Elephant in the Room Ideal

Author: Stefan Claypool

It's time to call the plague that is sweeping the United States by name. We are experiencing the third wave of socialism in this country, and to call it anything else would be profoundly dishonest. What else can one call a system where the president is allowed to fire private sector CEOs with whom he disagrees, or the Treasury Secretary is on the cusp of being granted the power to seize financial firms at will? How else can one categorize a system where money is stripped of inherent value and used merely as a unit of accounting? The federal government is subsidizing failing industries in the hope that if they are just kept alive a little longer, a miraculous turnaround will come. If it doesn't, well, that just means that we haven't thrown enough of our increasingly valueless money at them, that they haven't been regulated enough, that, damn it, the government needs to do more.

The most striking thing about socialism is that all over the world it has failed in every form when it didn't have something greater to leech off of. Socialism cannot stand on its own. Witness Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, and Venezuela. And yet somehow, despite its miserable track record, socialism still holds a strange appeal. People want to believe that, gosh darn it, we just need to love each other more, we just need to be more fair to one another, and all of our problems will be solved. But socialism is quite simply an unworkable system. The brilliance of the American system to date has been that, as designed by the founding fathers, it conforms magnificently to human behavior. Socialism works the opposite way, setting up an ideal and trying to force people into its mold. No wonder it has constantly failed.

And although certain people would like to pretend that the rise of the United States was nothing more than a historical coincidence, the fact of the matter is that our great influence around the world can be attributed directly to the principles upon which our nation was founded and the conviction with which we have adhered to them over the last two centuries. Now we can try to rationalize our way out of that and pretend that we stumbled blindly through the years, falling into power merely because the British were tired and the Germans were defeated and the Russians "chose" not to crush us, but we all know that's a lie. The United States rose to its peak because we believed in a few big ideas - the strength of the market, the soundness of limited government, and the inherent goodness of the individual. There isn't anything in that creed about forced equality, equitable distribution of resources among the proletariat, or the submission of the populace to the will of the government; that's the socialist creed, and we have achieved magnificence over the years by avoiding it.

The socialist republics of Europe have survived on their relationship with the United States, exploiting the strength of our markets while simultaneously begging us to adopt a more "European" economic system. Well, they're finally getting their wish. What's going to be the result? Stagnation. Decay. Failure. All of the social and economic death that has swept over Europe is going to cross the Atlantic unless we stop and remember what made us who we are. We need to reject the false idol of socialism for all time and embrace the American ideal - and the capitalist ideal - once more. We are AMERICANS. We need to start acting like it.

But we won't. Not yet. And we will be feeling the consequences for years to come.