In a different era, he might have been called a fascist. After all, Hugo Chávez was an anti-Semitic demagogue and chauvinistic nationalist who hated Israel, hated the United States, hated democracy, and favored state control of the economy. A onetime paratrooper and failed coup leader, Chávez aggressively militarized Venezuelan society, creating pro-government citizen brigades to serve as his own praetorian guard and arming them with Russian-made assault rifles. He threatened neighboring countries and constantly warned of looming foreign invasions. He promulgated wild conspiracy theories about Jews and Americans. He befriended the most reactionary and fascistic governments on earth, including the theocracy in Iran, the gangster regime in Russia, and the racist Mugabe dictatorship in Zimbabwe.
I’m happy to call him one in this era. And he is living proof of Jonah Goldberg’s thesis.
I want to go back to the gun law history. In 1987, Florida responded to a wave of crime by loosening restrictions. Were you surprised by what happened as a result?
At the time, I thought, “Oh, this is going to be a bloodbath.” And it wasn’t. The late ’80s were a very violent time in the U.S. The crack cocaine thing was in full flower. Then Florida did this, and most liberals thought it was crazy. But crime dropped. A lot. Crime there is now half of what it was before then.
…These are precisely the kind of people the Democratic Party says it exists to serve. Over and over, people I met on my trip would say, “I don’t get it. Democrats are the party of the working man. How can the Democrats do this?” They feel so alienated that they won’t listen to the Democrats on climate change or health care or immigration or anything else. As a Democrat, it broke my heart to hear this over and over and over again. These are our guys. These are our people, and they hate us. We take this anti-gun position and we’re giving these people away, and we’re getting nothing in exchange. We are not making the country safer.
He might want to reconsider some of the other things that “liberals” think are crazy.
Barack Obama has been trying to stimulate the economy with record-high government spending funded by higher tax rates and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke’s low interest rates.
But as Stanford economist Michael Boskin points out in the Wall Street Journal, “Japan tried that, to little effect, in the 1990s.” Slow growth has become the new normal there.
There are alternative policies. One is to cut government spending, or cut it more than you raise taxes. As Boskin points out, the Netherlands in the mid-1990s and Sweden in the mid-2000s “stabilized their budgets without recession [with] $5-$6 of actual spending cuts per dollar of tax hikes.”
And he notes that Canada reduced government spending in the mid-1990s and early 2000s by an amount equal to 8 percent of gross domestic product.
Those cuts weren’t painless, but they put Canada on a trajectory different from ours. Canadian voters value budget surpluses, and Canada managed to avoid almost all the bad effects of the 2007-09 recession.
I think that Keynes himself would be appalled to see the things being done in his name.
I love this country. I love the American idea. I have profound disappointments in my country. I feel we ought to be in space … because it meant so much to us … technologically. It moved us along.”
We are “in space.” We have a space station, we have at least two, maybe three manned spacecraft in development, to fly in two or three years (not even counting NASA’s wasteful efforts that won’t fly with humans until the end of the decade at best), we just got an announcement of a serious plan to send two people to Mars within five years. What more does he want?