Hugo Chavez: Give Up Your "Extra" Possessions

Hugo Chavez orders his followers to give up their "extra" possessions, leading me to wonder who gets to decide what is "extra".

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez told his supporters to give away possessions they do not need such as an extra refrigerator because he only wants true socialists to be members of a new single party he is forming.

"Whoever has a fridge they do not need, put it out in the village square. Whoever has a truck, a fan or a cooker they do not need, give something away. Let's not be selfish. I demand you do it," Chavez said at a milk producing cooperative, in remarks released on Monday.

Chavez, who calls capitalism an evil, said he would donate $250,000 of his own money and added, "Let's see who follows the example."

The anti-U.S. president who calls Cuban leader Fidel Castro his mentor denies he is turning the OPEC nation of avid consumers into another communist state as his critics say.

But since coming to power in 1999, Chavez has proposed increasingly radical steps to drive Venezuela toward a socialist state and, after a landslide re-election late last year, he declared himself for the first time a communist.

This is just old-style totalitarianism, and it will end the same way. Venezuela has oil (for now), and the means therefore to cover over his mistakes. But it can't go on indefinitely.