"Intellects Whose Desires Have Outstripped Their Understanding."

From National Review:

The mayor of Caracas, a close ally of Hugo Chavez, has ordered the “forced acquisition” of private golf courses in the Venezuelan capital. He explained that the move would make room for 11,500 new homes for poor families, and that “20 families survive for a week on what’s needed to maintain each square meter of grass on a golf course.” Such logic provides the link between the ideal of equality and the reality of tyranny. According to the mayor’s reasoning, it is the state’s responsibility to ensure that none may enjoy luxury while others suffer poverty. But consider the moral disaster that such a principal would create: The security and stability that flow from private ownership would evaporate. No one could safely produce, improve, or acquire any property for himself, since the resulting inequality would only create a new target for “forced acquisition” by the state. Productive incentives would be destroyed. It is for this reason that there is only one way for state-enforced egalitarianism to succeed: by making everyone equally poor.

(Hugo Chavez should put down Hezbollah supporter Noam Chomsky’s bizarre, anti-American leftist screed and pick up a copy of this classic instead. He may actually learn something useful.)