Envy and the road to ruin

The siren song of socialism masks the evil socialists deliver

By Robert Knight - - Sunday, May 29, 2016

There’s a dark cloud hanging over the progressive push to turn America into a collectivist paradise.

Things are so bad in socialist Venezuela, whose economy is cratering, that even the liberal news media have taken notice.

Day after day, stories emerge from the oil-rich South American nation about power outages, bankruptcies, long lines for toilet paper, urban unrest, and now even food shortages.

Millions of Venezuelans, no longer smitten by the kind of envy-laden appeals that Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton dish up on a daily basis, are having big-time buyers’ remorse since approving Hugo Chavez’s socialist uprising back in 1998. Revolution is in the air, which is why the government of Mr. Chavez’s successor, Niocolas Maduro, is in crackdown mode. It’s what you do when you’ve lost the people after systematically looting them.

The beating heart of socialism, as well as one of America’s two major political parties, is the sin of envy — wanting something that someone else has. On a personal level, it can breed resentment and bitterness. On a societal level it breeds monstrosities like socialism, fascism, Nazism and communism.

In the United States, we’re witnessing mass delusion, in which millions of ostensibly college-educated people are applauding the siren song of socialism while ignoring news reports about the kind of hell socialists deliver when ensconced in power.

It’s easy to understand why many students are “feeling the Bern.” Most have yet to experience the real world of paychecks eviscerated by federal and state taxes. I confess to falling for liberal politicians while in the extended womb known as college and before I started working 40-hour workweeks. If you don’t earn an income, redistribution is no threat to you and might even be to your benefit. Did someone mention a “Get Out of Yale Free” card?

Accompanying the hope for a free lunch is anger toward “the rich,” who deserve to be punished for their success.

The late writer Joseph Sobran drew an important distinction that might help explain the bitterness with which the legions of the left pursue their redistributionist agenda:

“Envy is now widely confused with covetousness. But to covet another’s good is to want to possess it yourself; to envy it is to seek the darker satisfaction of destroying his happiness in it.”

Another accomplished man of letters, the late Thomas Landess, arrived at the same conclusion: “Despite protests to the contrary, deep in their soiled hearts, American leftists hate a winner and desperately want to see him toppled. You sometimes get a glimpse of their green-skinned malice in their political rhetoric and actions.”

In his 2015 book, “Life, Literature and Lincoln,” Mr. Landess provided a wonderful example. It seems that back in 1962, Leonard Sherman, a New Jersey stamp collector, bought three sheets of U.S. four-cent stamps honoring the United Nations’ Dag Hammarskjold. One of the sheets had its yellow background printed upside down, making it worth an estimated $500,000.

Mr. Sherman unfortunately told the media about it, and his good fortune got back to Washington, D.C. John F. Kennedy’s postmaster general promptly ordered an additional 400,000 upside-down sheets printed. “With the snap of a bureaucrat’s finger, a rarity became commonplace,” thus destroying any value beyond the stamps’ worth of four cents each. A good day’s work in Washington.

I don’t think the word “killjoy” quite does justice to this little act of official vandalism, which benefited no one and stopped an interesting, harmless and lucrative venture in its tracks.

The top postal bureaucrat was fairly rich himself, so his torching of Mr. Sherman’s instant wealth was not garden variety envy but perhaps something more insidious, “a pinched vision of the world as consisting of wicked exploiter and powerless victim,” wrote Mr. Landess.

“Be assured that [the postmaster general] — who’d never met Leonard Sherman — knew precisely what evil lurked in the heart of a stamp collector worth $500,000. Underlying the apotheosis of envy are the unspoken assumptions that the ills of society are the result of economic exploitation.”

Which brings us back to the spectacle of Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton desperately trying to out-promise socialist redistribution schemes, while some of Mr. Sanders‘ followers sow violence at Donald Trump rallies.

Mr. Trump is a perfect foil — a billionaire who doesn’t give a rip about political correctness or conventional manners. He’s a rude, crude, spectacularly successful capitalist, the enemy of the people.

The more that Mr. Trump’s detractors on the left act out their displeasure, however, the more that the #NeverTrump movement loses once-staunch adherents.

In sanitized media, the left is well meaning and cuddly, all about tolerance and equality. Up close, it’s a different picture as ginned-up envy spills over into violence, confiscatory economics, political correctness run amok, and eventual ruin. That’s what’s turning once-prosperous Venezuela into an economic basket case.

We have it on the highest authority that envy is not to be taken lightly. The apostle James wrote that envy leads to “disorder and every evil practice.” And Solomon advised in Proverbs that “a heart at peace gives life, but envy rots the bones.”

Perhaps America’s colleges should consider offering a working semester in Caracas. It would be a good education in what works — and doesn’t — in the real world.

• Robert Knight is a senior fellow for the American Civil Rights Union.

https://www.washingtontimes.co...ialism-masks-its-ev/

quote:

Originally posted by Stlhead:
Hungry people do not stay hungry for long when there is food around.

Food-producers tend to stop producing when there are lawless hungry people around.

Becomes a zero-sum game of 'eat what's on the shelves now' till that's gone. At that point the hordes break into nice-looking buildings and homes to see what someone might have stashed.

Feral humans - think of it as a zombie apocalypse but, instead of OK-to-blast, already-dead brain-eating ghouls, this apocalypse is populated with people with civil rights, who probably have done nothing particularly worthy of being either desperately hungry nor of being blasted.

The people whose behavior, decisions, and policies created this - the ones it would be OK to blast, IMO - will not be the ones in the street, breaking into homes looking for stray cans of food for their kids.

Best to stay far, far away.

WATCH: John Oliver Tries To Separate Venezuela Crisis From Socialism

John Oliver wants you to know just how bad it's gotten under the socialist regime in Venezuela, just so long as you agree not to blame socialism. The real problem, he underscores in a recent segment on "Last Week Tonight," is not the socialist ideology that has driven the decisions by Hugo Chavez and his successor Nicholas Maduro that have created the socialist dystopia — it's really just "epic mismanagement."

Oliver, who recently decided it would be classy to target a children's book by Mike Pence's daughter, devoted a segment of his show over the weekend to providing his audience with a sobering update on the nightmarish situation in Venezuela. But right off the bat he made clear one of his goals for the evening: separating the tragic situation from the socialist ideology that created it.

"Over the last few years, it seems like every time Venezuela has been on the news, it's because something awful is happening," says Oliver, cutting to footage of the ongoing food crisis, riots, and dictatorial crackdown on protesters. "It's true. Things in Venezuela have been extremely grim," he admits.

But then Oliver pivots to his underlying theme for the segment: "If you follow conservative media at all, you might have seen it frequently painted as the inevitable dire consequences of a socialist government."

As an example of "conservative media" coverage, he rolls out a clip from the much-maligned right-wing conspiracy site Infowars — not exactly a mainstream representation of "conservative" coverage. After mocking both the Infowars infobabe and the "extremely chill" Bernie Sanders supporter she interviews, which he condescendingly describes as a "nice distillation of the current level of discourse in America," Oliver moves on to explaining what went wrong in Venezuela.

"What is happening in Venezuela is not just extremely important, it's absolutely worth paying attention to," he says "because this is not just a story about socialism — there are plenty of socialist countries that look nothing like Venezuela — it's a story about epic mismanagement."

While Oliver does a solid job of presenting just how dire the situation is and highlighting the key policies that created the crisis, he downplays the issue of the ideology driving the policies, instead framing the economic implosion of the country as the result of a series of bad economic and political decisions by an inept government, which happens to be socialist.

Video below (warning: language):



https://www.dailywire.com/news...crisis-james-barrett

Anyone spent time in pre-chavez Venezuela?

I did. It was wonderful.

However, they along with many others think socialism is the answer to poverty.

So they got the guy they wanted: chavez, who proceeded to wreck Venz. and Maduro is simply icing the cake..

This would have happened if Hillary had won the election.

sagemind100,

I agree.

Yet, Hillary's a staunch advocate of Saul Alinsky's socialism.

These people who often seem highly intelligent and well informed ignore the failure of communism and it's first cousins.

My conclusion: They will seize power when the impoverished think they've found a savior only to be worsened...poor dumb bastards...

quote:

Originally posted by Birdvol:
sagemind100,

I agree.

Yet, Hillary's a staunch advocate of Saul Alinsky's socialism.

These people who often seem highly intelligent and well informed ignore the failure of communism and it's first cousins.

My conclusion: They will seize power when the impoverished think they've found a savior only to be worsened...poor dumb bastards...

Some people know full well the certain rabid failure of socialism, but support and promote it because they expect they will be among the choice few on the top of the pile.

While its true that Venezuela has large oil reserves, they have two things that seriously hinder turning that into a viable revenue stream - First, they nationalized everything there meaning no western oil companies will go in until the current laws are changed. Second - the oil produced there is primarily heavy oil that has limited users.

The sad thing is that US Progressives won't learn a thing from the collapse of Venezuela. They'll continue to support the same kind of radical policies that will lead us to a similar end, should we elect them.

"Socialism can't be wrong because it's a sciiience! No, no, one of the techs at the wheel just made a boo-boo."

Riiight. Because the Soviet Union is still standing tall and the People's Republic of China never reduced socialism to an aspirational goal that somehow magically justifies the continued presence of totalitarian government, eh, Oliver? What other examples have you got?

quote:

Originally posted by Il Cattivo:
"Socialism can't be wrong because it's a sciiience! No, no, one of the techs at the wheel just made a boo-boo."

Is the science settled, like it is with climate change?

Sure. Lenin died years ago. Xi tried to rewrite the textbook a year or two ago, but that was really just a PR move made while he was trying to make his job position permanent.

quote:

Originally posted by DrDan:
Is the science settled, like it is with climate change?

Well... sure:
“A man who reads Marx and Lenin is a communist. A man who understands Marx and Lenin is a capitalist.”
— Ronald Reagan

Karl Marx, You Were Wrong!
But campus diehards still make a case for him.
https://sigforum.com/eve/forums...935/m/4650022144/p/1

Meanwhile, back in the USA:

Socialism is going mainstream, and Millennials are the cause

A headline in The Hill captures a significant moment in American history: "Four socialist-backed candidates win Pennsylvania legislative primaries."

The Democratic Socialists of America supported all four candidates, who will almost certainly win in November, given their lack of GOP opponents.

The DSA itself thinks socialism's time has come:

The DSA hailed the legislative victories as a huge moment for the socialist movement.

Arielle Cohen, co-chair of the Pittsburgh DSA chapter, told HuffPost that she feels a "monumental shift" after the victories, noting DSA's growing membership since President Trump's election.

"We won on popular demands that were deemed impossible. We won on health care for all, we won on free education," she said.

"We're turning the state the right shade of red tonight," she added.

The "right shade of red" is due to a growing acceptance for socialism, especially among Millennials, and outright hostility and opposition to capitalism.

https://www.americanthinker.co..._are_the_cause_.html

quote:

Originally posted by Scoutmaster:

Some people know full well the certain rabid failure of socialism, but support and promote it because they expect they will be among the choice few on the top of the pile.

Yesterday on my flight home from LAX, Kevin DeLeon the CA legislature got on board. I wanted soooo bad to yell at him to stop ignoring the 40% of the state that is more mainstream and conservative. I just wanted to punch him in the gonads.

I had a bad thought about the plane crashing and saving the once great state of California. Moonbeam was on the same flight two weeks ago, but so was Pete Wilson.....so I thought it was better that it not crash.

quote:

The thing that gets to me is that we fight for the freedom of all, even the morons who would throw it away.

A bit delayed, but...

We've long put our chips on the proposition that neighbors with democratic governments would be more stable, more wealthy and better neighbors. If nothing else, we've also long put our chips on the proposition that truly democratic neighbors would be less likely to provide access points to European powers (France, Britain, Germany, and now Russia) to gain a significant foothold or undue influence in the Americas.

Idealism plays a role in the fight for democracy, but democracy has always been part of our strategy as well.

quote:

Originally posted by Abn556:...The sad thing is that US Progressives won't learn a thing from the collapse of Venezuela. They'll continue to support the same kind of radical policies that will lead us to a similar end, should we elect them.

Not only will they not learn from the collapse of Venezuela, they will reject the reason for collapse.

The only reason socialism lasted as long as it did is because Venezuela is on the largest oil reserves in the world.
With the help of our capitalist oil companies, they were able to extract and sell all that unearned production. They didn't invent, build and sell products.
Then when even that couldn't pay enough to keep the fraud of socialism going, they decided to kill the golden goose by nationalizing (stealing really) the assets of foreign companies and productive citizens. That worked for a while until the equipment wore out, the productive citizens mostly left and the price of oil dropped.
Once this whole thing collapses it will require rebuilding the whole country like after a war. Hopefully the fallout doesn't take down all their neighbors too.

Socialism is a means to power, not a means to prosperity.

Apparently it's not even a means to survival.

Perhaps the US should send military in and take over Venezuela. Then keep the oil. The US and Venezuela would both be far better off. Too simplistic, I know.