Our Future: Venezuela, Europe

RUSH: John in Austin, Texas, we go back to the phones, welcome to the EIB Network, sir.

CALLER: Well, howdy from central Texas. I just wanted to point out if you hadn’t noticed how much the rhetoric from our current president is starting to sound like Hugo Chavez in the southern part of our hemisphere. So the stuff about foreigners and the rich stealing our revolution or destroying our revolution sounds so much like Obama talking about —

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: — foreigners and the rich destroying our democracy.

RUSH: Well, the question is who came first, did Obama come first or Chavez? I mean who sounds like who?

CALLER: (laughing) Well, you have a point.

RUSH: That’s a good point, if I say so myself. I think Venezuela, Hugo Chavez is something to keep an eye on. I think Greece is something to keep an eye on. I think the entire system of European socialist democracies is something to keep an eye on. California is already here. I think all of these places, keep an eye on them, ’cause that’s us. Have you seen what’s going on in France? This is us, too. It’s coming. There’s a part of me that, you know, I understand this, and a part of me that enjoys it. Sarkozy said, ‘We can’t sustain this. We cannot continue to pay people to not work. We can’t sustain a 14% unemployment rate.’ You know, liberalism destroys the golden goose. It’s free market capitalism that creates wealth, and, until that happens, liberalism can’t exist. There has to be wealth for liberalism to redistribute before they can do anything, and liberalism doesn’t create wealth by definition. It can’t. Liberalism confiscates it.

So, eventually, after so many years of unchecked liberalism, the golden goose dies, you’ve fleeced as much of it as you can, and you have depressed incentive to create wealth, and you end up with stagnation everywhere. Now, France is well on the way, Germany, and they’re trying to turn the ship around. The retirement age in France is relatively low, the unemployment rate is a constant 14%, pensions and all this, and Sarkozy said we can’t sustain this. So they’re gonna raise the retirement age like a year or two. Have you seen the riots? They shut down the Eiffel Tower.