Originally posted by: Craig234
Originally posted by: Vic
First, it's not considered necessary to cite the source of a quote from a proverb with a well-known or anonymous source. It's not like I was trying to take credit for it. If I quoted "Sour grapes" or "The mice voted to bell the cat," do I have to cite Aesop as my source so you won't get all worked up and have to fall back on red herrings?
It shouldn't be asking too much for you to quote both sentences of the 'well-known' quote; and you can exaggerate how well-known it is to justify using it.
However, before you posted this, I decided that it was well-known enough that I shouldn't have made an issue of that and edited my post to remove the issue.
As for the rest, more ideological blindness from you.
The irony is endless. Have I said you're shameless?
If Chavez shut down the radio station for involvement in the coup attempt, then why did he wait 5 years to do so? Oh, that's right, you're full of it.
Because he was acting under the law: directly opposte of what you say about his silencing his critics, he left them operating, attacking him, for 5 years, until the license expired.
And let's forget the fact that this coup attempt has so many controversies that go along with it that only a blind ideologue like yourself could possibly not see Chavez's own involvement in it (but that's another thread). Surely it had nothing to do with unarmed protestors from an opposition labor union being fired upon? (Oh, that's right, you believe in the conspiracy theory of CIA snipers :laugh: )
As usual, you have no evidence for your blind, ideological (see, the irony of your post) accusations. Is it plausible that a leader can have a phony coup to bolster support? Yes, and that's as far as you can take the issue, because the evidence quickly shows that the opposition is very real and willing to do great harm to Venezula to protect the power of the tiny oligarchy who had the vast bulk of money, power, and land before Chavez. But you are too lazy to get informed and deal with the facts, so you spout the nonsense.
Moving on, you're just demonstrating the knee-jerk ignorance of economics typical of most paranoid populists. I welcome you to cite a single example of any true monopoly in this country that came to existence without direct government interference. Just one.
What you fail to understand is that monopoly leads to the power needed to get the government to do the monopoly's bidding.
The cause and effect is that the powerful and wealthy people who want or have the monopoly are powerful enough to get the government to act as they want to further increase their wealth and power; it's not that the government is the initiator of creating the power and wealth for those people.
It's a spiral of corruption where the monopolists have the power to try to get the government to do their bidding and protect their monopolies. Sometimes it works.
The two are correlated for that reason; when there's not monopoly power, when wealth and power are more distributed, you don't see the government pushing monopolistic policies; and where wealth is greatly concentrated, you see the government doing the bidding of the people with the concentrated wealth, protecting monopoly.