Think on: “The theory of Communism may be summed up in a single sentence: Abolition of private property.” Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto, 1848
Tumbleweed has observed that there are actually citizens who think America should be a socialist utopia, a faux-paradise of equality. It harkens me back to a few years ago when my then 13-year-old son upon being asked if it would be great to live in a utopian society responded, “Yours or mine?” Profound! And equality? It’s about equality of opportunity, not sameness.
If any of the so-called intellectual elite out there have bothered to truly absorb Thomas More’s Utopia or Plato’s Republic or Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan or Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto, they should be quickly dissuaded of the practical viability of utopianism as an undergirding form of governing people (aka, socialism). Our founding fathers surely recognized this as evidenced by our Declaration of Independence and Constitution of the United States. To the purpose of creating a free society of individuals that controlled their government rather than vice versa, they followed the philosophical teachings of John Locke in Two Treatises of Government and the writings of Charles Montesquieu.
As described by economist/historian Friedrich Hayek in The Road to Serfdom, governments based in utopian principles such as communism, Nazism, and socialism depend upon and eventually gravitate to tyrannical leadership if they don’t first fall socially and economically by their own weight. George Orwell’s 1984 is arguably a variant on this process, keeping in mind that he was an avowed socialist. Of course, some of those “intellectual elitists” point to a nation such as Sweden as a socialist success story; ignoring the fact that they’ve had to adopt capitalist techniques to prop up their economies and continue to suffer from failing infrastructure.
High school history books – or whatever they’re calling them these days – pay scarce if any attention to Woodrow Wilson’s espoused commitment to Hobbesian utopian philosophy featuring big government determining life as it should be lived. Also ignored is the fact that Franklin Roosevelt’s key advisors studied Communism for years under Trotsky and Lenin. Little wonder that FDR sought to apply Communist principles as the underpinnings of his New Deal. Those programs were failing miserably, saved only by the political-economic aberration called World War II with its accompanying vast military buildup.
Tumbleweed could go on at far greater length as to the failures of utopianism, but suffice to say it’s quite scary when citizens – especially younger demographics in our nation – embrace socialist utopian thinking. Keep in mind that these utopian states are godless societies. Rights in such societies are issued by government, not by God. Morality – or virtue, if you will – becomes a frightening variable, built on the sand of man’s musings of the moment rather than on the rock of biblical teaching. The utopians evolve their morality from laws aimed at controlling the population. Utopia is about crowd control, not individualism. In a utopia, your individual creativity and motivation are unwelcome, as you must succumb to the central control…the government…the masters. In the utopian-driven socialistic model, the welfare safety net turns out to be a spider web where the government spiders devour the hopes and dreams of its the individual victims.
So, Tumbleweed will go out on a limb here. In a government as we have in the United States today wherein politicians and bureaucrats will go to great lengths to preserve and even increase their power, how can we the people regain the control that our founding fathers intended? Draining the proverbial government swamp only scratches the surface, as entire industries are wrapped around the perpetuation of Leviathan, from healthcare to energy to education and so on. It’s like a metastasizing cancer on our nation. Would that folks read the Constitution and restore us to its basic governance principles? Just sayin’.