Socialism leads to disaster
Your consistent inability to engage in meaningful civil discourse, Mr. Rock, and your continued efforts to assassinate the characters of those with whom you disagree with is sad, if not downright tragic. Ad hominem attack is nothing but nonsensical diversion; child’s play if you will. Your snipe about Cowichan Valley’s water quality and those drinking it is an example to my point, and you have strayed far from the track. Remember, the original premise put forward April 8 is that social conscience and socialism are two different things. The fact that you could not acknowledge this, instead diverging frenetically into yourself and your own version of socialism, is suspect. Also, your silence to my letter of May 7 in response to your May 4 tirade is conspicuous indeed. I have included an excerpt here:
“Some would have us believe that the ‘free market system’ is unbridled capitalism. It is not. There again we have two different things. In a free market system, the price for goods and services are self-regulated by consumers and the open market. It relies on the idea that supply and demand can reach their natural point of equilibrium without governmental intervention. This is where U.S. Republican Abraham Lincoln’s famous phrase, ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people’ can be applied. The ‘free market system’ does not take over, nor does it desire to take over government oversight; (that is socialism’s territory!). By contrast, in the capitalist market system, a concentration of capital can skew the supply side of the free market model but is offset by instituted regulatory bodies.
“Historical examples of how socialism has failed are many, but a recent example is Venezuela’s current plunge from the world stage. At one time a thriving democracy, Venezuela became burdened by abuse and mismanagement under the central control of its socialist leaders. After taking over the media, corrupting the rule of law, confiscating personal property including foreign assets, depleting economic reserves, and nationalizing the private-enterprise economy, it was still not enough to realize utopia. Sounding familiar yet? Even after the decline in the oil market, instead of reigning in government, democratic socialist, Hugo Chavez continued to spend on populist programs, romanticizing his people while immiserating them. After his death, Nicolas Maduro, continued the status quo, then ‘ruled by decree’, disintegrating the country further under crushing debt and poverty. Faced with food shortages and stripped of property, Venezuelan citizens fled their own homeland. Under those regimes Venezuela’s GDP fell from $334 billion in 2011 to a shocking low of $70 billion in 2019.
“Socialism’s reputation of central control demonstrated by nationalizing private enterprise, confiscating personal property, and reducing its citizens to a general collectivism, along with forcibly saddling them and their progeny with debt, is NOT reasonable governance. It goes against human nature for hard working self-sufficient, self-reliant people to agree to be controlled in this way. People just do not want to be owned by their government.”
In closing, Mr. Rock, I leave a quote for you and your socialist compatriots in ideology to ponder, from one of the leading liberal thinkers of the 20th century, Isaiah Berlin: “But to manipulate men to propel them toward goals which you — the social reformer — see, but they may not, is to deny their human essence, to treat them as objects without wills of their own, and therefore to degrade them.”
Diane Moen
North Cowichan