Correspondent of the Day: Third World Tyranny Has Come Home to Roost

Third World Tyranny Has Come Home to Roost
Editor, Times-Dispatch: Third World tyrants Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro periodically nationalize the assets of foreign corporations, in effect stealing those assets from their legal owners. Tyrants typically justify those expropriations with claims that they are redistributing the assets of wealthy capitalists to their own poor citizens. The corporations affected and their respective governments rightfully cry foul as legal contracts and obligations are trampled.

The citizens of the countries whose tyrants practice this art of larceny suffer for many years afterward as investors shun new investment in their economies. The U.S. has more often than not been the victim of such nationalizations and has been one of the most vehement critics of the practice.

Now, in a stunning disregard for our own rule of law, the U.S. has in effect nationalized General Motors and Chrysler. Legal contracts and obligations of bond holders and other secured creditors were trampled by our own tyrants. Assets were stolen from their rightful owners, including pension funds for teachers and other middle-class American workers, and transferred to unions and foreign interests. Our tyrants used the same arguments as Chavez and Castro, although our auto union workers can hardly be described as poor and our teachers can hardly be described as wealthy.

Now, as we enter our own post-nationalization era, we must ask ourselves this seminal question: Who will invest in American corporations and what will be the price of that investment?

Brian Fatzinger.
Midlothian.