Venezuela has number of problems on its hands lately, one of which had been toilet paper shortages predictably caused by its awesomely awesome socialist revolution. This is fitting, because its economy has been spinning down the drain. Now, Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro has a bright idea for preventing the flush from completing — spin faster!
“I want a Sony plasma television for the house,” said Amanda Lisboa, 34, who waited seven hours outside a Caracas Daka store, USA Today reported. “It’s going to be so cheap!”
“This is for the good of the nation,” Mr. Maduro said in the report. “Leave nothing on the shelves, nothing in the warehouses. … Let nothing remain in stock!”
“This is more like government-sanctioned looting,” said Caracas-based engineer Carlos Rivero, 42, USA Today reported. “What stops them going into pharmacies, supermarkets and shopping malls?”
Looting, indeed. When you go after private property owners — at gunpoint — call them “bourgeois parasites,” and tell the people it’s all being done in the name of “fairness,” lawlessness ultimately will rule the day.
Think this can’t happen in the United States? Think again:
While the country is immersed in Obamacare headlines and a congressional tussle over delays and mandates, the Obama administration is stealthily moving toward unprecedented control over private property under a massive expansion of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Water Act authority.
The proposed rule, obtained by the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee in advance of EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy’s testimony at a Thursday oversight hearing, widely broadens the definition of waterways over which the federal government has jurisdiction to as little as a water ditch in a backyard.
The Clean Water Act redefinition of “waters of the United States” would include all ponds, lakes, wetlands and natural or manmade streams that have any effect on downstream navigable waters — whether on public lands or private property.
The U.S. is going down the same drain, but the difference is that we have people who are trying to slow the process down. It’s just sad that advocates of administrative state are trying to create a bureaucratic vortex of centrifugal force to keep us in the toilet. “Got a ditch in your back yard, kid? Yeah, well, that means it’s the federal government’s yard, now. We’ve been spying on you for quite some time and, quite frankly, we don’t like what you’re up to. So now, you’re up to nothing.”
We know how statists feel about the Founding Fathers—and it’s not warm and fuzzy. In order to hide their animosity towards the Founding Fathers and the magnificent document they produced, they refer to the Constitution as “a living document” (i.e., it means whatever it is they want it to mean.) Only by viewing the Constitution in that light can the statists work around what has been an impediment—and a source of frustration—to their central planning for ages. In order for them to succeed, they need power. In a country of 400 million people—each with their own thoughts and dreams and desires—it requires incredible power to get everyone “in line.” The Constitution stops them in their tracks, which is why its defenders must be labeled “unhinged.”
To see how this works, one needs to look no further than the early roll out of Obamacare. Already, politicians are blaming the insurance industry for the economic fallout of their own policies. Individuals who understand basic economics predicted millions of people would lose their plans, that prices would go up, and that the Affordable Care Act would in fact not lower the underlying costs of the health care industry. Now that the writing is on the wall, even Diane “I think you might be a terrorist some day” Feinstein is trying to find a way to avoid the political fallout.
The world was always complex, but as technology advances the world’s perpetual busybodies will become increasingly frustrated. There are too many moving parts. Billions upon billions of voluntary transactions take place ever day between complex spiritual beings with free will. One camp seeks to control the uncontrollable — which has a historical track record of ending in tyranny — and the other believes that the free market (another imperfect system in an imperfect world) is still the best system ever devised for allowing man to obtain his full potential while pulling countless others out of poverty.
Americans should watch what is happening in Venezuela, because in many ways it is giving us a glimpse into the future if we refuse to change course.
Douglas Ernst Blog 