Politics and Insights from History

But let’s look at a modern day example of how complete government control ruins nations and cripples people. Take Mugabe the dictator of Zimbabwe. Robert Mugabe, who is a Marxist, became president of Zimbabwe in 1980,[i] a tile he has never relinquished even after a presidential election that took place in March 2008.[ii] Before Mugabe, Zimbabwe had been a very wealthy country. The most affluent in all of Africa. Since Mugabe’s takeover, Zimbabwe has sunk into economic collapse. Mugabe has spent his whole career preaching discrimination against whites and getting rid of any vestige of western influence from colonial days. The result: suffering and destitution.

Mugabe systematically took control of everything. He took over the media, law enforcement, schools and the army. Then he took over the economy by redistributing farmland, taking from white farmers and giving to poor blacks. Misled by his rhetoric of moderate reform and his promise to not change Zimbabwe or hurt it’s prosperity, many of these white farmers bought their land after Mugabe became president.

Starting in 2000, Mugabe used his army to forcefully remove whites from their farms, land they owned and worked. These farm owners sendured violent attacks. Some were killed. Their families suffered as well. Some even had children taken hostage. Mugabe then gave that land to blacks, but not any of the blacks that worked or managed the farm under the white landowner. They were thrown out on the streets. These new land owners didn’t know the first thing about running a farm causing it to fall into disarray as production ceased. Zimbabwe has very fertile land, but that land is cultivated by incompetent idiots all in the name of racial justice.

With the destruction of agricultural productivity, Zimbabwe’s exports fell, causing income from those exports to stagger. The country plunged into poverty. Warehouses that once held grain are now empty. People who used to have homes now live in slums and shabbily put together huts. What cattle haven’t been killed by the starving masses for food wander the countryside, much of which have hoof and mouth disease. Hospitals are falling apart and provide substandard medical care. Rampant outbreaks of cholera have killed many people. Those with AIDs have no access to medication. Those who have not died of disease die of starvation. Zimbabwe is now entirely dependent on foreign aid.

In an effort to attack the crippling economy, Mugabe issued edict after edict. There are so many laws in Zimbabwe no one can do anything for fear of breaking one. These laws only treat the symptoms of economic collapse. Not the root cause. (Sound familiar?) The true cause of Zimbabwe’s problem is Mugabe himself and his expansion of government into every aspect of people’s lives. His redistribution of wealth in the name of fairness or justice caused rapid inflation and weakened the currency. Zimbabwe has the highest inflation rate in the world. Compare it to the inflation rate of others countries at the height if there economic downturns.

Source: Prof. Steve H. Hanke, February 5, 2009.[iii]

Mugabe’s takeover of schools has increased the literacy rate of children. But the good news ends there. Children are taught hatred of whites, and foreigners. They are taught to fire weapons, build bombs, and to be good little soldiers that worship Mugabe. They are turned into his own, private militia who are then used to pull white farmers off their land, harass the people as the wait in food lines, and crush dissenting opinion and political enemies.

In the twenty years since his seizure of power, Mugabe has managed to take one of the most prosperous countries in the world, and turn it into the most poverty stricken. Africa’s golden gem is now dead weight, a parasite.

Zimbabwe is not the only country whose economy was destroyed by government confiscation of power and a dictator’s disregard for the welfare of the people. We still have Cuba, Sudan, Iran, Nigeria, Somalia and the list goes on.

You should notice a pattern here. Whenever a government becomes too powerful, the people suffer. We lose our freedoms, the wealthy are punished and the poor remain poor. Stalin destroyed the kulak farming class, who were quite wealthy. Hitler shut down the successful businesses of Jews. In Uganda, Idi Amin removed the wealthy Indian commercial class. Mugabe purged his country from rich, white farm owners. And now Obama wants to decide how much money CEOs can make and has taken over the auto industry. The similarities are frightening!

Obama is too much like past and present dictators. He has control of the major media. NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN and all of their offshoots have voluntarily thrown their support to him and report whatever he wants. If you watch these networks closely, you will notice how they paint Obama like a god, they almost always give him favorable coverage, they refuse to call his takeover of what used to be private industries for what it is, and they spend most of their time distracting the public by fawning over how good he looks in a suit and how great Michelle Obama’s arms are. You do not find much in the way of dissenting opinion. The only areas where true freedom of the press is still practiced are Fox News, talk radio, and the internet.

That can easily change. Obama, Pelosi, and other liberals want to reinstitute the Fairness Doctrine, which is nothing more than censorship. Obama’s appointment of a cyber czar is an attempt to control the internet. He can give excuse after excuse for why we need the government to monitor the internet, but the real reason is to control it, to control the people.

Obama passed his stimulus bill which greatly expanded the size of government, took over the auto industry, the banks, and is trying to force individual states to take money from the federal government. Obama has decreed that only environmentally friendly cars are to be manufactured in the U.S. His administration has decided how much CEOs can earn by putting caps on their income. Obama is now pushing health care reform, which is little more than government run health care. They already decide the quality of health for the elderly. The government owns the education system. It owns your retirement plan. Obama wants to redistribute wealth to bring what he and other liberals call social justice. Class warfare is how they gained power and how they keep it.

The federal government has steadily grown in size since the days of F.D.R. Barack Obama has managed to outdo that by increasing its size at an exponential rate.

Observe the events of the last five months. As you do, think about Hitler, Stalin, Mugabe, Castro, Idi Amin, and every other dictator the world has seen. Think of the French Revolution where class warfare was taken to the extreme as the peasantry slaughtered the aristocracy. Robespierre used the anger of the poor to gain power. Thomas Jefferson said of Robespierre, “The rich were his victims, and perished by the thousands.”[iv]

Obama is doing the same by constantly talking about the amount of unemployed in this country and demonizing the rich. If he succeeds in his ambitions, we will all suffer a loss of our freedoms and an economic collapse. We will become a third world country. Obama, like all liberals, is a parasite. Like all parasites, he takes a healthy body, or in this case a nation, and turns it into an ailing corpse. He feeds off of people’s fears, desperation, and anger.

Obama’s announcement for the need of a cyber czar is another in a long list of endeavors to seize power from the people. He uses the fear of terrorism to win our support for this newly created post. But what we really have to fear is not terrorism, but our own government and Barak Obama.