By Robert Tracinski
Friday, May 20, 2016
Imagine no
possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed
or hunger
A brotherhood of
man
You probably recognize these words, from John Lennon’s
song “Imagine.”
This is considered an innocuous statement of youthful
idealism, suitable for all audiences. I last heard it a few days ago, sung by a
group of wholesome middle-school girls at my kids’ school. The song is
encouraged by adults as a way of showing off your earnest idealism and your
willingness to keep an open mind to new ideas.
But its real meaning is an indifference to suffering and
a determination to close off your mind to facts that undermine your political
prejudices.
About the same time I was listening to those girls sing
“Imagine,” this
item came across my news feed:
By morning, three newborns were
already dead. The day had begun with the usual hazards: chronic shortages of
antibiotics, intravenous solutions, even food. Then a blackout swept over the
city, shutting down the respirators in the maternity ward. Doctors kept ailing
infants alive by pumping air into their lungs by hand for hours. By nightfall,
four more newborns had died. “The death of a baby is our daily bread,” said Dr.
Osleidy Camejo, a surgeon in the nation’s capital, Caracas, referring to the
toll from Venezuela’s collapsing hospitals.
Venezuela has some of the world’s largest supplies of
oil, with more proven oil reserves than Saudi Arabia. But about 15 years ago,
the late president Hugo Chavez set out to impose a socialist revolution, making
a particular point about his great munificence in providing free health care
for everyone. In pursuit of this revolution, Chavez crushed every industry
outside the oil sector and brought the state-owned oil company under his
control. The result has been a long spiral into poverty and oppression. Now we
can see the results: socialism literally kills babies.
It began by imagining no possessions. Private property
and private businesses and private profit were supposedly the source of
everyone’s problems, so the Venezuelan government set out to get rid of them,
with Chavez issuing a notorious set of 49 decrees in 2001 that gave him vast
power over the economy. He used this power to seize private factories and
expropriate foreign owners of Venezuelan firms—ensuring that no foreign
investors would want to put a single dollar into the country for the
foreseeable future.
A clueless 2009 article in a socialist magazine
specifically hailed Chavez’s interventions in agriculture, quoting his
assurance that “There is a food crisis in the world, but Venezuela is not going
to fall into that crisis. You can be sure of that. Actually, we are going to
help other nations who are facing this crisis.” The socialist reforms included
redistribution of land, the nationalization of whole sections of the
agriculture sector, the formation of socialist agricultural “cooperatives,”
generous subsidies and price supports, and the creation of a vast chain of
government-subsidized, government-run grocery stores.
When it all started to go wrong, the regime doubled down,
blaming private retailers for “hoarding” and “speculation” and prosecuting them
for waging an “economic war” against the people. Their solution was to impose
price controls, which naturally made things worse, leading Venezuelans to
protest by flooding the Internet with photos of empty store
shelves.
The failure of this system was papered over by draining
the country’s remaining oil profits, loading up on massive borrowing, and
imposing a surreal system of currency controls. All of it reads like a vast
experiment designed to find out what happens to an economy when you put it
under the control of crazy people. But it’s actually what happens when you hand
over the economy to people with a fervent belief that government decrees can
change the laws of economics and coerce everyone into prosperity.
So did this brave experiment in socialism result in “no
need for greed or hunger”? Did it bring about “a brotherhood of man”?
Not exactly.
Lootings are becoming a common
occurrence in Venezuela, as the country’s food shortage resulted in yet another
reported incident of violence in a supermarket—this time in the Luvebras
Automarket located in the La Florida Province of Caracas. Videos posted to
social media showed desperate people falling over each other trying to get bags
of rice. One user claimed the looting occurred because it is difficult to get
cereal, and so people ‘broke down the doors and damaged infrastructure.’
Elsewhere, looters attacked a corn warehouse after
employees began giving out small amounts of grain at the gates, but there
wasn’t enough to go around.
‘There’s no rice, no pasta, no
flour,’ resident Glerimar Yohan told La Costa, ‘only hunger.’ Yohan, like the
approximately 50 other people asking employees to give her a ‘little bit’ of
corn to feed her children for breakfast, was turned away.
Before you judge Venezuela’s looters, consider what you
would do if your children were starving.
So much for “no hunger.” What about the “brotherhood of
man”? Not only is looting soaring in Venezuela, but so are all forms of crime.
It has gotten so far out of control that mobs of vigilantes are burning
people alive in the streets over petty thefts. It turns out then when
people are starving, there’s not a lot of brotherhood. Instead, they fight like
dogs over a bone.
Now for the part about “no greed.” If there’s one thing
the history of socialism teaches us, it’s that government officials can always
find a way to live like kings while the people starve. So in Venezuela we see
rampant corruption, with Hugo Chavez’s daughter amassing a fortune estimated in
the billions.
There’s a lot of other baggage that comes with
“idealistic” worldview of socialism. John Lennon also asked us to “imagine
there’s no heaven” and “no religion.” This was not just about atheism, but
about a range-of-the-moment outlook in which we were supposed to be “living for
today.” Living in the present because “now is all there is” was a really big
thing in the 1960s. The hippies wanted us to be like the lilies of the field
and take no thought for the morrow.
That’s one thing socialism has delivered on. It’s easy to
live only for today when long-term planning has become impossible and you have
no idea where your next meal is coming from.
Socialism was also supposed to lead to world peace.
Imagine there’s no
countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or
die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the
people
Living life in
peace.
Under its socialist leaders, Venezuela has been in
constant conflict with its neighbors, particularly Colombia, where Chavez
supported the FARC narco-terrorists. That continues today, with his successor
Nicolas Maduro responding to the economic crisis by announcing “military
exercises to counter alleged foreign threats.” This is no surprise to anyone
who knows the history of socialism. Socialist systems always rely on
nationalism, a jingoistic style of patriotism, and a constant war frenzy to
mobilize the support of the people and distract them from the failures and
corruption of the government.
Socialism doesn’t even deliver domestic peace. At the
same time Maduro was announcing military exercises, he was also vowing a new
wave of arrests targeted at businessmen. Socialists leaders always wage war
against their own people first. In Venezuela, it started with Hugo Chavez using
rhetoric about the rich and about money in politics—sound
familiar?—as an excuse to shut down independent newspapers and radio and television
stations. Since then, the regime has moved on to the jailing of dissidents.
These truths about the fundamental inhumanity of
socialism are old news, and we didn’t need to see any of it confirmed again in
Venezuela. In fact, it had all been demonstrated over and over again before
John Lennon came along. When he wrote “Imagine,” it was no longer necessary for
anyone to imagine the actual real-world meaning of socialism.
What you need your imagination for is to continue to
evade them.
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