He did it for the oil.

Where are all the strident denunciations? When will the "documentary" air? Where are the human shields?

The army has been sent to the oil fields and the president of a certain kelptocracy in the West has acted unilaterally to seize the oil wealth belonging to others!

Where is the constant harangue from the loony left?

Nowhere, because it's OK to make men risk their lives for oil -- if you're from the left.

President Evo Morales ordered soldiers to immediately occupy Bolivia's natural gas fields today and threatened to evict foreign companies unless they sign new contracts within six months giving Bolivia majority control over the entire chain of production.

Morales said soldiers and engineers with Bolivia's state-owned oil company would be sent to installations operated by foreign petroleum companies.

"The time has come, the awaited day, a historic day in which Bolivia retakes absolute control of our natural resources," Morales said in a speech from the San Alberto petroleum field in southern Bolivia to decree what he called a nationalization of the natural gas industry. The field has been operated by Brazil's Petroleo Brasileiro SA in association with the Spanish-Argentine Repsol YPF SA and France's Total SA. [bold added]

Whatever you might say about Bush's invasion of Iraq, it clearly has not been motivated by a desire to take its oil fields, although for reasons unlike Morales's, that would have been a legitimate objective.

Aside from noting -- again -- that Bush's failure to do anything about Hugo Chavez of Venezuela has served to encourage thugs like Chavez all over Latin America, I have nothing much else to say about the situation in Bolivia but to note the amazing gall made possible to Morales by the fact that everyone he is plundering accepts his basic premise, that it is okay to steal property from the rich to give loot to the poor.

Morales has acknowledged that nationalization will not mean a complete state takeover, because Bolivia lacks the ability to tap all its natural gas on its own. [bold added]

Boo hoo! Poor Bolivia can't take all the oil wealth and needs the help of its own robbery victims! Morales can say this with a straight face and expect all those foreign doormats to keep on building infrastructure for him to plunder later on, when he's more "able". Sadly, everyone will grouse a little, and then go right in and take what pittance they can before being robbed. Oil executives will behave like chumps because under altruism, it's just the way things are done for Evo Morales to act as he does, and for America to fail to act, as it does.

If the looted were all state-owned companies like Petroleo Brasileiro SA, this would be hysterically funny. Unfortunately, some private property is also being stolen from Americans, in the form of Exxon-Mobil holdings, for example.

The proper responses to this move -- for a free nation whose citizens have been robbed of private property -- vary, depending on that nation's military capabilities and other such factors as whether its oil executives were careful about the chances something like this might happen going in. In such cases, proper responses range from invading to take the oil fields back (to be returned to their owners) from the organized mob running the government to destroying the fields. Note that this is not happening and will not happen, because Bolivia's need trumps the rights of the men whose effort and capital made Bolivia's oil production possible.

But the left claims to see looting where there is not even a legitimate reclamation of private property and remains silent when the very sin they damn Bush for -- sending soldiers on missions to take oil from its rightful owners -- is being committed. This speaks volumes about their sincerity, including the claim that they will invariably make, to the effect that Morales was acting on behalf of "the people". In fact, the very premise of the left -- that governments should seize oil fields -- makes all of them hypocrites for denouncing Bush for supposedly doing so.

Men who receive booty stolen from others have no freedom. They are merely well-fed prisoners, or slaves, who live their lives at the mercy of the same tyrants at whose mercy the looted once owned property.

Socialism is a fool's bargain.

-- CAV