Tag: collectivism

Marxist America

In a country once founded upon Locke’s “Life. Liberty. Property.”, we’ve become a nation shockingly comfortable with policy that is rooted in “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”

Among the dying embers of absolute monarchism arose two new political ideologies, both, in their own ways, a response to the autocracy that had been the dominant form of government since the dawn of human civilization. Philosophically, at least, both rejected the idea of privileged political classes that is the hallmark of absolute monarchism and, more or less, sought to level the moral and political playing field between the “common man” and his government.

It is how each ideology addresses the problem of moral and political station of the “common man” that defines them. The first ideology, Individualism, was born from the western classical Liberal tradition of Adam Smith and John Locke. Individualism took the sovereign rights long denied the “common man” by tyrannical monarchs and granted them to the everyone. Rights to their lives, to freedom of action and expression, as well as to property and acquisition of wealth, once reserved entirely to a tiny political class, was granted to everyone.

The second ideology, Collectivism, was born of societies still largely under the thumb of diffuse but deeply entrenched political and religious controls. Beginning with thinkers like Charles Fourier and culminating with Karl Marx, Collectivism saw the sovereign rights possessed by the tyrannical monarchs as the main moral defect of monarchism. In their utopian theory, sovereignty itself is eliminated. The individual’s value is inherent not in himself but comes from the community of which he is a part. Thus ownership is greed. Freedom is hubris. Life is expendable.

These differences between Individualism and Collectivism have been at the heart of the Culture War (as well as numerous actual wars) around the world since the late 19th Century. In America, a country founded unambiguously upon Individualism, it has been tension between these two ideologies that has driven political debate since Theodore Roosevelt through Franklin Roosevelt and beyond. The Culture War in America is ultimately still the same old philosophical battle.

That war, however, is largely over, and Collectivism, not Individualism, has won.

“…Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”
-Thomas Jefferson-

That Collectivism has won the Culture War will shock many who believe themselves “right of center“, but the fact of the matter should be obvious. Many of these “right of center” people support government regulating every employment contract, no matter how minor, throughout the United States. They believe government has a role in protecting domestic industries from a global market place. Worst of all, they defend the morally reprehensible systematic confiscation of private property from every worker.

In a country once founded upon Locke’s “Life. Liberty. Property.“, we’ve become a nation shockingly comfortable with policy that is rooted in “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” These people can’t comprehend of a nation without the government injecting itself into the commercial and private contracts of the people, because, wait for it, “what about the needs of society“? On a fundamental but unconscious level, their only question is how much of our “unalienable rights” is really alienable.

Do we, as a nation, believe that two parties have an unalienable right to decide for themselves what a fair and proper contract is without the involvement of “collective society“? Clearly not. Do we, as a nation, believe that it is morally wrong to impose upon our countrymen the cost government that outstrips its revenues every year enough to stop imposing upon our countrymen? Unequivocally not. Do we, as a nation, “prefer dangerous freedom over peaceful slavery” enough to forgo intrusive government regulation and taxation to support agencies that are bankrupting us? Demonstrably, this is no longer the case.

“There are two distinct classes of men –
those who pay taxes and those who
receive and live upon taxes.”
-Thomas Paine-

So Collectivism has won, and positions espoused by voices such as this one you are reading now are accused of being “fringe” and “extremist“, even as we quote directly from the writings of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, George Washington, Thomas Paine, John Locke, Benjamin Franklin, and all of the other Founding Fathers. Is it that vocal voices of Individualism really are “fringe” or is it that Collectivism has crept, inch by inch into the national psyche and finally burrowed deep enough to become the accepted norm in America?

Call me an anarchist, because I believe taxation is theft? Call me an extremist, because I believe the government is always an enemy of the people? Call me a radical, because I believe that I am endowed by my Creator with unalienable rights and demand that my “countrymen” stop alienating them? Call me unrealistic because I retain the Spirit of Resistance necessary to fight for the Individualism of America’s founding? So be it. I’m in good company.

“Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil;
in its worst state, an intolerable one.”
-Thomas Paine-

Liberty is For The Win!

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Beautiful America: Our Moral Revolution

After a bloody war of independence, the Founding Fathers sought to let natural Liberty loose into spacious skies, across fruited plains, and from sea to shining sea.

A cherry tree blossoms in an effusive greeting of Spring, as at last the days grow slowly longer again. Birds, deer, and even the humble possums that wander around these parts have shaken off the timid quiet imposed by winter, returning to their business of survival. Winter clothes are packed away for another year, as lighter clothes fill closets and drawers. Men and women go to work, earn their pay, and come home to their families. The rhythmic dance of life proceeds apace. This is as it should be.

In a city far away from this particular cherry tree, another very different rhythm can be heard. A gavel falls, men and women in suits hammer across concrete and asphalt, and the drum of government, ceaseless and immovable, rumbles across the land. Here there is no concern for what was once free or what was once right, but they deem permitted and what they deem legal. Government’s job, as they see it, is to govern, and govern they do. As far as the men and women of this city are concerned, this, too, is as it should be. This, however, was not always the way of things here.

There was once a time in our country that people who held a very different understanding of the nature of government filled the halls of this old city. They knew that if the government had authority over their lives, then they did not. They understood that natural Liberty, like nature itself, can grow only where it may. This was a lesson that they learned from life in Europe, for untold generations, where natural Liberty could only grow in the cracks of tyrannical monarchies, there withering in the shadow of the hubris of noble bloodlines.

After a bloody war of independence, the Founding Fathers sought to let natural Liberty loose into spacious skies, across fruited plains, and from sea to shining sea.

“There’s a clear cause and effect here that is
as neat and predictable as a law of physics: 
As government expands, liberty contracts.”
-Ronald Reagan-

For the last thirty years, really since the last time an American president openly and clearly espoused the ideals of Liberty, we have witnessed a wildly swinging pendulum of electoral opinion from one side to another and back again, as the vast majority of Americans across the land have long since abandoned the idealism of the past. Broadly speaking, there three political factions in the United States today, but only two of these political factions possess any political power today. These two factions are spurred relentlessly on by a single, all consuming drive: greed.

One group of voters wants their government to create jobs, usually by taking from the “haves” and giving to the “have nots” (by in large, this is coincidentally themselves). Demanding government do everything from ending poverty to provide health care for everyone (though they actually mean health care coverage, but they’ve never cared about details), this group of typically younger voters energetically push for bigger government, believing, in their youthful ignorance, that they’ve nothing to lose. Their political class elites happily promise to fulfill their demands, if only these voters keep them perpetually in power.

The other group of voters wants their government to create jobs, by getting rid of regulations while simultaneously telling private companies how and where to base their operations, using the same taxation, subsidization, or brute force of law used by the previous administration. They busy themselves with flags waving, slogan shouting, and in all other ways confuse their blind nationalism with an actual informed ideology, while remaining blissfully unaware that blue collar manufacturing jobs were growing under the previous administration, despite the “evil globalist” policies. Their political class elites also happily promise all of the above, if only these voters keep them perpetually in power.

The devouring machine of government swerves aimlessly from left to right every few years, despoiling our country and its people, as the frothing partisans of each side take turns wielding the blunt instrument of government against their opponents in an endless cycle of score settling. Meanwhile, nothing changes.

“O beautiful for heroes proved
In liberating strife,
Who more than self their country loved
And mercy more than life!”
-Katharine Lee Bates, America the Beautiful-

Standing apart from the empty grandstanding by the other political factions, there is a third faction, slowly growing in numbers and, with those numbers, voice. We, too, wish to gain control of the great devouring machine gorged on the grizzled blood of patriots and partisans alike. Our plan is simple: steer the evil machine right through the heart of Washington, D.C., stopping only when the Liberty killing machine crashes into the depths of the Atlantic Ocean where it belongs.

It is precisely because we wish to destroy their vile machine that the other political factions will stop at nothing to halt our new conservative movement. Without the government machine, the collectivist Left will no longer be able to enslave us all in chains of state imposed equality and bureaucratic red tape. Denied the government machine, the nationalist Left will no longer be able to enslave us all in chains of state imposed conformity and corporate duplicity. Without the government machine, Liberty will reign again.

Ours is a moral revolution, grounded in the conviction that We the People, not the government nor any other political institution, should adjudicate what is or is not moral amongst ourselves, and not to allow government to impose the moral and philosophical values of a few upon the many. That, fellow patriots, is all that matters.

Liberty is For The Win!

We just checked, and it turns out that fighting for Liberty isn’t free, because it requires time and energy to research, prepare, and propagate this message for you. Please drop just a dollar a month into the proverbial tip jar and become a Patriot Patron. Of course, don’t forget to like, subscribe, and share. Keep this fight for Liberty going! – @LibertyIsFTW

Rediscovering Capitalism

As long as there are those that believe the state has any claim to any portion of the wages, salaries, or properties of any individual, then we are not a capitalist society

A man wakes up at the first sign of dawn, as the first rays of sunlight lift the darkness filling his small home, barely large enough for his wife and three children. He and the eldest son put on their simple woven outer clothes, and head outside to tend the chickens while his wife sees to the younger children and starts a morning fire. Outside, the fields are covered in a creeping fog over the rows of wheat that fill the small field behind a low stone wall. As the first smoke curled from their small chimney, father and son walked back with a few eggs for the morning meal.

The rumble of approaching horses break the peace of the moment. The father hands his clutch of eggs carefully to his eldest, as he tells the boy to head inside and keep everyone out of sight. The father picks up an ax and begins chopping some wood as the riders come over a hill. The lightly armored fighting men bear the pennants of the new king and his freshly installed vassal lord and ride horses colorfully barded with the lord’s house colors. The father watches as the riders approach and rein in their horses in front of his home.

After the briefest of greetings, the lead rider informs the father that the new lord had laid claim to the man’s farm and its vicinity for his private hunting grounds. By the authority of the king, the father is ordered to remove himself, his wife, and his children and relocate to the hamlet north of the castle. The father, knuckles white on the shaft of the ax, bites back a protest and nods. The riders ride onward, leaving the father to stare at their backs in impotent rage and despair, his story joining the untold millions throughout the history of man’s tyranny over other men.

“In the former sense, a man’s land, or merchandize,
or money is called his property.”
-James Madison-

It was from within the chains of monarchism and mercantilism that capitalism was born, the truly revolutionary idea that the right to own property was not limited to the blooded elite, born into both political and financial power, but all people should have the right to be “secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects” (Fourth Amendment) and to better themselves to the limits of the productive use of their property, talents, and personal ambition.

Unfortunately for humanity, capitalism was not the only ideological reaction to centuries of the tyranny of blooded elite. It occurred to some that the “right of property” itself was the problem, not merely the bejeweled elite that lorded it over others, and thus collectivism, the absolute moral antithesis of capitalism, was born. At the root of this philosophical ideology is that no one should own anything, and that ownership of property necessarily required the exploitation of the labor of others.

These two competing ideologies took root in western societies, beginning centuries of political and economic struggle: capitalism, which elevated property rights of all to that of kings, and collectivism, which reduced property rights of all to that of peasants. It was capitalism that sparked the American Revolution and the broader western Capitalist Revolution that followed. Collectivism infected the eastern nations of Europe, finding its deepest roots in Russia.

The west, imperfectly embracing the blessings of universal property rights for all, bore the fruits of innovation and personal ambition as free people maximized the use of their labor and property to their fullest potential. The east, denying the property rights to anyone, fell to famine and death.

“There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to
pay for what he does not want merely because
you think it would be good for him.”
-Robert Heinlein-

However, even as central as capitalism has been to American culture, the political and economic dominance of western countries, and even what it means to be free, no principle of Conservatism has been so violated by both major parties for the better part of the last 100 years. The Founding Fathers, who fought a war against arguably the most powerful European power of their day over taxes amounting to a few pennies on trivial items, would scarcely recognize the political and economic servitude that their posterity has subjected themselves to in America.

Even self-professed “conservatives” vehemently defend the seizure of property through confiscatory taxation to pay for “needs of state“, as if tax revenue cannot be raised in any way other than shaking down private citizens of their hard earned wages. Today, Americans hand over their property in amounts that even King George III would have found unconscionable. When individuals no longer enjoy absolute dominion to their own property, can we really claim to be a capitalist society anymore?

Too many Americans have abandoned the very principles of ownership that the American militiamen fought and died defending. The American public has ceded absolute political and economic power back to our governments, and, while the economy remains at least superficially capitalistic, there’s no denying that collectivism has saturated American politics. Sadly, even those who think they oppose collectivism are, push come to shove, functionally collectivists who clearly don’t understand either capitalism or collectivism.

“The moment the idea is admitted into society, that
property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and
that there is not a force of law and public justice to
protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence.”
-John Adams-

As long as there are those that believe the state has any claim to any portion of the wages, salaries, or properties of any individual, then we are not a capitalist society. As long as the wages, salaries, or properties of individuals can be confiscated by the government “for the good of the collective“, then we live in a collectivist society. For those of us that are true capitalists, believing, without reservation, in the sacredness of private ownership, we have a duty to restore that which has been lost and to conserve the revolutionary idea of real freedom of which capitalism is a fundamental and necessary condition.

How can an individual consider himself or herself a Conservative if they do not strive to conserve every right and principle of the Founding, of which, property, as much as life and liberty, is absolutely necessary? Clearly, they cannot.

For more information, read The Liberty Tax: Defanging the Serpent.

Liberty is For The Win!

We just checked, and it turns out that fighting for Liberty isn’t free, because it requires time and energy to research, prepare, and propagate this message for you. Please drop just a dollar a month into the proverbial tip jar and become a Patriot Patron. Of course, don’t forget to like, subscribe, and share. Keep this fight for Liberty going! – @LibertyIsFTW