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Prime Minister Robert Fico sees the violation of human rights in the last regime as a big mistake but pointed to values created by people.

Prime Minister Robert Fico (Smer-SD) will never let himself be forced into calling the period before 1989 a black hole, he said in Parliament, adding that the violation of human rights was a big mistake but people created a lot of value.

Should I spit on peoples faces? Should I tell a pensioner he has not done anything and that he should be ashamed for the regime he lived in? Im talking about the value that was created, which you could distribute to the West for a crown, Fico answered to a question raised by opposition MP Ondrej Dostl (Freedom and Solidarity/SaS), as quoted by the TASR newswire.

Dostl asked the PM as part of the Parliament's Question Time about his position in the socialist regime. Fico said on May 1 in Nitra that he is not one of those people who claim that there was a black hole here before 1989.

Dostl requested an answer from him as to what the main cause was that prevented Slovakia from developing like other countries in the democratic West, after WWII.

Fico said that he cannot be blamed for the after-war arrangement of Europe.

Maybe I would like to have had an influence in it, however, what happened after 1945 was out of my control, stated Fico as quoted by TASR, adding that the past is assessed by historians and that this period has already become a part of secondary-school textbooks.

A black-and-white vision of the world seems to be not very helpful in our efforts to understand history, assumes Fico for TASR, adding that both groups, those glorifying, as well as those execrating the regime before 1989, are extreme.

Spreading half-truths uselessly polarises society and diverts attention from addressing current hot issues, stated the prime minister, as quoted by TASR.

Fico explained that when saying he does not see a black hole here before 1989, he means in respect to work and the generations of people who are pensioners today and added that if this was not the truth, there would have been nothing to privatise in Slovakia.

Meanwhile, Dostl is of the opinion that society should not relativize the crimes of fascism and communism but take a clear stance on totalitarian regimes.

What would you tell a person who does not perceive the wartime Slovak state as a black hole but as a time when people worked too? asked Dostl, as TASR informed.

Fico told Dostl he is an extremist in his opinions. The PM believes that reasonable people draw a lesson from positive things and refute and condemn the negative ones.

11. May 2017 at 22:38 |TASR, Compiled by Spectator staff

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Fico: Slovakia wasn't a black hole during socialism - The Slovak Spectator

So many bad political ideas, so many novel and ingenious expansions of government power, seem to originate with people who are on the political right and supposed to favor small government.

Take Charles Murray, who I used to hear cited all the timethis was years ago, before the Bell Curve controversyas a critic of the pathologies of the welfare state. These days, I hear about him most frequently (that is, when he isnt being shouted down by campus fascists) when he is cited by people on the Left as an advocate of the universal basic income, a scheme for giving everyone a monthly check to maintain a lower-middle-class lifestyle without having to do anything at all. In other words, welfare writ large.

I know the so-called libertarian argument Murray made for the basic income. Giving money only under specific programs targeted for specific needs under carefully tailored rulespublic housing, food stamps, etc.creates a lot of bureaucracy, a lot of loopholes to be exploited by the unscrupulous, and a lot of perverse incentives of the kind Murray has previously documented. Wouldnt it be simpler, cheaper, and more effective just to hand everyone money and let them decide for themselves how best to spend it?

Ive critiqued that idea elsewhere, but what I find interesting about it is that for all these years, Murray wasnt really an opponent of big government or the welfare state. He was just looking for a more effective way to administer it. So his legacy as a critic of welfare is in danger of being eclipsed by his advocacy for universal welfare.

You could make similar observations about how it was the Heritage Foundation that cooked up the individual mandate at the center of Obamacare, how cap-and-trade global warming regulations were dreamed up under the Reagan administration and pushed as a free-market solution, and how it was Milton Friedman who helped develop income-tax withholding.

It raises the question: how did we get so many statist ideas from people who were otherwise advocates of smaller government?

Arecent example from Megan McArdle sheds some light on whats happening. It turns out the problem isnt the socialism in our economics. Its the socialism inside our headsthe unexamined collectivist assumptions that keep pushing us toward a giant, overbearing government in spite of ourselves.

I am a fan of McArdle, who often makes interesting and trenchant observations, such as the one she starts with in this article: that the debate over the estate tax is intensified out of all proportion to its importance in the federal budget and the national economy. Few people pay it, and it doesnt contribute much to federal tax revenues. Shes right that there are deeper moral and emotional factors that actually drive the debate.

But then she produces this analysis of the moral issues involved:

In fact, there are reasons to keep the estate tax around. Lets start with some basic moral observations: Once you are dead, you no longer have a voting interest in what goes on in society. Thus, your interest in how your assets get disposed of after youre no longer using them is minimal. While youre alive, Ill defend your property rights vigorously. Once you have died, however, you lose my support.

Now Ill add another proposition: Society does not have an interest in your desire to ensure that your children are better off than other children. I understand that you have a great interest in this matter. I applaud the tireless work you put in to this end. But societys job is all children, not specific children who are lucky enough to have hit the genetic lottery. And its aim should be for a society of equal opportunity to succeed and get rich. So once youve died, and no longer have property rights society needs to protect, theres no particular moral precept that points toward helping your children inherit. On a moral level, Id be perfectly comfortable with a 100 percent tax on anything you havent passed on before your death.

What started out as a moderate call for common ground on this issue turns into a complete capitulation to the principles and outlook of the Left. The assumption here is that society, not the individual, is the ultimate standard of moral value. The interests of society are supreme and everything the individual hasincluding the products of a lifetime of effort, and all the hopes you have for your childrencan be sacrificed to it.

To make that clear, lets try looking at this from a purely individualist perspective, in which there is no such thing as the collective interests of society, just an individual who has worked his whole life to create wealth on the assumption that he will get to decide what happens to it, and looks to government to protect that right.

Looking at this from the perspective of the individual is the only thing that actually makes sense, because there is no such collective entity as society. There are only individuals. Government can only protect our persons and property individually, one at a time, and if it takes money from one person, the benefits dont go to society as a collective entity. They go to other individuals. Those individuals are usually located within the environs of Washington DCquite often on K Streetwhich is one of the reasons the federal government collects and spends more money now than ever before, yet doesnt seem to be making any progress on all of that lofty rhetoric about the greater good of society.

The unexamined issue here is collectivism, the idea that humans as a collective takes precedence over humans as individuals. Note how deeply that assumption is woven into McArdles analysis. Your property rights evaporate on your death because you no longer have a voting interest in what goes on in society, as if your contribution to society as a voter is the only thing that gives value to your opinions and validity to your rights.

I doubt McArdle would support those assumptions if stated so baldly, in such a pure and extreme form. But many people who are generally skeptical of big government have collectivist assumptions wound deeply throughout their worldview.

Socialism has a specific meaning as an economic system, hinging on public ownership or control of wealth and capital. But it also has a wider moral and metaphysical basis: it stands for the supremacy of society, of human beings as an undifferentiated collective, over the rights and life of the individual. Thats the socialist premise that has taken residence in a lot of peoples heads, even people who would be considered staunchly on the Right. To the extent they agree to think about society instead of individuals, to the extent they cede moral authority to the interests of society, not as a mere aggregate of the interests and rights of individuals, but as something that supersedes those rights, they have allowed a little dominion of socialism over their thinking.

Now we can return to McArdles question about why the Left is so determined to keep the estate tax, althoughit currently raises very little revenue. They want to keep it because they hope someday to expand it, the way they have expanded every other power of government, with the goal of totally expropriating the wealth of every person upon his or her death. They fight to keep the tax in place, even at a small level, in order to preserve the principle of the tax, the principle that everyones wealth ultimately belongs to society and therefore can be seized by the state. Thats a principle with much wider application than the estate tax, so you can see why they invest a seemingly small thing with such importance.

But what theyre trying to preserve is not just a form of taxation. Theyre trying to preserve that territory they own in your head, the part that says the collective is supreme over the individual and has the ultimate power to dispose of you and your effort. Thats the socialism in your head, and its the weapon they have always used to do disarm, undercut, and co-opt the critics of government control.

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Even Prominent Conservatives Have Socialism Inside Their Heads - The Federalist

In his classic monograph on central planning, The Road to Serfdom, F. A. Hayek noted something that seemed like a paradox: Socialism can be put into practice only by methods of which most socialists disapprove, he wrote. He argued that the old socialist parties were inhibited by their democratic ideals and that they did not possess the ruthlessness required for the performance of their chosen task. But that was not always to be the case: For every liberal in a hurry there is a V. I. Lenin, a Fidel Castro, a Mao Zedong, a Ho Chi Minh, a Che Guevara, an Erich Honecker ready to roll up his sleeves and start slitting throats.

Our so-called democratic socialists and their progressive allies always pronounce themselves shocked by this, though of course they have long indulged it, well past the point of being able to plausibly pronounce themselves surprised by any of it. From the New York Timess heroic efforts to not notice the repression and terror in the Soviet Union to Senator Ted Kennedys working on behalf of the KGB, from Noam Chomskys denial of the Cambodian genocide to modern Democrats love affair with Fidel Castro, there is no gulag brutal enough and no pile of corpses high enough to stir in the modern progressive the sort of outrage he might feel upon, say, learning that General Electric took advantage of an accelerated capital depreciation schedule for tax purposes.

People are starving in Venezuela. That, too, is familiar enough to students of the history of socialism. The Ukrainian language contains a neologismholodomornecessitated by the fact that the socialist rulers of that country used agricultural policy to murder by starvation between 2 million and 5 million people who were guilty of the crime of resisting the socialists agricultural policy. In the 1990s, famine killed something on the order of 10 percent of the population of North Korea, where people were reduced to cannibalism. A recent study found that the average Venezuelan has lost nearly 20 pounds in the past year as food supplies dwindle. Venezuela was, within living memory, the wealthiest country in Latin America.

There are two ways of thinking about economics: Many progressives (and many right-wing populists) believe that economics is less of a science and more of an ideology, that all of that talk about scarcity and supply and demand is mostly mumbo-jumbo deployed by people who are getting their way to ensure that they keep getting their way. The alternative view (the view of most economists) is that economics is an effort to describe something real, that while it is important to understand the difference between the map and the territory, all those economic models and demand curves add up to a description of an aspect of reality that is not subject to negotiation and is not a matter of mere opinion.

That was what concerned Hayek and his colleagues in what has become known as the Austrian school of economics, Ludwig von Mises prominent among them. They believed that the central-planning aspirations of the socialists were not simply inefficient or unworkable but impossible to execute, even in principle, owing to the way in which knowledge is dispersed in society. Drawing on more recent work in fields ranging from physics to computer science, modern complexity theorists have expanded enormously on those insights, arguing that markets, like evolution, are complex beyondcomprehending even in principle, hence unpredictable and unmanageable. As he famously summarized it: The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. From this Hayek, an old-fashioned liberal, concluded that while there might be room in a free and open society for a broad and generous welfare state, the project of providing benefits to poor and vulnerable people must be understood as distinct from the socialist project, which is to put economic production under political discipline. And this has been born out in our own experience: Sweden is simultaneously a free-trading, entrepreneurship-driven capitalist society and a society with a large and expensive (and recently reformed) welfare state. Sweden, sometimes held up as the model of good socialism, has in fact been following a policy of privatization and libertarian-ish reforms for 20 years, with an explicit commitment of moving away from an economy of government planning to an economy of market choice.

But men do not like being told that they cannot do that which they wish to do, and this is particularly true of men who have a keen interest in political power. Hayek believed that efforts to impose central planning on economies were doomed to fail, and that this failure would not be met with humility but with outrage. When socialist policies produced their inevitable economic consequences, the first reaction would be to try to pass laws against the realization of those economic consequences. We saw a good deal of that in Venezuela, for instance with the imposition of currency controls when excessive social-welfare spending produced hyperinflation.

But those efforts are of course doomed to failure as well, which leads to outright political repression, scapegoating, and violence. In Venezuela, strongman Hugo Chvez, who was adored by American Democrats ranging from the Reverend Jesse Jackson to former representative Chakka Fattah and any number of Hollywood progressives, undertook to silence opposition media by insisting that they were simply fronts for moneyed elites working to undermine the work of democracy. (It will not escape your notice that our own progressives are making precisely the same argument in the matter of Citizens United, a First Amendment case considering the question of whether the government could prohibit the showing of a film critical of Hillary Rodham Clinton.) His protg, Nicols Maduro, has continued in the same vein.

Today in Venezuela, soldiers are brutalizing protesters in the streets. Opposition leaders are murdered. The press is muzzled. And people are desperately hungrybut not the party bosses, strangely enough.

Socialism is either the unluckiest political movement in the history of political movements, one that just happens to keep intersecting with the careers of monsters, or there is something about socialism itself that throws up monsters. There is nothing wrong with Venezuelans, and nothing unusual about them: Here at home, our own progressives dream of imprisoning people for holding unpopular political views, nationalizing key industries, and shutting down opposition media. They have black-shirted terrorists attacking people with explosives on college campuses for the crime of holding non-conforming political views. And they arent averse to a little old-fashioned Stalinism, either, provided theres a degree or two of separation: Bernie Sanders, once an elector for the Socialist Workers party, remains the grumpy Muppet pin-up of the American Left.

Socialism can be put into practice only by methods of which most socialists disapprove, Hayek told us.

Are we really so sure?

READ MORE: Venezuela on the Brink Venezuela Reaches the End of the Road to Serfdom Socialism Is Killing Venezuelans

Kevin D. Williamson is National Reviews roving correspondent.

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Venezuela's Starving Population -- Socialism Is to Blame | National ... - National Review

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

Venezuela, rich with oil and reputed for its beauty, has hit on hard times putting it mildly.

Why? In a word: socialism. This is the ugly truth that leftists, Hollywood types and other elites socialists-in-training and wannabesdont want revealed about their favorite government ideology and political philosophy.

Protesters in Venezuela have been storming the streets for weeks, tossing rocks, bombs, tear gas and now, most recently, gobs of feces, at police wearing riot gear.

They have gas; we have excrement, blared forth an image on social media advertising the so-called planned St March for Wednesday, the Guardian reported.

And its not just a slogan. Theyre really doing it.

One of my patients is collecting excrement from her child, said one dentist, in the throes of stuffing feces into containers for protesters to use in the streets, the Guardian reported.

Whats their bone of contention?

The country, once the gem of South America, is now racked by triple-digit inflation, medicine shortages and food scarcities that have left millions hungry. Such is the outgrowth of socialism.

Hundreds of thousands have rallied and taken over the streets, demanding the ouster of current President Nicolas Maduro, who took over the high office in 2013. His political leanings?

Hes with the United Socialist Party of Venezuela.

Maduro assumed the seat from Hugo Chavez, who died in March 2013 after serving about 14 years as president.

Chavezs political leanings?

Chavez styled himself as the leader of the Bolivarian Revolution, a socialist political program for much of Latin America [with] key elements [that] include[d] nationalism, a centralized economy and a strong military actively engaged in public projects, according to Britannica.

He fancied himself a Karl Marx-type reincarnation; he was one of Fidel Castros pals.

And now, Chavezs legacy? Same as Maduros.

Feces-packed, hand-made glass-bottled poopootov cocktails, as media outlets dubbed.

For a watching America, the takeaway should be blunt: Socialism is not the way to go. Politicians speaking that language have no place in U.S. constitutional governance. The fate of a blind eye on this is too drastic to contemplate or ignore.

See the article here:
Venezuela socialism on display as poop bomb riots rock - Washington Times

The thought of Tier 1 FX desks being run by teams of entitled, unaccountable gray cardigan-wearing Caravan Club members with civil service pension plans should be enough to send the entire industry striking up prime brokerage relationships in Hong Kong, New York and Singapore.

Just one month remains before Britains electorate goes to the polls to elect the prime minister that will lead the country for the next four years after incumbent premier Theresa May called a snap General Election two weeks ago.

Never since the dark days of the late 1970s has there been such a polarization between potential candidates, Theresa Mays evident attempts to emulate the late and great Baroness Margaret Thatcher a far cry from opposition leader Jeremy Corbyns old-fashioned extreme left aspirations.

It is entirely possible to listen to a speech by Mr Corbyn, or read his party manifesto, whilst reminiscing over the several meter high piles of refuse adorning the streets of every town and city, the three day working week and the nationwide industrial disobedience that brought Britains proud industrial empire to its knees forty years ago.

There are far more considerations this time than socio-economic preferences, however, as todays world is an electronic one, and Londons financial markets economy, which leads the world and is responsible for 176 billion in revenues and is so efficient that it employs only 0.0009% of the European Unions workforce yet produces 16% of all tax receipts for the entire 28 member states and has a 76 billion trade surplus.

It is patently evident that Londons financial sector especially the non-bank electronic trading sector with its prime of prime brokerages, connectivity and integration suppliers, and their relationship with the eFX divisions of Canary Wharfs Tier 1 banks is a pinnacle of commercial excellence and leads the world.

Not very much scratching beneath the surface of Jeremy Corbyns hammer-and-sickle toting shadow cabinet is required to note something quite sinister, that being the socialist Labor Partys disdain for Britains largest and most revenue driving business, Londons financial markets industry.

Just three years ago, there was a substantial amount of discourse mounting in London with regard to the European Unions predilection for the intrinsically socialist Tobin Tax on transactions that are placed in trading financial instruments.

That has now gone completely quiet, as Britain opposed it on principle and has managed to fend it off, however in 2013, eleven European Union member states, all of which were led by left-wing governments, announced their wish to move ahead with introducing a financial transactions tax.

At that time, the nations which include France and Germany intended to use the tax to help raise funds to tackle the debt crisis, and the tax had the backing of the European Commission which was reinforced after the 2014 election the highly unpopular Jean-Claude Juncker as President.

The other countries that wished to introduce it were Italy, Spain, Austria, Belgium, Greece, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia and Estonia, all nations with absolutely no place in the worlds highly advanced financial markets economy. Greeces government accountants, when not asleep for half of the day, cannot tell the top from the bottom of their balance sheets, Italy is rife with corruption, Portugal is agrarian, Belgium has invoked outright bans of retail electronic trading instruments and Slovakia, Slovenia and Estonia have absolutely no Tier 1 bank presence.

Jeremy Corbyns policies echo this line of thinking.

The Tobin tax was originally proposed to target the FX market when it was orchestrated by James Tobin in the 1970s, and whilst Britain has managed to remain free from its burden until now, Jeremy Corbyn is a staunch advocate of implementing it.

In September 2015, Jeremy Corbyn and Shadow Chancellor and equally leftist John McDonnell made a schedule to meet four times per year with a seven-strong group comprising of economic academics (rather than business leaders) one of which was Anastasia Nesvetailova, a self-designated expert on the international financial sector and its role in the global financial crisis of 2007-09. Ms. Nesvietailova, is an academic who spends her day in the classroom rather than the boardroom, thus is a theorist and has no practical experience. Just the type of policy advisors favored by the left.

During one particular conversation, the Labor Partys support for the implementation of the Tobin Tax on all trading transactions was raised, as was, rather alarmingly, the potential of a Britain free of dominance of the financial sector.

Bearing this in mind, it is worth looking at John McDonnells credentials and viewpoint.

Mr. McDonnell is a former trade unionist who backs renationalizing banks and imposing wealth taxes. He actually lists generally fomenting the overthrow of capitalism as one of his interests in the Whos Who directory of influential people. He also advocates the complete public ownership of all banks.

Mr McDonnell has served as Chair of the Socialist Campaign Group in Parliament and the Labour Representation Committee, and was the chair of the Public Services Not Private Profit Group. He is also Parliamentary Convenor of the Trade Union Co-ordinating Group of eight left-wing trade unions representing over half a million workers

The thought of Tier 1 FX desks being run by teams of entitled, unaccountable gray cardigan-wearing Caravan Club memberswith civil service pension plans should be enough to send the entire industry striking up prime brokerage relationships in Hong Kong, New York and Singapore.

Mr McDonnell has also said publicly that if he was able to, he would have assassinated Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, a comment that when challenged, he retracted and said it was a joke.

Well, Mr McDonnell, that kind of extreme anti-business mentality combined with a will to bring the entire financial markets sector to its knees in the rebellious quest for overthrowing capitalism is not welcome.

Mr McDonnell wrote in 2012 that a financial transaction tax would halt the frenetic, madcap speculation in the City and raise money for infrastructure investment.

If the City resists then lets make it clear that capital controls would follow, he said in a piece for Labour Briefing, a left-wing website.

He has also said he wants to take the power to set interest rates away from the Bank of England and to give it back to government. This would reverse a decision by the Blair government to let the central bank decide monetary policy.

If his choice of senior cabinet ministers is not enough to ensure that this odious relic of the dark days of socialism stays out of office, Mr. Corbyns affection for Venezuelan communist dictator Hugo Chavez should do the trick.

In 2013, Mr. Corbyn tweeted Thanks Hugo Chavez for showing that the poor matter and wealth can be shared. He made massive contributions to Venezuela & a very wide world just after president Chavez passed away.

The hard-left policies of Mr Corbyns idol Hugo Chavez have left a once-rich nation brutalized and devastated and with 2,200% inflation, strict capital control laws and an inability to do business with any free market nations.

Venezuela shows quite clearly just how catastrophic socialism is. So you might then expect those well-meaning folk who held up Chavez as a paragon to admit their mistake. Naomi Campbell, Diane Abbott, Seumas Milne and Owen Jones in the UK; Sean Penn, Oliver Stone and Michael Moore in the US. Not a peep from any of them.

Hugo Chavez successor Nicolas Maduro has turned out to be a first class economic incompetent. In 2016, imports collapsed by more than 50% (largely due to socialist trade sanctions) and the economy nosedived by 19%.

The budget deficit is around 20% of GDP. The minimum wage is now the equivalent of 25 a month. Conversely, Londons financial sector employs several middle managers between the ages of 25 and 35 who easily earn between 150,000 to 200,000 per annum, rising to over 500,000 for a senior executive position, and professional mobility the chance of switching to new firms and accelerating ones career is among the best in the world.

After a Central Bank estimate that suggested that the Venezuelan economy had contracted by 19% last year was leaked to the press, Mr Maduro fired the banks president and replaced him with a Marxist loyalist demonstrating another very problematic aspect of left wing control, censorship and that anyone who speaks against the ideology, whether right or wrong, will be removed from office.

Up to 640 billion of oil money was lavished on the countrys poor during the oil boom years, creating a gargantuan dependency culture. The country quintupled its national debt and hundreds of thousands of homes (of questionable construction quality) were handed to the poor. President Chavez created a massive and unsustainable bubble which is now beginning its slow, painful collapse.

At the heart of Venezuelas economic chaos lie market distortions. Gasoline is sold locally for less than 1 British pence per litre and it receives 12 billion of state subsidies a year. The country has a complex monetary arrangement that makes use of three different exchange rates simultaneously.

This feeds rampant corruption because those with close connections to the president can buy dollars from the state at 10 bolivars a dollar but sell them at 3,300 bolivars a dollar on the black market a classic case of do as I say, dont do as I do.

Price controls have made it unprofitable for small businesses to sell staple goods, leading to widespread shortages. Carjackings and kidnappings are now epidemic. Caracass murder rate is 80 times higher than that of London, which over the last 15 years has become very safe indeed, especially in Central London, and in particular, the Square Mile where it would be extremely rotten luck to have even so much as a wallet stolen from a pocket.

It does not bear thinking about should a government with these views and ideas which are aimed at instilling a new world order gain office, hence London will likely be business as usual on June 9 once the sensible rather than anarchic have done the right thing at the polling booths.

Read more:
Jeremy Corbyn's hard-line socialism and Bolivarian aspirations ... - FinanceFeeds (blog)