Talk, Talk, Talk
Nov 11th, 2007 by Micah Tillman | 2 Comments |
I find socialist leaders (not socialist normal people) who criticize other leaders for being power-hungry amusing. Witness Chavez: Spanish King Tells Chavez to “Shut Up”
Chavez is giving socialism a bad name. Socialism is about everyone working together. But if the socialist leader person can’t keep a civil tongue, what kind of leader (example) is he?
It seems, however, that the Israeli and Palestinian leaders are still hoping they can speak civilly and work together: Abbas calls Annapolis meeting historic opportunity. Let’s just hope the international talking goes better than the internal talking Abbas engages in during the speech.
And I’m not sure about this one: Romney aides oppose speech on religion. I, for one, would be interested in hearing such a speech. It might help to hear why he thinks his religion is not an artificial construction, especially in this “Bush Lied, People Died” era.
And here’s another one I’m not sure about: Hillary Clinton’s Campaign Plants Second Question, ABC Reports. I can’t decide whether this is a big deal. Politics is an artificially constructed performance anyway.
| Stumble It! 
| Digg This!
| Add to del.icio.us! 
| Reddit? 
|
I think this post might be one of those self-contradiction things. Where you criticize someone for doing something even though you’re doing the same thing.
Hmmm. . .
It is important to define socialism before I make any comments about it. Socialism is an economic system in which the government owns the means of production. Sometimes, people apply it to capitalist countries which have high levels of taxation and a large social safety net (like Scandinavian countries and, to a lesser extent, the rest of Western Europe). Some Western European countries did go over to socialism after World War II (like Britain), but all of them began to abandon it and de-nationalized most of their industries after the stagflation of the ’70s and the subsequent elections of Thatcher in Britain and Reagan in America.
Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, I regard socialism as both falsifiable and falsified, so I don’t know if Chavez can give it a worse name than it already has. I should say that I don’t disapprove of the moral theory underlying socialism and I sympathize with people who sympathize with socialism. (As Edward O. Wilson used to say, Karl Marx was right. Socialism does work; he just had the wrong species. It works great for ants.) I don’t think I’ve ever sympathized with a socialist leader, though, virtually all of whom have been power-mad dictators with delusions of grandeur, except perhaps Clement Attlee in Britain. (Chavez certainly qualifies.)
Chavez has been extraordinarily lucky in that he has been President during an unprecedented runup in oil prices. He’s still faced economic crises, but the historically high price of oil has bailed him out. Once the price of oil reverts to the mean, the harm Chavez is doing to Venezuela’s economy will no longer be concealed and that will be the end of Chavez.