Poland’s Minister of Justice delivered a scathing response to European Union bureaucrats who are attempting to bully the staunchly anti-migrant country as the battle over ‘refugee resettlement’ quotas rages on.
Zbiegniew Ziobro directed his comments at Frans Timmermans, Vice President of the European Commission, who has established himself as one of the EU’s most aggressive attack dogs against a growing list of member states who oppose the migrant schemes.
“We all know from school, in history class, that the Netherlands has a long experience in colonialism, but bad habits must be stamped out,” said Ziobro, correlating Timmermans’ Dutch roots to his penchant for imperious interventionism. “I’d like to ask Mr. Timmermans to stop speaking with such insolence and arrogance about Poland, and to Poles, and to the Polish authorities because we deserve respect.”
“We expect and demand respect.”
Polish nationalists and Euroskeptics have taken up the refrain of “Hands off Poland,” and rumblings of #Polexit grow louder by the day.
The Polish government is in the midst of procedures to reshape elements of its judicial system, but the EU has threatened to punish the country severely if they follow through, accusing Warsaw of creating a “systematic threat to the rule of law in Poland” and possibly ‘breaching fundamental human rights.’
The reforms are aimed at dismantling a “privileged caste” of left-wing activist lawyers and judges, obligating ‘Christian values’ to be considered in Supreme Court rulings, and shaking up the entire judiciary by dismissing many sitting judges while also re-structuring how they are appointed.
Friedrich Hayek famously observed that socialist central planning puts countries on the road to serfdom.
The latest dead end on that highway to hell—already littered with the human victims of past failed attempts in places like Cuba and the old Soviet Union—is in Caracas, Venezuela.
That is where, last weekend, President Nicolás Maduro and the thousands of Cuban communists who actually run his government took the final step to squash the rights of individual Venezuelan citizens and impose an authoritarian dictatorship.
Hayek could have told us: It is the logical last act in the Venezuelan tragedy that began nearly 20 years ago with the election of Maduro’s mentor (and Fidel Castro’s protégé), Hugo Chavez.
As The Economist magazine reported earlier this year, the damage in Venezuela is extensive.
The economy has contracted dramatically—gross domestic product in 2017 will be nearly 25 percent smaller than when Chavez died in 2013. Hyperinflation—and the complete economic collapse it signals—seems to be just around the corner.
Inflation is predicted to exceed 1,600 percent this year and the value of the country’s currency—the bolivar—has plummeted. As wags on Twitter have noted, it is now worth less than the virtual gold tokens in the “World of Warcraft” video game.
Which would be funny, were it not for the immense human suffering right now in Venezuela. People are losing weight because there is not enough to eat in this workers’ paradise.
There are shortages of everything, everywhere. Just like in the old Soviet Union, people line up at the first rumor that some basic item—bread, rice, cooking oil, etc.—might be available.
Food riots are frequent. Medicines are almost nonexistent. Hospitals do not even have running water. Many people are fleeing—thousands of refugees are crossing the border daily into Colombia.
It wasn’t supposed to end this way. The World Bank clucked approvingly in the early Chavez years, when his oil income redistribution schemes improved statistics for inequality.
Meanwhile, the Chavistas looted and destroyed the Venezuelan private sector, seizing and wiping out the efficient companies and farms that had been producing the basic goods people are now fighting over.
As long as oil prices were rising, they got away with it.
There is more equality in Venezuela today, that’s for sure. As British Prime Minister Winston Churchill would have put it: Socialism produces misery, equally shared.
Not everyone is hurting, though. Chavez’s daughter, María Gabriela, has a fortune estimated at more than $4 billion.
The Miami Herald reports that state-owned oil company PDVSA alone funneled $11 billion in illegal payments to Venezuelan government officials and their friends and families between 2005 and 2014.
Venezuela’s score in the Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index makes it the most corrupt country in the Western Hemisphere, and helped drag the country to the bottom of The Heritage Foundation’s annual Index of Economic Freedom, too.
Back home in America, the mainstream media is dutifully reporting on the demonstrations against the government.
Sometimes they mention that Maduro’s thugs on motorcycles are randomly beating people up and that Venezuelan government sharpshooters are targeting and killing protesters to terrorize the public and scare them into staying off the streets.
But, in a country where many young people are still enchanted by the Bernie Sanders message of socialism and free stuff, not enough attention has been paid to this simple fact: that in the real world—a world where bad people say good-sounding things to voters and then proceed to steal other people’s stuff once they take office—Venezuela is what you get when socialist theories are actually put into practice.
As the health care debate goes on, Senator Bernie Sanders will toss in a socialized medicine bill.
Bernie’s bill won’t be a realistic piece of legislation. The 1 percenter Socialist from Vermont has three successful bills to his name. Two of those involved renaming post offices. He was a marginal figure during the ObamaCare debate. The financials of the plan won’t work. But they never do.
ObamaCare insurers are losing billions. Aetna pulled out after $700 million in losses. United Health jumped after losing $720 million. The single-payer that Bernie wants to propose will be even worse.
Vermont’s single payer experiment cost $4.3 billion out of a $4.9 billion state budget. The California Senate passed single-payer with no way to cover the $400 billion cost in a $183 billion budget.
Democrats who wouldn’t vote for it faced death threats and accusations that they were “murderers”.
That’s what every argument about socialized medicine comes down to. Either you support it or you want people to die.
Life expectancy in the year after ObamaCare fell for the first time since 1993. That was, coincidentally, the year of Hillary’s big push for socialized medicine.
Socialized medicine is better at taking lives than at saving them. Just ask Bernie.
The closest the Vermont Socialist has gotten to medical management was his time as VA committee chair. After hundreds of thousands of veterans died waiting for care, Bernie covered up the carnage. He claimed it was a right-wing conspiracy, sabotaged efforts to hold hearings and dismissed the complaints.
"When you are dealing with 200,000 people, if you did better than any other health institution in the world, there would be thousands of people every single day who would say 'I don't like what I'm getting,'" he insisted.
Bernie lied. 307,000 veterans died.
Socialized medicine isn’t a system. It’s an ideology. No amount of deaths or statistics can discredit it. And that is another reason it’s so dangerous. It combines the entrenched bureaucracy that rots all government programs from within with the fanatical conviction that it is the road to utopia.
It doesn’t matter how many people a progressive program kills. It must be defended on principle.
Socialized medicine is sold with a lie. The lie is that you can get all the medical care you need for a low price. Or even for free. But socialized medicine doesn’t have less rationing than the hybrid government-market programs that progressives keep incrementally creating and then tearing down. It has more.
Socialism always sells the same lie. Take anything, remove the profit motive, scale up taxes and you can distribute it more fairly. But instead socialized medicine cannibalizes the health care market. Patients get tightly rationed health care. Doctors and hospitals are squeezed on reimbursements. The system never rations itself. Instead it rations care and becomes a policy vehicle for social engineering.
Even while Obama Inc. was touting ObamaCare, it was moving forward with cuts to health care services for active military personnel. ObamaCare replaced viable health care plans with unusable plans that were catastrophic care in all but name. Rationing was always the name of the game.
Socialism doesn’t build services, it builds bureaucracy.
The bureaucracy rations the services it administers while building bigger buildings, hiring more personnel and expanding its organization. Bureaucrats get nicer chairs while patients bleed out waiting to see a doctor. Medications vanish from the formulary while unions negotiate bigger contacts with more perks. The bureaucracy insulates itself from criticism by identifying its existence and funding with medicine. Oppose it and you’re a murderer.
That’s socialized medicine.
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