For those Americans who loathed their own country’s role as a beacon of freedom, the appeal of Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez was irresistible. Following in the footsteps of other Western pilgrims who had trooped to the Cuban prison of Fidel Castro or to Joseph Stalin’s Soviet empire to praise these gulags as the face of the future, people like Oliver Stone and Sean Penn dutifully embraced Chavez. They liked his childish rants about George W. Bush and helped burnish the myth that he was a true man of the people even as this caudillo suppressed freedom and built a cult of personality. Chavez’s death hasn’t changed this, and in the last day we have heard more blather about populism and his concern for those in poverty. Predictably, the leftists at The Nation are eulogizing him as a humanitarian. Joseph Kennedy showed why he wasn’t up to carrying on the legacy of the previous generation of his family by also mourning the Venezuelan strongman as a caring individual.
There is nothing to be done about those who will applaud anyone who hates America. Such sentiments are nothing more than adolescent rebellion masquerading as political opinion. But the claim that Chavez deserves credit for helping the poor is worth taking down, if only because this issue carries within it a lesson that applies to democracies as well as to authoritarian states like the one he created in Venezuela. The tradition of tyrants trying to buy the love of the masses with government money is as old the Roman Empire. It often pays immediate dividends to the person handing out the goodies, but people who think they are getting something for nothing always suffer in the end.
Chavez is still celebrated in some sectors for confiscating the property of oil companies and using much of that wealth to fund projects and services for the poor. Playing Robin Hood never goes out of style. Chavez enjoyed the role immensely and built himself a cult bought and paid for with state money. Traditional urban political machines in the United States worked on the same principle. Taking money from one set of people and giving it another larger group is good politics. But the Tammany Halls of the world always come to grief because the culture of “where’s mine” cannot be sustained indefinitely. Sooner or later, thug governments run out of people to fleece to pay off their followers. That’s true even for a government funded by seemingly limitless oil wealth like Venezuela.
The Chavez regime prospered on the notion that there is such a thing as a free lunch, and those who ate at his table continue to believe that there was no price for his largesse. Those who have justified and supported every dictator or totalitarian system through history have made the same wrongheaded calculation. What they fail to understand is that the giveaway of government goodies at the price of condoning theft of property and denial of rights ultimately penalizes even those who believe they are the beneficiaries of the scheme. Venezuelans now have a country without a true free press, independent judiciary or elections that can be considered genuine expressions of democracy. And they have an economic system that will ultimately fail because it is not based on the rule of law.
Concern for the welfare of the least fortunate is an obligation of all societies. But there is a vast difference between genuine social justice and a strongman doling out favors to his followers. Ultimately, socialism is organized theft, and even when executed with the panache of charismatic thugs like Chavez it is a system that is predicated on the denial of freedom by those who pose as its defenders. Those who play that game, whether mafia dons, tin pot dictators or legendary thieves, are good topics for fiction. But no decent or thinking person should ever mistake them for humanitarians.
"Joseph Kennedy showed why he wasn’t up to carrying on the legacy of the previous generation of his family" n nYou're kidding, Jonathan, right? n nIf any one group of people presented themselves as being 'men of the people' while carrying on in illegal and / or unethical ways that were personally self serving, it was the Kennedy bigshots. One was even a selfish swimmer who left a young woman clawing at the ceiling of a sunken automobile. n nAt least the patriarch of the family was an honest guy, who spoke his mind on WW2 and the Jews: n n"On June 13, 1938, Kennedy met with Herbert von Dirksen, the German ambassador to the United Kingdom, in London, who claimed upon his return to Berlin that Kennedy had told him that "it was not so much the fact that we want to get rid of the Jews that was so harmful to us, but rather the loud clamor with which we accompanied this purpose. [Kennedy] himself fully understood our Jewish policy."[38] Kennedy's main concern with such violent acts against German Jews as Kristallnacht was that they generated bad publicity in the West for the Nazi regime, a concern that he communicated in a letter to Charles Lindbergh.[39]" n n(from wikipedia) n nIt's the above ass who is the namesake of the younger twit you talk about, right? n nAs for Chavez, good riddance to bad rubbish. His passing is clearly a litmus test for those who care to opine. Many prominent Britons are mourning his passing . . . .
"Playing Robin Hood never goes out of style." nRobin Hood took money from government's and Church's (welfare system) tax collectors and returned it to the people from whom the taxes were taken. nChavez was doing the same??
If Chavez was a Robin Hood how is it that he assumed room temperature with a net worth of an estimated $2 Billion??
"Joseph Kennedy showed why he wasn’t up to carrying on the legacy of the previous generation of his family by also mourning the Venezuelan strongman as a caring individual." n nFrom the Fox News article cited: n"A spokesman for Kennedy said Chavez and the people of Venezuela have donated about 200 million gallons of heating oil over an eight-year collaboration with Citizens Energy. The charity distributes heating oil to lower income families in 25 states and Washington, D.C., offering 100 gallons per family." n nJoe's building a fine legacy himself. And one point Fox omitted was that Kennedy approached every major oil company for contributions of oil and only Citgo responded.
Hitler loved dogs, and children, did you know? n n
Yes, because the poor in Venezuela, from whom Chavez stole, are so much better off, than Kennedy and those Americans he gave this heating oil to. They really did not need that oil.
Yup, Joe Kennedy sure is building a legacy. n nAccording to Joe's tax filings from 2011, his legacy that year was $901,236. nAnd Joe's wife? Why her 2011 legacy was $346,764. n nHellofa legacy…..$1.2 million from a NON-profit. n nNo wonder the other Oil companies turned him down.
Joseph (“Joe”) P. Kennedy III, has already built himself a legacy as a premier panderer by giving away oil paid for by other people. He will probably continue to do well in Massachusetts (at least), and die of old age in some political role, with legions of leftist sycophants propping him up, like a cardboard cutout, as a momentous world leader. If Obama had a son, he might look a lot like Joe Kennedy.
That gift from Chavez didn't cost him a penny, it did however cost the people of Venezuela millions that could have benefitted those people in numerous ways. If the other companies said no to little Joe it was probably his attitude that drove them away. Somehow I don't see politeness as part of his character.
Events such as these are great clarifiers – they tend to separate those with clarity of vision and at least a shred of moral character from those who are truly "useful idiots".
I'll roger that Doc., but are you sure they are "useful"?
"useful" to Hugo Chavez et al…
Ah yes, I was thinking in a more general sense.
Those who don't recoil from any system of government that does not respect the property rights of its citizens are despot wannabes. Those eulogizing Chavez are either too ignorant of his ways to have an informed opinion or they are despot wannabes.