Today’s Wall Street Journal includes a keen letter from a reader who sees the parallels between the utopian, collectivistic blather of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and that of Barack Obama. I submit that with just a bit of scrubbing, someone who read the texts of a standard Chavez speech and an Obama speech (especially that he’s now in his full-dress demagogic campaign mode) would have a hard time telling them apart. Here’s the letter:
Venezuela Is No Model for the U.S.
Mary Anastasia O’Grady’s “Chavez’s 40-Year Plan to Conquer Vice” (Americas, Dec. 5) describing how Venezuela’s buffoonish dictator Hugo Chávez intends to cure all the vices of mankind and thus create a socialistic utopia sounds a lot like “change you can believe in.” The Obama Democrats/liberals/progressives/socialists subscribe to Jane Addams’s words, “we must demand that the individual shall be willing to lose the sense of personal achievement and shall be content to realize his activity only in connection to the activity of the many.” Their “vision” enshrines the notion that since not everyone is gifted with an entrepreneurial nature, the government is obligated to enact policies that limit personal enrichment and thus inequality. Such a society can never function unless man’s baser instincts are brought under control, and it will never produce an Edison, Ford or Jobs. Thus, such a society can never have enough wealth to pay for the promised vast social entitlements, and even with its enormous oil income, we will soon witness the total collapse of Venezuela’s economy.
How many times will such a scenario have to be repeated before these so-called Latin American “redeemers” realize that only personal and economic freedom can produce economic vitality? Why do we seemed doomed to follow this equation for failure? Are we at the tipping point where those who believe the siren song of equality of outcome will control the next election and accelerate our slide into mediocrity? Is this the “fundamental transformation” that President Obama and his clueless followers planned for America?
R.H. Gruy
Granbury, Texas
