OPINION:
Venezuela, over the weekend, saw gas lines that stretched to 700-plus vehicles.
There’s your socialism, folks. The socialism the left in America so loves to tout.
The left gets away with pretending as if socialism is good for the people by selling lies.
In 2011, the self-declared socialist-slash-democratic-socialist Bernie Sanders had a post on his Senate website that read, “These days, the American dream is more apt to be realized in … Venezuela,” land of income equality.
Right. The deceptions continue today — even as the long gas lines in Venezuela get longer.
Here’s one, courtesy of an NBC News headline: “In oil-rich Venezuela, residents deal with long gas lines as U.S. sanctions have an effect.”
Here’s another, from The Washington Post: “No, Venezuela doesn’t prove anything about socialism.”
And yet one more, from Yahoo: “Venezuela’s crisis is not the result of socialism.” That piece goes on to advance the usual Big Government Lover line that falling oil prices combined with unsustainable debt and a corrupt government brought about the country’s collapse.
That piece goes on to advance one of the left’s biggest pro-socialism arguments — that true socialism has never been tried, and Venezuela is not an example of true socialism.
Yada, yada.
Smart people know that if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, it is a duck. And when there’s a government that reaches for massive power, and snatches from the individual the ability to freely profit from one’s own endeavors and calls for redistribution of wealth — well then, that’s a socialist-style system.
That’s a socialist-style system that brings on a corrupted government, just the kind advanced by Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro.
The same Maduro, curiously enough, America’s leading socialist voice, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, recently refused to denounce.
“Myself,” she said in March, the Washington Examiner wrote, “just like anyone else, is absolutely concerned with the humanitarian crises that’s happening and I think it’s important that any solution we have centers the Venezuelan people and centers the democracy of the Venezuelan people first.”
There’s that leftist spin again — as if democracy and socialism are one and the same. (Though given today’s direction of the Democratic Party, maybe they are, in America.)
When will the left learn socialism never works, it always fails and continually breeds discontent and poverty and corruption among the people?
Answer: That’s a loaded question.
In the eyes of the left, socialism does indeed work. It hands the power of the people — the power of the individual — over to the lucky few elitists and globalists in government.
Socialism gives those who seek to control the feel-good, watery social justice message that’s needed to pilfer from the people, control and ultimately, rule.
• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley.
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