The dying will begin soon

From The New York Times:

URACHICHE, Venezuela — The squatters arrive before dawn with machetes and rifles, surround the well-ordered rows of sugar cane and threaten to kill anyone who interferes. Then they light a match to the crops and declare the land their own.

For centuries, much of Venezuela’s rich farmland has been in the hands of a small elite. After coming to power in 1998, and especially after his re-election in December, President Hugo Chávez vowed to end that inequality, and has been keeping his promise in a process that is both brutal and legal.

Mr. Chávez is carrying out what may become the largest forced land redistribution in Venezuela’s history, building utopian farming villages for squatters, lavishing money on new cooperatives and sending army commando units to supervise seized estates in six states.

"Brutal and legal". Those two words describe both Stalin's seizure of the entire harvest of Ukraine, causing a massive famine in which millions died, and Hitler's attempt to exterminate the entire Jewish race. Both men came to power legally under the laws of their respective nations and both men were only exercising powers granted to them by their governments.

Collective farms did not work in the USSR, they did not work in China and they did not work in Israel. The Kibbutzim still exist but they are no longer Utopian experiments in communal living. Today they are simply for-profit corporate farms. The forced land redistribution in Rhodesia (I refuse to call it Zimbabwe, the Zimbabwe crowd had their chance and turned it into a hell on earth - as any person with an IQ in the double digits knew they would) is nothing more than state sponsored murder and robbery.

Venezuela is being set up to starve and since they elected Chavez I can't feel very sorry for them. It is good that people who support leftist should starve or freeze or die of some easily treated disease of condition because the waiting line for the socialized hospital is too long. This might teach them, or their survivors, a lesson. Too bad there isn't some way we could inflict these things on people who vote Democrat in America without disturbing the portion of the population which still retains their sanity and votes Republican.