The conflict between Collectivists on the Left and Individualists on the Right, has only intensified over the last century. While those favoring liberty above all else had a resounding success in the Reagan Administration, that success has been put into question ever since the Democrats took power in the 2006 Midterm Elections. In 2009 America, those favoring equality are making their comeback -- at breakneck pace. These people seek to collectivize American society, thereby sacrificing liberty in order to create a harmonious relationship with the minor percentage of people who are impoverished. Collectivists believe that the "wealthy" in America have taken advantage of the system and used it to become "too rich." That by being too successful, they created a massive stratification between the wealthier class and the poorer class, thereby making it impossible for those on the bottom rung of the economic ladder to achieve upward mobility. Collectivists desire to champion equality by taking what they claim to be the "upper five percent of the wealthiest" and bring them down a bit -- in order to create equilibrium and supposedly reduce that stratification of wealth. The best way they do this is through taxation, or the forced reduction of wealth by making those who achieve a certain level of success have to pay more to the government, which in turn, redistributes that wealth to the poorer classes in society. This (according to the Collectivist) creates equality in society and, once equality has been achieved, a utopia has been created.
But does Collectivism, in fact, create an equal society?
The American Dream has always been built on the principle that everyone was free to pursue their own destiny. That destiny could only be pursued with the combination of liberty and a representative form of democracy. Where equality traditionally came into play was in terms of the pursuit of happiness. Everyone was equally afforded the opportunity of upward mobility; not guaranteed that such a movement on the economic ladder would occur. While everyone may equally have the right to pursue their destiny, their free will takes them in different directions. Since our Founding Fathers believed that free will and the defense of the individual were the key to American success (this fact has been proven time and again), the Collectivists' definition of equality is incorrect and should not be sought as a viable solution to our society's most vexing problems. If the Collectivist believes that in a heterogeneous society such as ours (that is built upon the notion of free will, no less), equality in results can and must be guaranteed than they are seeking to change the entire face of the country. They are countermanding the Founding Fathers' vision, and they are sadly misguided.
Collectivists believe that there exists some form of aristocracy in our culture; an elite cabal of a few wealthy people who control all of the interests and keep everyone else down whilst expanding their own coffers. The real question becomes, how much of a minority are the wealthy? Collectivists today (like President Obama) say they only desire to tax the upper five percent of wealth, yet in reality, they are taxing anyone who makes upwards of $150,000 a year. While that may sound like a lot of money it's really not. In fact, most Middle Class people make somewhere around that much annually -- and they certainly are not "rich." The Collectivists attack major corporations as well. When one attacks the upper wage earners, one is in fact stifling economic prosperity. They are making it untenable for those people with wealth to spend that wealth; those people, in turn, hide their wealth or lose it to the government through redistribution. When that occurs all of that money is wasted because it could have been injected into the economy and the economy could have grown and supplied more people with jobs. What I am talking about is nothing new. In fact, many people know this as Supply-side Economics. However, it has been proven to work far better than the Collectivists' tax-and-spend policies. Whereas one seeks to empower the successful individual and try to transmit his success fairly to others by providing jobs through economic stimulation, the other seeks to punish the successful individual for being different; for being wealthier than those around him/her. In what way is that fair? In what way is that equal?
Indeed, the Collectivists have had several chances to try it their way. During the 1930s the Great Depression reigned supreme and it was believed that only FDR's New Deal policies could save capitalism from itself. Yet, it has been proven that not only did the Collectivist notions of the New Deal policies stagnate an economic recovery, they may have worsened the situation; making a natural, deep recession into a Great Depression. For those Liberals taking the time to read this article (undoubtedly scowling the entire time) I shall allow the words of one of FDR's closest confidantes and chief Collectivist policymakers, then-Secretary of Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr.'s words to speak for themselves. During a May 9, 1939 session of the House Ways and Means Committee Morgenthau confessed:
"We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. And I have just one interest, and if I am wrong...somebody else can have my job. I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises....I say after eight years of this [Roosevelt] Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started....And an enormous debt to boot!"If Collectivism truly worked, if it truly created a better society then why did one of its leading proponents suddenly turn on it after eight years of implementing the most Collectivist policies in American history? Why was it that "unemployment for the whole year in 1939 would be higher than that of 1931, the year before Roosevelt captured the presidency from Herbert Hoover" (Folsom, 2)? In fact, the only thing that did grow was the government during this era. We see President Obama performing similar acts today: endorsing policies which promote Public Sector growth at the expense of the private sector. Yet, the Great Depression should be a key indicator that Collectivist policies like that do not save economies; they worsen them. Even now, the Collectivists implement their policies of wealth destruction in exchange for equality, yet the crisis is still here. Indeed, the President talks about the "worst being ahead of us" still!
When the Founding Fathers envisioned our country and established the Constitution, they truly believed that we were the greatest country in the world and we were capable of great things. However, those men were not fools. They knew that problems would arise and that not all of them could be solved (in their own era, they failed to adequately address the question of slavery which they knew would come back and haunt their children) immediately. They believed that the system of balance they had created which valued the individual through liberty, democracy, and property rights -- granting him equal chance at pursuit of opportunity -- was worthy of preservation, though. We may be the greatest nation in history, but we are still human. We cannot save everyone and we cannot solve all the problems...especially if the solution means tearing down the fundamentals of our society and replacing them with the horrors of Collectivism.
Collectivists love to proclaim that there are more poor people in this country than there are wealthy and according to their research, it is true. When one looks into the situation, though, they realize that the reason it appears as though there are so many unfortunate people in this country is due to the fact the Collectivists consistently redefine what constitutes being poor in order to inflate their numbers and make it seem as though more people support them, thereby demoralizing the Individualists in our society. Collectivists feel that once everyone has had their grievances redressed, we can move forward as a society. This just simply isn't the case. If it were then the Soviet Union would have won the Cold War; East Germany, North Korea, Cuba, and Myanmar would be utopias -- not apocalyptic hellholes. I am not claiming that the American Left wishes to institute Soviet-style Communism, however, they do wish us to get nearer to that than to the shining city on a hill the Puritans spoke of when they first landed on North America all those centuries ago.
The fact of the matter is, there are more successful and generally happy people in America than unsuccessful and unhappy. For instance, a key ingredient of the economic recession of 2008-2009 was the mortgage crisis. Yet, 91% of Americans who took out mortgages managed to pay them on time -- meaning only an irresponsible 9% did not. Collectivists now want the majority to lower themselves to the idiotic few? How about the Collectivists stand up and tell that minority to pick themselves up and find a way to work harder. Why does the Constitution and the country have to suffer for the irresponsibility of so few people? For those few people who cannot make it here, this land of freedom has one more great freedom that I feel I should mention: the freedom to leave. There are plenty of nations of the world which accept -- indeed value -- mediocrity. Places like Canada, Mexico, France, Britain, any Western European nation, really, are all excellent places to live and Socialist paradises. Why do you have to make America like them? Why not leave and live your lives happily over there. This is nothing negative, not everyone is cut out to survive in a capitalist-individualist system. In fact, as a taxpayer, I would be willing to subsidize your move over there. But, I digress.
Look again at the Great Depression and all of the "wonders" that came out of the Collectivist-oriented New Deal Policies. We were given Social Security which amounted to a glorified, government-backed Ponzi Scheme which said that anyone over the age of 63 (at the time) would be given money by the government since they could not work (yet the average lifespan when Social Security was created was around 61) meaning the government never intended to actually implement Social Security en masse. We were given varying degrees of Welfare which, according to men like Bill Cosby has actually been one of the leading factors to the destruction of the African-American family and ultimately the lack of forward progress within the African-American community. Let's look even further into the Great Depression and see this Collectivist utopia that was created then, in the words of people who lived it. A man from Beaver Dam, Virginia wrote this in a letter to President Roosevelt in 1936:
"We right now, have no work, no winter bed clothes...Wife don't even have a winter coat. What are we going to do through these cold times coming on? Just looks like we will have to freeze together and starve together."So, it is the intention of a great many Americans to appeal to some miserable minority which, in all likelihood never be able to make it in our prosperous society, by destroying that which makes us great. The New Deal era is remembered as a great era because the government, under FDR, saved the country due to the force of FDR's personality and his persistence. Yet, nothing was actually solved. No grand solution came from all of the Brains Trust Roosevelt formulated over the years. All Collectivism did -- and this is according to the liberal historian Arthur M. Schlissenger, Jr. -- was change the very nature of the Presidency into an "imperial presidency." These policies sapped the will of the people. Only a handful of uber-rich survived comfortably during this time and the politicians made out like bandits...all at the expense of liberty and the pursuit of happiness (and in many cases, the expense of life since suicide and death rates increased exponentially). The question becomes, why do so many people look to Collectivism for answers when history so clearly shows that whenever it's tried, it leads to misery and stagnation? Is the quest for equality at all costs worth it -- if the only equality which can be achieved is one of shared suffering? Is that the American Dream? Most certainly not.
So, the inherent flaw I find with Collectivism is the fact that one must lose liberty in order to achieve equality. In trying to create a Collectivist society, one must first strip the individual of their right to pursue their own self-interest (and their destiny). This is achieved by taxation. With taxation, the collectivist saps people of their desire for success -- and ultimately happiness -- by simply making it too expensive and hard to become successful and maintain that success. This is all done with the noblest of intentions and under the guise of equality. The goal is to achieve a societal parity with the bottom percentile of those on the economic scale by lowering the majority of successful people to that bottom level -- leaving only a handful of upper rich and political bureaucrats with enough to be considered "successful." Once that has been achieved, you now have a Collectivist society. You now have made everyone equal -- in misery. At its core, then, Collectivism is neither fair nor just; rather totalitarian and vicious. In order to achieve this equality, one must take away people's control of their destiny...and their happiness. It destroys two of the three tenets of American civilization (liberty and pursuit of happiness) in exchange for greater equality. Collectivism, to paraphrase Milton Friedman, is built off of violence and coercion: in order to achieve this utopia, one must forcibly take money from other people and spend it as you wish. That's against freedom. The Collectivist must convince you that in order to achieve a greater economic good, one must commit an evil act; by committing an evil act and giving into our most basic desires, we are somehow doing a good. It's madness.
As well, Collectivism stunts progress and enslaves the people (without them ever realizing it) to those few remaining rich and political powerbrokers by tethering their destinies to that of the federal bureaucracy. In fact, when analyzing it there is nothing equal about a Collectivist Society; it even ultimately attacks democracy. Democracy is more than just a majority vote. It is about the debate that occurs between the people on an issue which leads to an informed decision. One cannot have democracy without diversity. In a Collectivist society, diversity is the enemy (yet paradoxically the diversity in groups is what a Collectivist preys upon to gain power). It also an enemy of democracy for the only people who will be prosperous and successful are the uber-rich (like Hollywood actors) who can afford these tax increases and still be wealthy and the bureaucrats in the enlarged government.This not only assaults democracy, it also seemingly assaults Collectivism as it leads to an aristocracy! Thus, the pursuit of achieving such a society is both dangerous and counterintuitive to the American Dream.
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Folsom, Burton. "New Deal or Raw Deal: How FDR's Economic Legacy Has Damaged America." New York: Threshold Publishing, 2009.
Friedman, Milton. "Capitalism & Freedom." Illinois: University of Chicago Publishing, 1962.
Goldwater, Barry. "The Conscience of a Conservative." New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1960.
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