As the President of the United States treads ground previously trod by such a personage nearly ninety years ago — Calvin Coolidge was the last U. S. Commander in Chief to make the trip to Cuba — we are understandably inundated with coverage.
Obama’s Cuba trip is Big News.
We see that Cuba is backwards — it is socialist, after all, so no surprise there — but slowly opening up to American travel and trade. The nation’s voluntary sector squirms under the omnipresent, oppressive feet of its regulators.
What we see now is the result of socialist repression. Cuba shows, perhaps, socialism’s best-case-scenario result, stasis. The island dystopia is in many ways a time capsule. Some of its current charm is that stuck-in-timed-ness.
But there is also endemic hopelessness in the country. The people are held back. Infantilized. Ruled.
And there is no disputing the fact that this is all the result of an excess of socialism. As I have argued before, the old standby, the Blame the US Embargo ploy, is one that socialists wield with devastating results — to their own ideology. Socialism is the suppression of free trade; pure socialism abolishes all trade, along with all private property. Blaming an embargo shows how important private property and capitalism itself are to socialism’s few successes.
Barack Obama is, right now, demonstrating the best case against socialists in his own party, by opening up Cuba to the wonderfully corrosive processes of the market.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
3 replies on “Socialist Stasis, Disturbed”
Too bad we couldn’t talk Obama into staying in Cuba. He’d fit right in.
The problem is Obama won’t be opening up Cuba to the ‘corrosive processes of the market’. He will merely make it easy for Cuba’s rulers to get their hands on American money, with no corresponding increase in freedom for Cubans. Naive American travelers will spend their hard-earned dollars to enrich Cuba’s leaders. What about the money American tqaxpayers pay every year to lease the base at Guantanamo Bay? Cuba has had access to that money for over fifty years.
Absolutely correct.
Obama does not want Cuba open to market forces