Every so often, perhaps inadvertently, a collectivist says something very smart. In the case of Lula da Silva, Brazil’s socialist president, he made the common-sense observation that you can’t redistribute without first producing. He didn’t quite realize what he was saying, one imagines, since he presumably would have realized that capitalism is a superior system in both the short run and long run, but at least he recognized the role of wealth creation. Obama, by contrast, acts as if the blessings of a free market economy automatically exist and that people will continue to produce even if he persists with his statist plans to simultaneously subsidize sloth and penalize productive behavior. Here’s the excerpt with the Brazilian President’s amazing statement:
He described the situation when he was elected Brazilian president: “The country had no credit, had no working capital or financing or income distribution. What kind of capitalism was that? A capitalism without capital. I decided then that it was necessary to first build capitalism, then make socialism, we must have something to distribute before doing so.”
http://momento24.com/en/2010/05/09/lula-da-silva-before-being-a-socialist-you-have-to-be-a-capitalist/
