As IF Times

Nicolas Maduro has been removed literally from his home in Venezuela by US special forces in a precise military operation and placed in custody in a New York remand center. Very recently, Maduro publicly dared the Americans to come get him. I guess technically, Trump was invited.  Fast forward a few months, and he’s perp walked into a cell with P. Diddy in New York.

As you’d expect, the event has brought out strong opinions on both the legality and the morality of his removal.

As in all cases, there are 3 sides to any story; the opposing sides and the actual truth, which will often overlap with the opposing views. The views of most politicians can generally be ignored since their utterances are partisan and dependant on whom is funding their existence. As is well known, they are very adept on using both sides of their mouths to strongly condemn or support whatever is most determined by the polls.  Now they are boxed into supporting a dictator who had thousands of his citizens murdered during protests.

To cite such an example, we show the utterance of a Chris Murphy, the Democrat representative from Connecticut who in 2019 issued the following tweet:

Of course now, in the aftermath of the actual removal of this “dictator”, the political opposition and media mob is in an uproar over the unilateral actions of President Trump. Much of the outrage concerns the notion that the US is once again interfering with the internal politics of a nation and imposing their imperial will. Is it really a resident’s problem if they know that their neighbor is beating their spouse? Post mortems of all of the ‘regime changes’ allegedly orchestrated by the US in the past 50 years reveals that it’s never as simple as American imperialism. There are always other corporate interests at play and America is conveniently tagged as the villain.  To be sure, a nation’s business is its own business and it certainly isn’t America’s place to oversee all nations.  That was what the United Nations was created for.  As we know, the UN is essentially a drinking club for despotic nations and about as effective in maintaining world peace as paper condoms are for birth control.  This point was brought home recently by the appointment of Somalia as head of the UN security council.  Somalia; whose only expertise is in running daycares; installed as head of world security. This is Monty Python stuff.

In the case of Maduro, the number of factors which resulted in excising him from leadership are many and more likely to be revealed as time goes on. It’s unlikely that it was only about oil, or the Monroe doctrine or about an oppressive regime, or about drug shipments and money flows to terrorist groups, or about alliances with Iran and Russia, or about sending criminals to the US, or about blunting the influence of communism among neighboring stares or about secretive money flows to domestic politicians or about rigged elections. None of these by themselves are bad reasons.  In concert however, they are compelling reasons. Up until just now, politicians on both sides of the aisle railed against Maduro’s influence as noted above.

When you also observe the increasingly strong protests against the oppressive regime in Iran by their own citizens, it becomes clear that many nations are tired of being oppressed by their autocratic rulers…many of which are kept in power by cancelling elections in the case of the Ukraine and oddly, the UK, or by annulling elections altogether as did happen in Venezuela and recently in Romania. Thus, those protesting the removal of an ‘elected’ leader in Maduro are both misinformed or disingenuous.

At the end of it all, it really doesn’t matter what paid protestors and ideological NPC’s think; it’s more important to see what Venezuelans think and right now, there is an air of celebration and relief that the nation will finally emerge from their socialist hell.

Ironically, even as Venezuela appears to be emerging from this tyrannical state, the siren song of control and oppression is rising among nations once thought of as bastions of freedom, notably the commonwealth nations and much of western Europe. No wonder they’re protesting the US action.  If they could only delete the anti-state actors domestically, that would be a real victory.

Source: Venezuela seizes bakeries amid bread shortage | Miami Herald

In 1957, Ayn Rand published what would become her most famous, (if gratuitously overwritten) work of literature depicting a dystopian scenario in which productive people are stripped of their ability to control the product of their industriousness.  Instead, the state decides what levels of production are appropriate, by whom and even to the detriment of the producer because  the “public good” trumped the needs of the productive individual.  As time goes on, innovative and productive endeavours stop, industries fail and the country spirals into poverty.

The cautionary message conveyed by this fictitious scenario in Atlas Shrugged has been lost on many societies since the appearance  of the now 70 year old classic novel.  The situation in Venezuela with the commandeering of bakers….bakers, could be lifted directly from the pages of the book.  Venezuela is blessed with an abundance of economic potential by virtue of ample oil resources.  Oil prices soared from under $20 dollars a barrel to over $120 at their peak before declining to the present $50 a barrel level.  This bounty of revenue should have created a windfall of wealth for the nation.  Yet, thanks largely to the ill advised adventures of their socialist ex-president Hugo Chavez,  the nation is barely solvent, with a crushing national debt while poverty and shortages plague the people there.  The government is restricting goods and services of all kinds and have now taken to policing bakers on their production.  It’s as if they were lottery winners that blew the windfall on booze and trinkets.

By comparison, we may observe that a couple of other nation states have managed to not just survive, but thrive economically with virtually no benefit of available commercial natural resources.  In the case of Israel, they have somehow turned  a few acres of arid sand, surrounded by permanently hostile neighbors, into an oasis of economic activity.  In the case of Japan, a bunch of islands bereft of natural resources, they are nevertheless among the world’s pre-eminent industrial nations.  In neither one of these two examples are the poor, the elderly and the sick, pushed into lives of desperation and poverty.  Oddly, we only see this type of poverty and desperation in nations that subscribe to centralized control and planning as the form of government.  Think Cuba.

In fact, throughout history, there are no examples of successful, centrally controlled, collective societies. None. Think of that.  We never hear of people risking their lives to get into nations such as Cuba, or Venezuela. Yet somehow, the notion that a benign and altruistic central authority represents the ideal form of government continues to be pushed to this day.  The historical failure of this mindset hasn’t quelled the ambitions of those that push for this dystopian oppression on an even larger scale.  Frighteningly, we see this impetus for  ‘world government’ coming from today’s ‘globalists’.  And therein lies the entire problem with people who have no sense of history and too much faith in unicorn theory.  They are like the slow kid in school that still answers 5, when asked the sum of  2 plus 2, despite having been told the correct answer 14 times.  In the absence of any successful precedent for their visions of a theoretical central bureaucracy manipulating the affairs of a nation-state, they cling to the idea that this time, it’s different.