Worse than Socialism
By Bruce Walker (11/12/08)
During the presidential campaign and in the post-election analysis many conservatives have lamented impending socialism. It is not clear if Obama and his fellow Democrats could implement a truly socialist agenda. It is not even clear if Obama and his party truly want socialism. The very rich tend to be the looniest Leftists. Do they really want the government taking their wealth away?
Very high tax rates on the highest income level is something conservatives and other normal people should oppose but, as Charles Krauthammer pointed out recently, the federal government had those nearly confiscatory tax rates during the Eisenhower Administration. The silly, tried, and failed experiment of soaking the rich hurts the economy, reduces upward mobility, and diminishes freedom. But only a generation accustomed to the Leftist definition of man as homo economus could believe that absurdly high tax rates and schemes to spread the wealth are the greatest threat we face.
Britain embraced socialism for several decades. Socialism failed, but it hardly crushed British liberties. Brilliant political thought, wonderful film and music, religious liberty and the other real blessings of liberty flourished during these years in the United Kingdom. When the British people tired of celebrating childish envy as serious economic theory, they elected Maggie Thatcher and in a short time the British economy was humming again.
Sweden has embraced socialism for a long time. This has inhibited Swedish affluence, but quite clearly Swedes are not poor at all. Swedish socialism limits personal freedom, but Sweden is not an authoritarian, much less a totalitarian, state. There has never been an iron curtain needed to keep Britons from leaving Britain or to keep Swedes from leaving Sweden.
China now has freer economic markets than Sweden, but the thugocracy that is China runs slave labor camps, imprisons Christians practicing their faith, censors political and social commentary, and generally crushes the human spirit. The general loss of freedom, not the loss of more economic freedom, is worse than plain socialism.
If Obama tries to truly end talk radio, that is true danger. If Obama’s party uses computer software to gerrymander congressional districts so that voting is almost irrelevant, that threatens our right to end bad governance. If the federal government under Obama works to crush dissent, then we are in real trouble.
The assault that will end America is not on the household wallet. It is the assault on independent thinking, spiritual values, and the right to disagree. College campus speech codes imposed upon American society scare me. Using federal muscle to determine what broadcasting is “fair” and what is not frightens me. Officially trashing our national tongue and our national culture in the pursuit of diversity threatens me.
The Founding Fathers did not wage a war of independence for money any more than the Pilgrims and other dissenters left England to get rich. America became rich because it embraced Judeo-Christian values which, in turn, formed the foundation for all our myriad categories of liberty. Free markets, a subset of those liberties, did produce wealth, but America is not great because of its wealth. America is great because it has always been profoundly connected with those sentiments of devout Christians and Jews, and because that connection inevitably leads to liberty.
We put the cart before the horse when the specter of socialism frightens us most. Socialism is, indeed, a symptom of something bad, but it is not the disease itself. Jews and Christians believe that we have a moral duty to help the poor. It takes the briefest reading of the Gospels to grasp how little Christ thought wealth should govern our lives. It takes the small understanding of Judaism to see how much more important learning Torah is than gaining treasure. Morality, not money, must be at the heart of what we cherish. If not, we lose everything else.
That is what we are seeing in Europe now. Sweden is becoming an increasingly ugly place, but not because of socialism. Loss of faith cripples Sweden. Moral relativism disarms sophisticates. Swedes cannot resist the brutal ambition of radical Islam, which has an Allah, with materialism, which has only atheism. The dominos are falling around the civilized world, but not because of risible, old economic theories. The dominos are falling because our core liberties have been cashed for goodies. We have forgotten the actual value of freedom.
Stupid tax policies, counterproductive government programs, and similar glop can always be undone. The socialism tried by the British and Swedes is dumb and self-destructive, but this socialism is not the moral enemy of our souls. Once we forget that we are special creatures in an ordered universe of purpose and once we embrace collectivism in our thinking and in our feeling, then all is lost.
Always oppose socialism. It always fails wretchedly. But never forget that the battle for our survival is much greater than just redistributing wealth or government handouts. We have, really, plenty of stuff. What we need is to fight for the grand idea of human liberty and to recall that this fight is at the heart of everything good that politics can do.
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