There’s really nothing one can say anymore about what Hugo Chavez did to his country, No Food, No Medicine, No Respite: A Starving Boy’s Death in Venezuela. But now in France a left-wing politician is on the rise who praises Chavez, Left-Wing Politician Shakes Up France’s Presidential Race:
That man is Jean-Luc Mélenchon, admirer of Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez, sworn enemy of NATO and high finance, and candidate of his own “France Unsubjugated” movement, who has been drawing tens of thousands to his rallies, especially the young, as he did here Sunday at Toulouse on the banks of the Garonne River. They came to hear a veteran French politician give them a dousing of old-fashioned Robin Hood-revolutionary rhetoric, with promises to tax the rich hard, give to the poor and start a “citizen revolution.”
There is a serious chance that this will be the next president of the French republic. This man, who has no problems being called a Communist. If there is one political system where the experiment has been done, it is command economy socialism. There may be cases of market failure where the state needs to intervene, but by and large an economy dominated by the state has not done good for the common man.
And yet the reality is what alternatives are the people being given? They are looking Left and looking Right, because they want hope that the future will have some of the promise that the past had. Sober realistic centrists with broadly liberal views only offer them only hard truths.
Truths such as this: Evidence That Robots Are Winning the Race for American Jobs. The far Left anti-capitalist program in economics really doesn’t offer a long run path to prosperity. But capitalism itself only leads to individual and broad-based prosperity as a side effect of market logic. If returns to capital could accrue without labor inputs, then that would be even “better.”