Hugo Bush and George Chavez:

I admit I had to gag a bit when I read this in the New York Times: ”But fresh graffiti on streets here in São Paulo, where [President Bush] landed Thursday night for his first stop, calls him a murderer. The smattering of protests and the placement of military vehicles around the city, South America’s largest, also present an alternate interpretation of his visit: as a clash between the open capitalism that Mr. Bush espouses and the socialist approach pushed by leftist leaders who have grown in power and popularity.”

There is nothing you can do today to slander capitalism that associate it with the likes of George Bush. Bush is no advocate of capitalism, open or otherwise. If he were charged with the “crime” of promoting capitalism there wouldn’t be enough evidence to convict him.

Capitalism is the private ownership of the means of production. It requires free markets where government does not hand out favors to cronies, create regulations for the favoured industries, or shackle competition. Bushian Republicans is Big Government. It is Elephantine Government.

It is government so massive we don’t have a word to describe it. It meddles in virtually every aspect of human existence. It is such massive government it not only meddles in every aspect of human existence but it isn’t happy screwing up America alone. It wants to screw up the world. And does.

The largest increase in socialized medicine in decades is a Bush legacy. That’s not capitalism. He spends millions on “chastity’ programs. That’s not capitalism. He runs up massive deficits. That’s not capitalism. In fact the New York Times proves that Bush is no capitalist. In his visit to the South America: “He promised hundreds of millions of dollars to help families buy homes and said he would dispatch a Navy hospital ship to the region to provide free health services.” You call that capitalism!

Now I know the Left-wing readers, who enjoy this site, will cringe. But Bush is a socialist. He’s more of a socialist than Bill Clinton was for sure. And get this remark from the man: “When you total all up the money that is spent, because of the generosity of our taxpayers, that $8.5 billion to programs that promote social justice.”

God, Mr. President, you disgust me. First, Mr. Bush, I know this doesn’t fit into you pea sized brain but the American taxpayer wasn’t being generous. You took the money from them under threat of imprisonment and then you dole it out to make your pathetic self feel important. The American people are generous but generosity implies choice and your entire existence has been dedicated to destroying choice and imposing your moronic views on others at the point of a gun both at home and abroad.

Generosity is what you do willingly with your own resources. If I mug you in the alley and hand over your cash to my favorite charity you are not being generous. Neither am I, in fact. Generosity is what you do with your own resources freely, without force being involved. What you do is socialism.

It is socialism on the global scale. It is the theft of the resources of productive people in the United States to be doled out around the world at your liking to promote, as you put it, “social justice”. As Hayek noted, social justice is a mirage and the attempt to impose it will ultimately destroy liberty. That fits in with your agenda very well.

Of course the Left-wing in South America bitches because the US doesn’t give more money to their corrupt and incompetent governments. Sorry, amigos, we have our own corrupt and incompetent government to support.

Now if you don’t think Bush is incapable of telling the truth he also claimed the his government is promoting “open markets and open government”. Right, like secret courts approving secret wire taps, like the abolition of habeas corpus, like kidnapping people around the world, torturing them, denying people access to attorneys, snooping through the luggage of every traveling American, national ID programs, ad nauseum. Lots of open government.

In an attempt to prove their point the Times contrasted Bush to Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez. What is the contrast when it comes to their international travels? Chavez goes around the world doling out money which has been confiscated from the productive sector of his nation. In doing so he is called a socialist. King George travels around the world doling out even greater sums of money which has been confiscated from the productive sector of his nation. He does was Chavez does but on a grander scale and people want to pretend that isn’t socialism.

This is not the first time that Left and Right have behaved in very similar ways and then pretended that they are vastly different. The differences between Hitler and Stalin were rather minimal. Hitler allowed most industry to be privately owned but the owners had to run it the way the government wanted while under Stalin the government directly ran industry. The real difference is that Hitler pretended there was private ownership (but state control) while Stalin realized that if the state controls it they might as well own it. Hitler’s imperial ambitions weren’t quite as grand as those of Stalin but Stalin managed to take over, and control, for a much longer time, a far larger portion of the globe.

When marketing two products that are very similar you have to latch on to minute differences and exaggerate them, and the differences between Bush and the Left, especially the American Left as exemplified in the Democratic Party, is that Bush believes in even bigger government. The US government has grown more in size, and at a faster pace, under Bush than under any Democrat. Every Democratic President has vetoed more spending bills than has Bush.

The Left calls what Bush does fascism. That is correct. But the differences between fascism and socialism are rather minute and that is due to the fact that the founders of fascism were socialists, literally. Mussolini, the father of fascism, was a member of parliament for the Socialist Party and had edited the party newspaper. The fascists just felt that it was unnecessary to actually own industry, it was enough to control it and order it about at the government’s whim.

The Democrats in America have basically been economic fascists since the days of Roosevelt as John Flynn noted in his classic book As We Go Marching. The do differ as to their scapegoats but both extremes have always had scapegoats that are used.

The Marxists claimed that evil class of people were capitalists, who Marx himself said, were the Jews. Hitler said the evil class was the Jews who control industry and business. Not a big difference. Different eras require different scapegoats. The political Left attacks those people who control industry and business and mostly leave out any ethnicity. The political Right attacks “liberals” and gays.

Both Left and Right demand the expansion of state power to solve what ever problem they have urgently concocted, imagined or caused. Both condemn the powers the other side has accumulated under their watch and then refuses to reduce those powers when they take power. If anything they then expand the very powers they condemned.

Republicans whined about the nationalization of education. What did Bush do about it? He passed No Child Left Behind which gave the feds more control over local education. And the Democrats will not repeal it. The Republicans complained about socialized medicine under the Democrats, reforms which have rapidly pushed up the cost of medicine in America. Under Bush they then expand state control of medicine to new highs. The more things change the more they stay the same.