We may all know it, but it needs to be repeated from time to time: The great political divide is between those who favor collectivism and those who favor individual freedom.

Collectivism on a national scale is necessarily statism. Human nature being what it is – instinctively self-preserving and self-advancing – such collectivism requires compulsion, or, to use a softer word, organization: the organization of an entire nation. (At least the nation: the ultimate collectivist dream is the global collective, the organization of the whole world.) And only a government, which is to say the state, has the power to do it.

A collectivized nation is not simply one that is under the rule of a common law. To the contrary, a society in which the citizens consent to be subject equally to the abstract authority of law (a constitution, or a body of laws made by representatives answerable to their electors), is a free society.

A collectivized nation is under the rule of human organizers who exert control of the people according to their own will. It is the opposite of a free society. Such a state is, in the true meaning of the word, a tyranny.

It may be a benign tyranny; its rulers, serially or in concert, could be (in laughable theory) persons of admirable uprightness, possessed of the utmost goodwill and kindly intentions, moved by the highest ideals, inspired by the loftiest visions of human happiness, but it is nevertheless a tyranny.

And besides, what sort of person can believe he knows what’s best for everyone else? How can he be a good sort? Wouldn’t such a man (or woman – there have been tyrannous queens) have to be an insufferably arrogant know-it-all? Or the sort who doesn’t really give a damn about the effects of his orders on others just so long as he has his own way? And is there likely to be a person who really can know enough to be the best arbiter of everyone else’s fate? Or can be trusted to set the best possible direction for millions of lives? And is it conceivable that one direction can be best for everyone?

Collectivists include Socialists, Communists, Nazis, Fascists, global government idealists, the Greens, and in sum the ideologists of any form of totalitarianism, including Islam.

There are two types of collectivist states and movements:

Non-egalitarian: such as Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, Salazar’s Portugal, Islam.

This type, except for Islam, has too few devotees at present to constitute an ideological threat. (Islam is an active enemy of freedom, but not only because it is collectivist, so we won’t discuss it any further here.)

Egalitarian: such as Soviet Russia, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, Mao’s China, Castro’s Cuba, Greens.

A collectivist state of the egalitarian type controls the distribution of material goods, of course. If goods are to be equally distributed, there has to be an agency doing the distributing, and that agency can only be the state. Having the monopoly of force, the state alone has the power to redistribute all property; to seize what is yours and bestow it on someone else. Maybe you worked long and hard for it, but nevertheless the state ordains that someone else who didn’t work for it has at least as much right to it as you have, in fact more. That’s the immorality of redistribution. It is called ‘social justice’. Equality of this sort is incompatible with liberty.

Millions pursue these egalitarian ideals, as ‘socialists’, ‘liberals’, ‘progressives’, or ‘greens’, despite their colossal failure wherever they’ve been tried in practice.

The attraction of an egalitarian collectivist system lies in its apparent guarantee of security. It offers you an alternative to a lonely struggle for survival. It will, theoretically, provide you with food, shelter, schooling, healing. And on top of all that, it will give you a sense of (communal) purpose, and a lifting of responsibility to make life-directing decisions for yourself. If you just do what you’re told, work where you are directed to work, live where you are allowed to live, eat what is made available to you, repeat the lessons you are taught, you will survive. And furthermore you‘ll have nothing to reproach yourself with; you can bear a lightness of moral being, certain that you are no higher or lower than anybody else, having neither to envy others nor to be annoyingly envied by them.

Paradise? For those who think it may be, there is bad news. The whole utopian structure is built on a fallacy. The idea that you will be more secure in the arms of the state than you are if left to your own devices is an illusion. What the state provides the state can withhold. If the state gives you a job, it can deny you a job. The same with housing, education, medicine. You are dependent on it, and if it fails you or punishes you by withdrawing its patronage, you will have no recourse. Your choice is to live as a slave obedient to the state, or perish.

The only real security lies always in your own ability to act for yourself (and your immediate dependents). It may not be easy, yet most who try succeed. The more freely you can act for yourself, the safer you are. The state’s only legitimate role is to safeguard you while you pursue your self-chosen aims, by protecting your country from external enemies with military strength, and you personally by enforcing the law.

The state is forever an incipient threat to freedom. It tends to accumulate power and encroach gradually on the freedom of the citizens. It needs to be kept from becoming too powerful. How to limit the power of government is the chief problem for representative democracies.

The state will take more power to itself in times of national crisis, such as war or severe economic recession. It can – and governments often do – invent crises as an excuse to take more power. They are doing so now. One of the most potent excuses that representative governments are seizing on to expand way beyond acceptable limits is ‘climate change’ with its ‘threats to the environment’.

It is in the name of an apparently overriding necessity – nothing less than the preservation of our planet – that governments are busy trying to organize populations into collective compliance with their will. All populations. The salvation of Earth is only possible, the environmentalists say, if their remedies are applied uniformly to the entire planet. Never has there been such a gift of an excuse for collectivists in power to organize the rest of us. We must all, they insist, henceforth live, work, play, travel, dress, eat, and house ourselves as they tell us to if we are to survive.

DO NOT BELIEVE THEM.

Post Script: Green is the new Red (as in Communist Red). The Communist Van Jones, briefly appointed as Green Jobs Adviser to President Obama, made no secret of why he liked the job. He said that the green economy would start off as ‘a small subset’ of a complete revolution, away from ‘grey capitalism’ toward redistribution of all the wealth. ‘We are going to push it and push it and push it and push it until it becomes the engine for transforming the whole society.’

Jillian Becker   September 2009

… we like this:

One of our readers, A.G.S., sent us an idea he had for an article comparing America now to the early days of Mussolini’s Italy. The thought came to him, he wrote, when he read Mario and the Magician by Thomas Mann. He outlined the article he had in mind and asked me [JB] if I would complete it. At first I was a little skeptical; I felt he was exaggerating. But the more I thought about it, the more I found myself in agreement with him. The following is the result of our collaboration.

*** 

In his famous story Mario and the Magician, Thomas Mann demonstrates how fascism under Mussolini corrupted the Italian populace. At the start of his regime a general feeling spread among the Italians that it was right to impose conformity, and society was gripped by a mood of collective censoriousness. In the story, set in an Italian holiday resort, a child takes off her bathing suit to wash the sand out of it in the sea, and her momentary nudity arouses the wrath of the crowd on the beach, the police are informed and the child’s family is fined. The story as a whole is about the destruction of individual will during an evening’s entertainment by an evil hypnotist. The allegorical implications are unmistakeable.

As in Italy then, an atmosphere of authoritarian regulation is spreading in the US now. There is a powerful demand, emanating from the president and his circle, for mental and physical conformity.

Proofs of this intent abound. Group action and community involvement are encouraged, with the aim of inducing non-conformists to fall in line. The Department of Homeland Security issues a memo warning that persons who have a political point of view different from the present federal government majority are a threat to society. Anyone challenging the theory of anthropogenic global warming, which the Democrats in power have embraced as an orthodoxy, is denounced as a heretic. In the cause of mitigating the projected undesirable effects of climate change, the government proposes to dictate what sources of energy you may use and to what extent.  It will regulate the temperature of your house, the clothes you may wear, the food you may eat, and the car you may drive. In sickness and infirmity your body will be treated as the government decides when its nationalized health policy is imposed. Government will decree what opinions you may express on talk radio, in the universities and schools, and soon in any public forum. By ‘spreading the wealth around’ it will set a limit to how high any individual may rise by his own efforts.  Government will rule on how much business managers may be paid and under what union-dictated terms an employee may work.

When conformity is legislated and imposed by force, dissent criminalized and punished, authoritarianism has become tyranny. 

Obama is the Mussolini of America.

We enjoy reading Mike Adams, and see eye-to-eye with him on many political issues.

Where we do not agree with him – as with the otherwise admirable Ann Coulter – is on religion.

Well, we’re atheist conservatives and they are Christians, so that’s no surprise.

Today in an article in Townhall titled ‘Liberty and Tyranny’ – well worth reading in full – Mike Adams criticizes statism, progressivism, and the left’s ideal of equality. We share his views on them. Then he comes to the question of ‘rights’.

He asks ‘a serious question: If rights are not bestowed by a Creator, then under what conditions do they exist? In other words, who bestows them?’

The answer is nobody unless the state. A right can only be granted in law. Because we do not believe in a supernatural lawmaker, a Creator of our universe and us, we do not accept the idea of ‘human rights’ at all, or of ‘natural rights’.

We prefer to say that we human beings are – or ought to be – FREE to do whatever we choose provided we break no laws. Law sets limits on our freedom, and should do so rationally and equally.

Nobody’s ‘right’ whether in sentiment or law should ever impose an obligation on another person, except the obligation of restraint. Whoever it was who said, ‘the freedom of your fist ends where my nose begins,’ expressed it perfectly. A list of rights according to Franklin Roosevelt – as quoted by Adams – includes: a right to a useful and remunerative job and a wage adequate to provide food and clothing and recreation; a farmer’s right sell his produce for enough to give him a decent living; everyone’s right to a home, medical care, pensions, education and more. It is an endorsement of the Marxist notion: ‘to each according to his need’. Those who hold to that creed believe that a man should receive in exchange for something he sells – his labor, an artifact, or whatever he offers – the payment that he wants.

But our wants are limitless, while the value of what we have to sell is not.

Only the free market can determine value. A buyer will pay as much as the thing he is buying is worth to him. The more buyers who want the thing on offer, the higher the price will be.

The only alternative to economic freedom is distribution by tyrannical government. A government that arbitrarily distributes the wealth of the people is by definition a tyranny.

You can never have liberty and equality. The choice is between freedom and equality. (By which we mean economic equality: equality before the law is essential to freedom.)

In freedom, if an individual wants to earn more, he can do so by providing more and better goods and services. That is to say, we assess our needs for ourselves and work as well as we can to get the money to pay for them: which could be summed up as ‘from each according to his need’.

Will we get as much as we want? That will depend on our individual ability.

So we reverse the Marxist tag ‘from each according to his ability and to each according to his need,’ and make ours, ‘from each according to his need and to each according to his ability.’

The market will decide the reward. All we can do is our best. We have no ‘right’ to demand handouts from others on the grounds that we ‘need’ what they have.

To put it another way, socialism is theft.

 … of Islam? Well, that’s the reference but …  Obama has five pillars on which to rebuild the US economy. 

In yet another ‘major speech’ – he likes to make them as often as possible among flags and cameras, becoming ever more like all the other dear leaders of the peoples who have centrally-planned economies –  he declared yesterday (in small but central part): 

We must build our house upon a rock.  We must lay a new foundation for growth and prosperity – a foundation that will move us from an era of borrow and spend to one where we save and invest; where we consume less at home and send more exports abroad.

It’s a foundation built upon five pillars that will grow our economy and make this new century another American century:  new rules for Wall Street that will reward drive and innovation; new investments in education that will make our workforce more skilled and competitive; new investments in renewable energy and technology that will create new jobs and industries; new investments in health care that will cut costs for families and businesses; and new savings in our federal budget that will bring down the debt for future generations.  That is the new foundation we must build.  That must be our future – and my Administration’s policies are designed to achieve that future. 

So the First Pillar is a continuing interference in, and tighter control of the economy by the federal government 

The Second Pillar is reinforced leftist indoctrination in the schools under stricter federal government authority 

The Third Pillar is the provision of insecure and very expensive energy, its uses ever more regulated by the government so that lives become poorer and harder

The Fourth Pillar is the establishment of nationalized healthcare, being a huge extension of the welfare state and the augmentation of  governmental power of decision over the life and death of every individual  

The Fifth Pillar is a fantasy, a pretense, a fairy story that future federal budgets will get smaller and the monstrous deficits  will be ‘halved’ in a blink of the dear leader’s eye.  

 Obama is a leveler, Charles Krauthammer writes, and so – 

The credit crisis will pass and the auto overcapacity will sort itself out one way or the other. The reordering of the American system will come not from these temporary interventions, into which Obama has reluctantly waded. It will come from Obama’s real agenda: his holy trinity of health care, education and energy. Out of these will come a radical extension of the welfare state, social and economic leveling in the name of fairness, and a massive increase in the size, scope and reach of government.

If Obama has his way, the change that is coming is a new America: "fair," leveled and social democratic. 

One of our editors, C. Gee, comments:

 Is it unAmerican to want Obama to fail?

 There is a storm in the teacup of the right blogosphere. Charles Johnson of LGF, whom we greatly admire and usually agree with, opines that Republicans are wrong to say they want Obama – who has called himself  ‘The Ones we have been waiting for’ –  to fail, as the vast middle of the nation will hear this as wanting America to fail. These people, apparently, do not want any American president to fail.

Well, it is time the vast middle of the nation opened its ears and really listened to what is being said. If they had done that during 2008, they would not have voted in a president that wants America to fail. The vast middles may have liked The Ones’ positive message of hope and change. But his actual policies are already undermining this nation, preparing the way for the international socialist utopia. 

The left wanted Bush to fail, because they wanted America to fail. They still do. Wanting The Ones to fail is not tit-for-tat, or descending to the Left’s level. It is a  principled political stance, whether articulated or not.

We want The Ones to fail so that America can survive and protect what is left of civilization in this increasingly nasty world. And it is senselessly prissy to draw a distinction between saying we want The Ones to fail and saying we want his policies to fail. The Ones has no political existence other than in his policies.

Some pills should not be sugar-coated, some messages should not be massaged.

 Phyllis Schlafly explains how the economic crisis has been used by the Democrats to advance their redistributionist agenda by means of the ‘Stimulus’ Act:

Here are some of the major "change" provisions of the 1,000-plus page act that all admit no member of Congress read before passage. This list doesn’t include any of the dozens of "porky" items that Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., boasts Americans don’t care about (and usually don’t know about).

First, the stimulus bill repeals the essentials of welfare reform passed by the Republican Congress in 1996. It was reluctantly signed by President Bill Clinton after he realized the public was demanding reform, and after it proved popular, he tried to take credit for it.

LBJ’s Great Society welfare was probably the worst of all liberal policies because it was directly responsible for destroying marriage by subsidizing illegitimacy and divorce, thereby creating a matriarchy dependent on government handouts. It wasn’t poverty that destroyed marriage in the lower-income classes, it was the liberal policy of giving taxpayers’ money to women, thereby making the husband and father irrelevant and even an impediment to the flow of easy money.

By setting limits on government handouts, the 1996 welfare reform encouraged welfare recipients to get jobs or job training, to make themselves self-sufficient and to end their long-term dependency on government.

The Obama stimulus plan increases the taxpayers’ money that the federal government gives to the states for welfare, and reverses incentives by giving bonuses to states that put more people on welfare. The stimulus is even worse than the Great Society policies of the 1960s.

That is a good example of the Obama goal to spread the wealth around (regardless of the harm it does).

Second, the stimulus plan calls for nearly doubling federal spending on education, which means doubling federal control. This money gives Obama the opportunity to spread his friend William Ayers’ "social justice" teaching (i.e., that America is an oppressive and unjust society) throughout K-16 education. This goal will be facilitated by Obama’s appointment of Arne Duncan for secretary of education, who like Obama and Ayers, is an alumnus of the Chicago political machine…

Third, the stimulus plan calls for Obama "change" by giving government control over access to medical treatments plus surveillance over online medical records for every American. Giving bureaucrats the power to decide which procedures have "clinical effectiveness" and may be used means nationalizing the health care industry and rationing medical care.

Fourth, the stimulus bill greatly expands by about $23 billion nearly every element of the welfare state, including food stamps, Medicaid eligibility, the earned income tax credit, the Special Supplementary Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, and child-support enforcement for single moms. The governors have just awakened to the fact that the stimulus plan will require their states to raise business taxes if they accept this new free money.

Fifth, Obama’s claim that the stimulus plan cuts taxes is a fraud. A large percentage of the alleged tax "refunds" is just another handout because it will go to people who don’t owe any income taxes.

Sixth, the announced purpose of the stimulus is to create jobs, but Obama’s photo-op to illustrate this at Caterpillar Tractor in Peoria, Ill., turned into a political donnybrook. National television showed Obama speaking to some of the 20,000 whose jobs have been outsourced by Caterpillar and implied that the plan will enable them to be rehired. Minutes later, Obama was contradicted by Caterpillar’s CEO, who warned that, on the contrary, more layoffs are coming. It looks like the stimulus will create more government jobs plus an estimated 300,000 jobs for illegal aliens, but not much for anyone else.

 Walter Williams reminds us what Adam Smith said, what he meant by the ‘invisible hand’, why capitalism works and socialism doesn’t, and why our selfish instincts benefit others far more effectively than our charitable endeavors. Read his whole column here.

What is the driving force that explains how millions of people manage to cooperate to get 60,000 different items to your supermarket? Most of them don’t give a hoot about you and me, some of them might hate Americans, but they serve us well and they do so voluntarily. The bottom line motivation for the cooperation is people are in it for themselves; they want more profits, wages, interest and rent, or to use today’s silly talk – people are greedy.

Adam Smith, the father of economics, captured the essence of this wonderful human cooperation when he said, "He (the businessman) generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. … He intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain." Adam Smith continues, "He is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. … By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it." And later he adds, "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest."