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HISTORY
AND FUTURE OF U.S. SOCIALISM
Part
4 of a Series
Reagan Renaissance
July 22, 2004
Readers
may think that we are focusing too much on socialism in this series.
Using history as our guide, democracies end in hyperinflation or
bankruptcy whenever its citizens learn to vote themselves benefits from
the public treasury. Logic confirms that this should be true, and
further it would seem to be irrational to believe otherwise. Will the
United States be the exception? Based on current law and the public
discourse, it would seem that many, if not most, Americans believe the
answer is either yes or that the problems are far enough in the future
that we need not concern ourselves now. Careful examination of the
economic trends in place when balanced against current law and the
demographic trends in place challenge, if not frankly contradict this
view.
We
live in an age of fifteen second sound bytes. Far too many Americans
were educated and think in the same way. It may be a great way to sell
cereal and soap or to elect a Congressman or even a President. Do you
remember, "It's the economy stupid"? In stark contrast,
remember the Reagan quote, "We will preserve for our children this,
the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the
first step into a thousand years of darkness." It is going to take
more than a fifteen second sound byte if civilization is to be saved by
rescuing the United States from socialism.
History-a
review of the mistakes we are repeating:
According to legend, socialism came to America with the Mayflower in
1620. The first Thanksgiving may have actually been a celebration of the
triumph of capitalism over socialism.
James
Madison, the acknowledged father of the Constitution, 1792:
"I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the
Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects
of benevolence, the money of their constituents." "Remember,
democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders
itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit
suicide."
Benjamin
Franklin:
"When the people find they can vote themselves money, that will
herald the end of the republic."
Thomas
Jefferson:
"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the
issue of their money, first by inflation and then by deflation, the
banks and corporations that will grow up around them (around the banks),
will deprive the people of their property until their children will wake
up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered." "The
issue today is the same as it has been throughout all history, whether
man shall be allowed to govern himself or be ruled by a small
elite."
Congressman
Davey Crockett and an Alamo hero, 1830:
"Mr. Speaker, I have as much respect for the memory of the
deceased, and as much sympathy for the sufferings of the living, as any
man in this House. But we must not permit our respect for the dead or
our sympathy for a part of the living to lead us into an act of
injustice to the balance of the living. I will not go into an argument
to prove that Congress has no power to appropriate this money as an act
of charity. Every member upon this floor knows it. We have the right, as
individuals, to give away as much of our own money as we please in
charity; but as
members of Congress we have no right to so appropriate a dollar of
the public money."
Franklin
Pierce 1854:
"[I must question] the constitutionality and propriety of the
Federal Government assuming to enter into a novel and vast field of
legislation, namely, that of providing for the care and support of all
those … who by any form of calamity become fit objects of public
philanthropy ... I cannot find any authority in the Constitution for
making the Federal Government the great almoner of public charity
throughout the United States. To do so would, in my judgment, be
contrary to the letter and spirit of the Constitution and subversive of
the whole theory upon which the Union of these States is founded."
Grover
Cleveland 1887:
"I can find no warrant for such an appropriation in the
Constitution, and I do not believe that the power and duty of the
General Government ought to be extended to the relief of individual
suffering which is in no manner properly related to the public service
or benefit."
Governor
of New York, Franklin D. Roosevelt 1930:
"As a matter of fact and law, the governing rights of the States
are all of those which have not been surrendered to the National
Government by the Constitution or its amendments. Wisely or unwisely,
people know that under the Eighteenth Amendment Congress has been given
the right to legislate on this particular subject (prohibition), but
this is not the case in the matter of a great number of other vital
problems of government, such as the conduct of public utilities, of
banks, of insurance, of business, of agriculture, of education, of
social welfare and of a dozen other important features. In these,
Washington must not be encouraged to interfere."
Mark
Twain:
"The mania for giving the Government power to meddle with the
private affairs of cities or citizens is likely to cause endless
trouble, through the rivalry of schools and creeds that are anxious to
obtain official recognition, and there is great danger that our people
will lose our independence of thought and action which is the cause of
much of our greatness, and sink into the helplessness of the Frenchman
or German who expects his government to feed him when hungry, clothe him
when naked, to prescribe when his child may be born and when he may die,
and, in time, to regulate every act of humanity from the cradle to the
tomb, including the manner in which he may seek future admission to
paradise."
Frederick
Bastiat:
"It is impossible to introduce into society a greater change and a
greater evil than this: the conversion of the law into an instrument of
plunder." "The state is the great fiction by which everybody
seeks to live at the expense of everybody else."
Frederick
von Hayek, 1974 Nobel Laureate in Economics:
"When it becomes dominated by a collectivist creed, democracy will
inevitably destroy itself."
Lenin:
"While the State exists, there can be no freedom. When there is
freedom there will be no State."
Nikita
Khrushchev:
"We can't expect the American People to jump from Capitalism to
Communism, but we can assist their elected leaders in giving them small
doses of Socialism, until they awaken one day to find that they have
Communism."
In spite
of his quote above, Roosevelt successfully indoctrinated socialism into
America before the end of his first term as President. Politicians have
been adding to and compounding this error ever since.
Assessing
the Magnitude of the Problem-overview
From 1964 until his incapacity and subsequent death, Ronald Reagan was
unarguably the leading spokesperson for conservatism (defined as
keeping government within its Constitutional confines). Not being privy
to Reagan's thinking, I don't know his true thoughts about Social
Security, but Reagan did acknowledge his willingness to accept a role
for government in Social Security. We may never know whether he believed
there is Constitutional authority for SS or whether he simply was not
willing to fight the political realities of SS as the "third rail
of politics" at a time when he could see other winnable battles
that he wanted to win and was willing to pursue.
Reagan
remained relatively silent after he left office until his successor
apparent capitulated to Congressional Democrats on the 1990 budget by
reneging on his pledge, the now infamous sound byte, "read my
lips..." Reagan wasted no time (1992) in designating a new leading
conservative spokesperson, Rush
Limbaugh. Rush surrendered and conceded defeat without a fight. Rush
even went beyond Reagan's precedent in addressing a caller in October
2002, "The idea that
Social Security is going to end or be reduced is just silly. Why not say
so?"
Future
of US Socialism
President Reagan and Rush were both wrong about Social Security. In
deference to both President Reagan and to Rush, they did not have the
benefit of seeing the Gokhale-Smetters
Report. Nor could they have anticipated the aftermath of the Federal
Reserve's mistakes in fostering and dealing with recent and existing
market bubbles. We will be providing more data and discussing this in
more detail in future articles, but if you are intellectually honest and
extrapolate the trends in place together with Gokhale-Smetters, it will
be difficult not to come to the conclusion that either socialism is
coming to an end in the United States or the United States itself is
coming to an end in fulfillment of the "prophecies" quoted
above. We intend to show that the people who believe the United States
is exempt from the laws of economics or that the problems are far enough
in the future, are almost certainly wrong.
Borrowing
again from President Reagan, "We are not, as some would have us
believe, doomed to an inevitable decline...I do believe in a fate that
will fall on us if we do nothing..." If the end of socialism in the
United States is inevitable, how will it happen and who will bring it
about? And when? The answer to the who is easy. Almost by default, it
will not be our politicians, the creators of the problem. Nor will it be
our judges who looked the other way and allowed it to happen. That
leaves only "We the People" as the answer to the
"who". The quick and easy, answer to the "how" is to
simply stop repeating the mistakes of the past. "When?"; the
sooner the better. The devil and the details of the "how and
when" are the subjects of the remainder of this series.
Marketing
Hands down, the best marketing offer in the planet's history was
made by Jesus, eternal life in paradise in exchange for nothing more
than faith. Nothing to lose and everything to gain. Most choices involve
a carrot and a stick. No other offer has entailed a better carrot or a
bigger stick. Yet a majority of the people have not availed themselves
of this opportunity. This rather extreme example illustrates that while
risk and reward factor into decision making, clearly credibility can
play a decisive role in the choices people make. Please understand that
I am not challenging the credibility of Jesus, but rather am attempting
to illustrate the fact that people assign relative values of credibility
to their various sources of information and respond according to those
weightings.
Most
choices involve some type of action or reaction to gain the carrot with
the wrong choice or no action resulting in the stick. One of the
problems associated with group activities is that if the majority makes
a poor choice, everybody gets the stick. And history is filled with
aphorisms regarding how rarely majorities make good decisions. Did mandatory
socialism in a "free" country cross your mind?
Only a
tiny fraction of our population will initially see this series. Only a
portion of those will believe this series has any credibility. Many of
the Americans that are motivated with the desire to make a difference
get discouraged when they consider how difficult it can be to overcome
the perceived opposition of the majority, even if they factor in support
from a hoped for "silent majority". If you have found a
measure of credibility in either the facts or this story, and you would
like to avoid the stick if the majority of Americans are wrong, then it
is very much in your interest to please invite your family and friends
to start following this series. The power of the internet to reach
people and to change their minds is growing.
Ronald Reagan is still making a difference and can make an even bigger
difference if you simply use the internet to tell a friend and ask them
to in turn tell their friends. By following Reagan's legacy as a model,
maybe We can make the difference.
Thanks
again to Financial
Sense Online and the Puplavas.
© 2004 Reagan Renaissance
Editorials Archive
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