Venezuela: No Octavio, The Chavez Government is Socialist

Miguel Octavio in the CS Monitor attempts to discredit Hugo Chavez and his government by denying that they are genuinely socialist, but Octavio fails to grasp the nature of socialism.

[Chavez] said we were entering into socialism long ago (2005?), but has yet to define it or implement it. Socialism is not taking over companies and destroying them, nor taking over farms and abandoning them. Socialism is not having a president wear fancy watches and buying armored Bentleys to take him around.

But the system Chavez has implemented is socialism. Socialism consists in enslaving people to the state and putting the government in charge of all property and means of production. The atrocities that follow from this include the “taking over [of] companies and destroying them” and the “taking over [of] farms and abandoning them.” The Venezuelan government is socialist—just as was the government of the Soviet Union, and just as is the government of Zimbabwe. It just hasn’t had time to wreak the full extent of socialist destruction.

If Venezuelans want to oust Chavez and free themselves from this disaster in the making, they must come to understand that socialism—because it denies the individual’s right to the product of his mind—is contrary to human life and thus evil.

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Image: Wikipedia Commons

About Joshua Lipana

Joshua (John M.) Lipana was, until his death in 2013, an assistant editor of The Objective Standard Blog and a freelance writer based in the Philippines. His writings appeared in numerous print and online publications, including Free Enterprise,Capitalism Magazine, NewsReal Blog, and The American Thinker.

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