The price of free stuff ends up being terribly high. While Venezuela has endured food riots for years, the capital recently has been the scene of protests related to medical care. Venezuela has free universal health care — and a constitutional guarantee of access to it. That means exactly nothing in a country without enough doctors, medicine, or facilities. Chemotherapy is available in only three cities, with patients often traveling hours from the hinterlands to receive treatment. But the treatment has stopped. Juvenile cancer patients taken by their parents to the children’s hospital in the capital are being turned away because the treatments they need are no longer available. The scene is heartbreaking, but that’s the political mode of thinking: Declare a scarce good a “right” and the problem must be solved, regardless of whether that scarce good is any more plentiful than it was before. As you could probably have guessed, the Venezuelan government stopped publishing health statistics years ago.
Thatcher used to proclaim: “There is no alternative!” She said it so often that her rivals began to abbreviate the expression “TINA” in mockery. But there are two ways — precisely opposite ways — to read that sentence. Mrs. Thatcher meant that there is no alternative in the end to free enterprise, free markets, private property, and liberal institutions. The socialists mean something else: There is no alternative because there is no choice, choice being the one thing a socialist cannot abide. Whether the instance of socialism in question is the Venezuelan economy or an American public-school system is incidental; the basic mechanics are always and everywhere the same. Maduro wants to lock up opposition leaders; the American Left wants to lock up homeschoolers and people who hold dissenting views on climate change.
We will have liberty or we will have reeducation camps. There is no alternative.
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