because of their tremendous good. The markets offered a huge quantity and wide variety of agriculture goods—sold at a profit.
An example was a 78-year-old-woman in Kiev who rented a table at the Hay Market to sell her home-grown apples, pears, and berries. She charged
a high price, and got it. Nearby, a 70-year-old man sold homegrown onions and garlic. Next door, another sold watermelons grown on private land by a group of cooperating farmers. What did these farmers do for their day job? The very same type of work on the less-efficient state farm. Others at the market sold cabbage, tomatoes, onions, apples, eggs, churned butter, beef, pork, poultry, cottage cheese, ducks, and geese—all of it privately raised, prepared, and brought to market.
“Every city in the Soviet Union has a similar market where farmers can sell their produce,” said a writer for in the Kansas City Star and Times in 1978, “... not at state-regulated prices but for whatever the market will bring. These tiny enclaves of free enterprise, while they may be frowned on officially, are welcomed and even encouraged by the Soviet government, in practice because they add so much to the national food supply.”739
Agriculture experts in both the U.S. and Soviet Union calculated that thousands of small gardens, accounting for a miniscule 3-4 percent of the cultivated land, produced a whopping 27 percent of all food grown in the Soviet Union, including 62 percent of all potatoes, 37 percent of all eggs, 31 percent of all meat and poultry, 30 percent of all milk, and 1 percent of all grain (sweet corn).
North Korea
North Korea was once a powerhouse of productivity. Today, its people are starving to death. While their neighbor to the south thrives with a relatively free economy, socialism has flattened North Korea’s ability to produce. Today it relies on desperate measures. It sells its coal and minerals to China, and sells the right for Chinese fishermen to work Korean waters. It sends workers to other foreign lands as cheap labor to return whatever funds are possible.
Before he died, Dictator Kim Jong II required at least $1 billion a year to meet his needs, and dispensed worthless currency to the people to live on.
To compensate for the country’s inability to prosper, Kim and company might have supported or tolerated counterfeiting and money laundering to the tune of millions every year. Defectors claim in uncorroborated statements that the government of North Korea is indeed directly involved, despite public denials to the contrary. No one knows if or how the current regime has carried on that work.
Three primary facilities poured out at least $25 million in phony $100 bills every year for the past 25 years. The bills circulate primarily through Korea and China, sometimes making their way to Europe and the U.S. Locally, people buy $100 bills for $40 and try to pawn them off as real U.S. tender. If print quality is especially accurate, counterfeiters can get up to $70 each.
There exists some doubt that the socialist country has the technology to reproduce $100 bills. The government claims no involvement, and gave evidence by publicly executing two convicted counterfeiters in 2006.
Compared to national needs ($1 billion annually), and the total quantity of U.S. currency in circulation at any given time ($800 billion worldwide), $25 million a year in bogus bills doesn’t seem to make much of a dent. But the U.S. dollars are not the only lucrative trade coming out of North Korea. Some estimates put the value of counterfeited currency at more than $100 million a year.740 The fact that the practice continues poses the question: In what other ways is North Korea benefitting by counterfeiting currencies other than the U.S. dollar?741
North Korea can’t feed itself. With the fall of the Soviet Union, the country has been dependent on China for food and energy. According to a study by Heather Smith and Yiping Huang, China has been supplying North Korea with millions of tons of food and energy supplies. For example, between 1996 and 2000, China sent more than 1.2 million tons of grain, 2.3 million tons of crude, and 2.5 million tons of coal.742
Learning to Recognize Socialism
The USSR collapsed decades ago, and now the European Union is showing signs of cracking up. What three aspects of socialism do they share in common?
Why doesn’t austerity work socialists?
Who is Starr Parker? What did she say about Johnson’s “war on poverty”? List 3 unintended consequences from his “war.”
Which pillars of socialism are present in Argentina.
How many people died in China to build its communistic society? How many died in Russia? Cuba? Iran? North Korea? How many died from the world war that Hitler started?
How many detention centers, labor camps and prisons are in North Korea to enforce socialism in that nation? Can the country feed itself? Who benefits the most from that stridency?
Sweden is held up as a model socialist nation. How much debt is it in for socialism? What cultural trait helps it survive?
How much of the USSR’s potatoes came from private plots? Is any socialist country as prosperous with as high of an average living standard as the U.S.? What does this say about socialism?
Part XVI--THE 46 GOALS OF SOCIALISM
The goal of socialism is communism: “What is usually called socialism was termed by Marx the ‘first,’ or lower, phase of communist society.”
* * *
722 CIA, The World Factbook, Sweden, 2012.
723 Ibid.
724 Nima Sanandaji, Sweden: A Role Model for Capitalist Reform?, Captus 2011.
725 U.S. Census Bureau, Selected Social Characteristics in the U.S.: 2008.
726 Nima Sanandaji, Robert Gidehag, Is Sweden A False Utopia?, www.newgeography.com, May 2, 2010.
727 Ibid., Sanandaji.
728 Gerri Peev, MailOnline, Welfare Payments Cuts ‘will force 200,000 benefits claimants out of London and into suburbs’, October 25, 2010.
729 Alan B. Krueger, et al, Job Search and Unemployment Insurance: New Evidence from Time Use Data, CEPS Working Paper No. 175, August 2008.
730 Ibid.
731 Alan Reynolds, The ‘Stimulus’ for Unemployment, Cato Institute, November 17, 2009.
732 Brookings Institution, cited in Incentives Not to Work, Wall Street Journal, 4/13/2010.
733 Estimate made by Jerry Brewer, president of Criminal Justice, reported in Analyst estimates Chavez’s family fortune at around $2 billion, News From Venezuela, July 27, 2010.
734 Rummel, R.J. Death by Government, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1994.
735 The Economist, Zimbabwe: The Face of Oppression, May 15, 2007.
736 Margaret Thatcher, in a TV interview for Thames TV This Week, February 5, 1976.
737 St. Petersburg Times, August 17, 2009.
738 Cuba: Private Employment Now 22 Percent of Jobs, AP, August 30, 2012.; CIA, The World Factbook.
739 Reprinted in The Palm Beach Post, Nov. 5, 1978.
740 Economist Intelligence Unit, Country Profile 2003, South Korea, North Korea, p. 85.
741 Dick K. Nanto, North Korean Counterfeiting of U.S. Currency, Congressional Research Service, June 12, 2009.
742 Heather Smith and Yiping Huang, Achieving Food Security in North Korea, presented at the Ladau Network/Centro di Cultura Scientifica A. Volta conference, June 2000.
Chapter 91: The 46 Goals of Socialism
The opportunities change, but the goals remain the same.
The biggest mistake in recent decades by the world’s free people is their indulgence in a prolonged mental demise into apathy, stagnation, and neglect. In many circles the former yearning for freedom is smothered under a desperate frenzy for government bailouts, the dole, the loan, the tax break—anything, as if governments were saviors of last resort with limitless resources.
Within a single lifespan the world has changed from hope to hype, concern to contempt, cautious to callous, from helping neighbors to fearing them. This can’t last. Many scholars believe it is time for a revolutionary change in our state of mind. What went wrong with the world’s state of mind?
First and foremost, we have been thinking the way the socialists want us to think—that is, we are thinking like socialists.
We want to change the world, but not ourselves. We want everything and anything, except the consequences. We want the government to force all things right. We impatiently want it all. Our motto has become “There ought to be a law ...”—and today, there usually is. Our slogan is, “Choose the right (my right)—or else.”
Western culture has been adopting socialist thinking for a very long time—but not in a vacuum. Guiding it along have been a number of socialistic objectives, targets, and goals. They come in the form of friendly solutions that play on our natural human weaknesses. They promise something for nothing—an easier life, all the benefits without the cost, a fix for all things, fairness, and social justice—just give socialism a try. These objectives and goals have a great world-wide following today.
Most people don’t realize that these goals are designed to soften them up, to prepare them for the final collapse of freedom and the birth of global Ruler’s Law, international socialism, a new world order. For lack of understanding, many loyal defenders of freedom are supporting these goals. The goals in the following list are derived from the vast collection of writings, both ancient and modern, from reformers and dreamers throughout history who have supported the seven bad ideas of socialism. Some could be quoted directly, others are surmised by actions being undertaken today. Some modern socialists bravely deny they would ever want to upset the culture, such as calling for the elimination of the family or religion, but as shown in the prior pages, given enough time, all socialism must and does eventually lead to those extremes.
The Current Goals of Socialism743
Please note: Referenced in the footnotes are a few examples of plans, proposals, or arguments that carry forward the enactment of the 46 goals of socialism.
The Naked Socialist Page 56