Vicente Maduro: A New Hero for American Conservatives

by Jacob G. Hornberger
Aug. 31, 2015

Venezuela's dictator Vicente Maduro, who American conservatives have long reviled for his socialism and economic fascism, has suddenly become a new hero to them.

How did such a remarkable transformation take place?

Maduro has instituted a reign of terror against illegal immigrants in Venezuela, specifically those from Columbia. And that's enough to make Maduro a new hero to American conservatives, who wish that President Obama (or his successor) would take the same actions against illegal immigrants in the United States that Maduro is taking against illegal immigrants in Venezuela.

According to an article in the New York Times, Maduro has declared a state of emergency along the Columbia-Venezuela border as part of a massive crackdown on illegal immigration. The declaration suspends civil liberties, which has enabled Maduro's immigration goons to conduct house to house searches, all without probable cause or judicially issued warrants.

Show me a better example of tyrannical conduct than that.

Yet, that's precisely what conservatives want Obama to do here in the United States. They would love nothing more than to see battalions of well-armed immigration SWAT teams spreading across America and conducting house-to-house searches and raids on Americana businesses.

How else do they propose to ferret out those 11 million illegal immigrants living here in the United States? Through snitches?

Fortunately, our American ancestors got the Fourth Amendment enacted, which prevents that sort of tyrannical conduct on the part of the government. But conservatives feel the same way as Maduro: Who needs probable cause and a stinking search warrant when a national-security immigration emergency is at hand?

That's not all.

Bringing to mind the U.S. immigration highway checkpoints in the American Southwest, which are part and parcel of enforcing U.S. immigration controls, Maduro's goons are checking people's identity papers, rounding up hundreds of Columbians, many of whom have lived in Venezuela for years, and forcibly deporting them, bringing untold suffering on people who are among the poorest on the planet.

Maduro's excuse for his immigration reign of terror? He says that the Columbians are importing crime into Venezuela.

Now, where have we heard that before? From American conservatives, that's where!

When asked how his immigration policies differed from those of Republican Donald Trump, Maduro replied: "I don't have Donald Trump's hairdo and much less his bank account and even less his ideology."

But Maduro is wrong. The fact is that he and Trump do share the same ideology -- the ideology of socialism and economic fascism, the ideology of both the conservative and liberal movements.

For 25 years, I've been pointing out how there isn't a dime's worth of difference between conservatives and liberals when it comes to political and economic philosophy.

Both conservatives and liberals believe in socialism, as reflected by their joint devotion to the welfare state way of life that was foisted onto the American people by liberal-conservative icon Franklin D. Roosevelt. Their favorite socialist programs are Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and public (i.e., government) schooling.

Not surprisingly, those are also the favorite government programs of self-proclaimed socialist Maduro. The only difference is that conservatives and liberals call their philosophy "saving and reforming free enterprise" while Maduro rightly calls it socialism.

They both believe in the warfare state, as reflected by their joint devotion to empire, overseas military bases, an enormous standing army, foreign wars and interventions, coups, support of dictatorships, wars of aggression, assassinations, invasions, occupations, torture, the CIA, the NSA, the Pentagon, and a governmental structure based on a national-security apparatus.

They both believe in the war on drugs, as reflected by their eagerness to incarcerate people for doing nothing that infringes on the rights of other people.

And they both believe in immigration controls, as reflected by their joint commitment to laws that punish people for engaging in purely peaceful and consensual economic activity, for exercising fundamental, God-given rights, and for doing nothing more than trying to better their lives, just as those Columbian immigrants in Venezuela were doing when Maduro unleashed his reign of terror on them.

For 25 years, I have pointed out that immigration controls will ultimately lead America in the direction of dictatorship and totalitarianism.

For one thing, immigration controls involve socialist central planning, whereby government officials determine how many immigrants shall be permitted to come into the country, what their qualifications shall be, and so forth. But as every Russian -- indeed every Venezuelan -- will tell you, central planning produces nothing but chaos and crises.

That then leads to an ever-increasing array of new interventions, each one designed to fix the problems with the previous interventions.

But nothing ever works. Nothing can ever work. That's because socialism, including in the area of immigration, is an inherently defective paradigm.

Ask any proponent of immigrations what his plan is for stopping illegal immigration. He can't tell you. That's because no plan will ever work. Even totalitarian tyranny won't keep everyone out, as we learned from those who risked their lives to cross the Berlin Wall.

One thing is for sure: If Americans continue rejecting the libertarian concepts of free markets and free enterprise in the area of immigration and continue adhering to the bankrupt notion of governmentally controlled borders, they will experience ever-growing dictatorship and tyranny, similar to that of Vicente Maduro, the new conservative hero.
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Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught law and economics. In 1987, Mr. Hornberger left the practice of law to become director of programs at the Foundation for Economic Education. He has advanced freedom and free markets on talk-radio stations all across the country as well as on Fox News' Neil Cavuto and Greta van Susteren shows and he appeared as a regular commentator on Judge Andrew Napolitano's show Freedom Watch. View these interviews at LewRockwell.com and from Full Context. Send him email.