“AMERICANS WARMING TO SOCIALISM OVER CAPITALISM, POLLS SHOW”, states a poll at FoxNews.com
Well of course they are.
Most Americans are not critical thinkers. They look to the pack or the herd. Either they haven’t been trained how to be critical, independent and objective thinkers, or they’re simply too lazy to learn. Or both.
As a result of no critical thinking, it doesn’t occur to people why America is a far, far better place to live materially — even if you’re in the poorest sector — than anywhere else on earth.
No country on earth has a crisis of immigration to fight over, other than America. Possible runners up include places like the U.K., France and Germany, countries struggling with the invasion of Islamic fundamentalists. But these countries have a lot of private ownership, although less than the United States. And the people flooding to countries with more private ownership are all coming from countries with NO private ownership and NO economic freedom.
Doesn’t that tell you something? Yes, to a critical thinker it’s obvious.
But like I said: Most Americans are not critical thinkers. That’s the basis for all the psychological and emotional disturbances we see. Social and political disturbances are merely the manifestation of personal disturbances in a growing number of individuals.
We are a nation in massive emotional crisis, and the willingness to consider socialism OVER capitalism — which means dictatorship over freedom — is a symptom of that emotional crisis.
It appears that more and more Americans are willing to take for granted that all the wealth and prosperity that America currently has will continue to exist under socialism. Under socialism, these noncritical thinkers assume, it will merely be more evenly and “fairly” distributed.
So under American socialism, we can expect to see a continued rise in the standard of living for all, continued growth economically, continuing improvement from one generation to the next in terms of both opportunity and technology. We can continue to have all that — all the prosperity and excitement of a free economy — and yet pay nothing for it. We could have had it all along. Who knew? Santa Claus always did exist.
Such a breathtaking error — on the level of true delusional psychopathology — can only happen if people mindlessly assume that wealth and prosperity have no cause. That no minds, no efforts, no risk-taking, no rational and accountable planning — all the things that go on in the PRIVATE sector, big and small businesses every single day — have anything to do with it.
The unspoken premise is that wealth, prosperity and innovation will happen if government simply mandates it — and makes it all free. Because that’s what socialism claims, and of course never delivers.
It’s incredibly stupid. But it’s the kind of error that only people living in a country with (1) almost no critical thinking whatsoever and (2) generations of always improving material well-being can be expected to make.
It’s the worst fear of our nation’s founders. They vainly hoped that education would somehow resolve that. Even men as wise as Thomas Jefferson thought a government-guaranteed education system would stave off the kind of ignorance that would lead to the collapse of critical thinking — and the resulting movement toward despotism and authoritarianism — we now see developing in the land of liberty.
But government has never been, and never will be, the source of the solution. Government is incapable of creating anything. The most we can hope for is for government to protect private property and individual rights. The solution for sustaining and enhancing life has to come from people themselves. At the end of the day, people either want and yearn for freedom, or they don’t. If they don’t yearn for it, they will let it go. They will rationalize that “there’s nothing wrong with a little socialism to make life easier” while taking it for granted that all the well-being we know from capitalism will melt away with the emergence of socialism. They don’t have the mindset to consider the contradiction, because it’s too much to think about. It’s better just to go with what feels right, and that’s the end of it.
Socialism and buckling down to tyranny are the easiest things in the world. Demanding and maintaining freedom is the hardest. Only a society filled with rational, independent and self-reliant individuals who are committed to these values — and not resentful of them — will do what it takes to remain free. It’s as simple as that.
In the past, America faced external enemies such as the British royalty, pro-slavery Southern feudalists, the Nazis, and the Communists. Today, the enemy is ourselves — the growing number of us embracing the concept of something for nothing. Unless more of us overcome the intellectual and mental inertia and delusional anxiety paralyzing so many people (particularly on the left), we’re not going to be free in another generation.
Nobody living right now in America (unless they’re immigrants) can begin to grasp what that will feel like.
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