OPINION:
Americans appear increasingly comfortable with the idea of giving up their private health insurance for a single-payer (government) system. This suggests we are becoming more comfortable with socialism and giving up our wealth and personal freedoms in exchange for a better life that never materializes.
Not only has socialism failed to deliver social justice or grow prosperity wherever it has rooted — be that Soviet Russia, Africa, Cuba or South America — but its pathway is profoundly anti-humanistic because it repudiates individual freedoms and self-actualization.
Socialism — defined as centralized economic controls, bureaucratic market decision-making, and confiscation and redistribution of wealth — fails to deliver economic prosperity or provide social justice simply because it is not designed to do so. Rather, it is designed to create a permanent underclass whose dependence on government assures its loyalty to the ruling party.
Socialism fails because, through the process of consolidating its party’s governing power, it abandons the human motivators of free markets, aspirational self-interest and individual wealth accumulation, which naturally propel individuals to create marketplace value, seek wealth and produce economic growth. These natural human motivators work best under limited government and require freedoms that are antithetical to socialism’s state control of economic processes. With these natural motivators effectively neutralized, under socialism economic output is anemic, easily consumed and eventually rationed.
When supposedly well-meaning, “Democratic Socialists” come looking for ever larger chunks of your paycheck, they are actually coming for something more precious, too: Your freedoms and independence.
KEN BECKERT
Abingdon, Md.
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