The welfare-warfare state way of life under which Americans have been born and raised has created a highly dysfunctional society, one in which the federal government has destroyed the freedom of the American people, killed countless millions of people in foreign countries, debased the value of people’s money, and put our nation onto a trajectory of national bankruptcy.
By focusing on individual federal programs, one is able to easily see how the federal government has succeeded in doing these things. For example, one can see that the federal government’s drug war has not only destroyed freedom by punishing people for engaging in a purely peaceful activity but also given rise to untold violence both here and abroad. Or one can see how the government’s inflation of its supply of printed money, a kind of indirect tax, has worked to plunder the American people. Or one can see how the federal government’s interventionism in foreign countries has produced the threat of terrorist blowback here at home, which has then caused the federal government to adopt counterterrorism measures that have destroyed the freedom of the American people.
But there is another point that is worth considering — that oftentimes federal programs work in tandem with each other and end up producing even more death and destruction of liberty and prosperity than would otherwise be the case.
The effects of interventionism
Let’s consider, for example, Venezuela, a country that was ruled from 1999 until 2013 by a brutal socialist dictator named Hugo Chavez. When he died in 2013, he was succeeded by Nicolás Maduro, another brutal socialist dictator who remains in power to this day.
U.S. officials loathed both Chavez and Maduro for one big reason: They both refused to kowtow to U.S. officials and do the bidding of the U.S. empire, as other Latin American rulers do. Thus, U.S. officials embarked on a scheme of regime change, one that was intended to oust Chavez and later Maduro from power and replace them with U.S. stooges who would be absorbed into the U.S. empire.
Of course, U.S. officials maintained that the real reason they were targeting Venezuela with regime change was to help free the Venezuelan people from a brutal dictatorship. But that was pure nonsense, given the fact that the U.S. empire has always been — and still is — an ardent supporter of other brutal dictatorships in the world. The U.S. support of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in the 1970s and 1980s comes to mind. Today, there is the U.S. support of dictatorial regimes in Saudi Arabia and Egypt.
What did the United States do to effect regime change in Venezuela? It resorted to economic sanctions, one of the weapons in its interventionist arsenal that it employs against recalcitrant regimes. The purpose of sanctions is to inflict maximum economic harm on the citizenry, including impoverishment and even starvation, in the hope that the citizenry will rise up in a violent revolution, oust their ruler from power, and replace him with a U.S.-approved ruler, at which point the sanctions will be lifted.
The U.S. sanctions against Venezuela have been a tremendous success in terms of the horrific damage that they have done to the Venezuelan people. This is especially true given that the sanctions worked hand-in-hand with the horrific consequences of the socialist economic system that Chavez and Maduro imposed on the Venezuelan people. With those two programs — socialism and sanctions — the Venezuelan people never had a chance.
The utter failure of sanctions
The U.S. sanctions, however, have been a tremendous failure insofar as regime change is concerned. They didn’t succeed in ousting Chavez, and they haven’t succeeded in ousting Maduro. In fact, one might even argue that the sanctions solidified their hold on power. That’s because they and their supporters would blame the horrific economic distress in Venezuela on the U.S. sanctions rather than on Venezuelan socialism. In the absence of the sanctions, everyone could easily see that it was the socialism causing the economic problems.
The horrific economic crisis produced by the ever-tightening vise of socialism and sanctions ended up causing an exodus of millions of Venezuelans from the country, because their only choice was whether to stay in Venezuela and starve to death or escape the country in the hope of surviving elsewhere. Millions of them chose the latter course.
And that brings up America’s immigration-control system. As I have long pointed out, this system is based on the core socialist principle of central planning, the same socialist principle on which the Chavez-Maduro socialist system in Venezuela is based. In the United States, federal immigration central planners decide how many immigrants are going to be permitted into the United States.
Social central planning produces what Ludwig von Mises called “planned chaos.” What better term to describe the decades-long situation along the U.S-Mexico border? Of course, America’s socialist immigration system has not only produced perpetual chaos, it has also produced death, suffering, and an immigration police state that has destroyed the freedom and privacy of the American people, especially those living along the southern border.
As I have maintained for the 34 years of The Future of Freedom Foundation’s existence, there is but one solution to America’s ongoing, never-ending, perpetual immigration morass. It’s the same solution to Venezuela’s ongoing, never-ending, perpetual economic morass. That solution is freedom and free markets. In Venezuela, that means an immediate dismantling of all socialist programs. In the United States, that means the immediate dismantling of all restrictions on the free movements of goods, services, and people across America’s international borders — that is, the same open-borders system that America has between the states.
Unfortunately, all too many Americans continue to place their faith in immigration socialism, just as all too many Venezuelans continue to place their faith in overall socialism. People want socialism to work. And they become angry and frustrated when it doesn’t work. Thus, when tens of thousands of people are at the border clamoring to get into the United States, immigration-control advocates continue to believe that there is a way to resolve the crisis by simply coming up with some reform that will finally — finally! — make their socialist immigration system work. What they don’t realize, despite 100 years of failure, is that there is nothing that can make their system work simply because socialism is an inherently defective system — that is, one that can never be made to work.
But notice something important: Given that the U.S. sanctions on Venezuela have succeeded in inflicting maximum economic harm on the Venezuelan people, especially in combination with socialism at the hands of their own government, countless Venezuelans have, not surprisingly, chosen the United States to which to flee in an attempt to save their lives. That extraordinary flow of people has, not surprisingly, severely worsened the immigration situation at the border.
So, what do American statists say in response? They get angry over the fact that their socialist immigration control–system is resulting in an even bigger crisis than before. They advocate “cracking down” on the Venezuelan immigrants and calling for them to be deported to Venezuela, knowing that death awaits them there.
Moreover, the statists wouldn’t think of calling on the federal government to lift its economic sanctions on Venezuela. That would be akin to “surrendering” to Maduro and his socialist goons. Thus, the sanctions continue, the immigration-controls continue, and the death and suffering and destruction of liberty continue. Of course, enforcing the sanctions and the border controls also costs money, which contributes to the out-of-control federal spending, debt, and monetary debauchery that destroys the well-being of the American people.
Blowback from the drug war
Consider also the drug war, a never-ending federal program that has been in existence for around 100 years and is still not even close to being “won.” It has produced widespread violence in Latin America, including in Venezuela, by giving rise to black-market drug gangs and the massive drug-war-related violence that comes with them. That violence has also caused countless Venezuelans to flee their country and come to the United States.
What has been the response of U.S. statists to that phenomenon? Once again, they cry for an immigration crackdown on the border, one that encompasses deporting Venezuelan immigrants back to their country, where death awaits them. The idea is that better that they die in Venezuela from drug-war violence than be permitted to enter and stay in the United States.
But notice the moral perversion involved here: It is the U.S. government, with its sanctions and its drug war, that is responsible for much of the massive influx of Venezuelan refugees into the United States. Rather than lift the sanctions and end the drug war, the U.S. government instead doubles down by forcibly returning the victims of these two U.S. programs to their homeland, where they can die from starvation or be killed by drug gangs.
Gun ownership and freedom
Then there is the issue of guns. Given the massive violence in Latin America arising from the drug war, the response of statists here in the United States is to advocate imposing gun control on the American people. The idea is that by enacting gun control, U.S. officials will be able to stem the flood of guns that are being purchased by drug gangs in Latin America. Thus, we have the spectacle of the drug war leading to another massive infringement of freedom, this one infringing on the gun rights of the American people.
As our American ancestors understood, the right to keep and bear arms is more than about shooting deer or self-defense against violent criminals. It is also about maintaining the right to resist or even overthrow a brutal dictatorial regime.
The Venezuelan people are today experiencing the consequences of a gun-control society. Recently, a presidential election was held in Venezuela. Maduro and his personally controlled official election commission quickly declared him the winner but without providing any written proofs of the election tallies. The opposition, on the other hand, collected the written tallies — called “actas”— from over 80 percent of the voting stations. Those tallies establish that the opposing candidate, Edmundo González Urrutia, garnered a massively higher percentage of votes than Maduro.
Since the election, there have been extremely large protests in the streets demanding that Maduro vacate power. Maduro, however, has one big advantage in his favor. Venezuela, like the United States, is a national-security state — that is, a government that has a massive military-intelligence establishment that wields omnipotent powers.
Maduro has another distinct advantage. Some years ago, a system of strict gun control was implemented in Venezuela, which effectively disarmed the Venezuelan people. The only people who were permitted to have guns were the Venezuelan military and police. Thus, after the recent election, Maduro’s well-armed goons quickly arrested and rounded up thousands of protestors and have kept them incarcerated indefinitely without trial.
As Thomas Jefferson pointed out in the Declaration of Independence, people have the right to violently revolt against a tyrannical regime. The problem is that because of gun control, the Venezuelan people lack the ability to exercise that right. That should be a valuable lesson for the American people. Once a people permit themselves to be disarmed, they give up the ability to resist tyranny with force.
That’s why our American ancestors enacted the Second Amendment. They knew that without the Second Amendment, the First Amendment would be worthless.
There will always be bad things happening to people all over the world. The best thing America could ever do is to not only not make things worse for them but also to provide a haven for those of them who are willing and able to escape their plight. Among the best things that Americans could ever do for the freedom and well-being of the Venezuelan people, and also for themselves, is lift the sanctions on Venezuela, end the drug war by legalizing all drugs, and open U.S. borders to the free movements of goods, services, and people.
This article was originally published in the November 2024 issue of Future of Freedom.