“The Road From Serfdom”

With elements of the Left in control of the U.S. government in a manner not seen in a couple of generations, if ever, discredited socialist policies of central planning and government intrusion into, and absorption of previously private economic endeavors have escaped from the padded lecture halls and professors’ offices at universities. Policies of government intervention into the economy spurred by amisguided attempt to combat the “evils” of capitalist profits inevitably lead to government intervention in other domains of individuals and groups. When people refuse to go along with such suffocating government intervention, there will be threats and, if necessary, draconian action taken against them for their deviation from the “true path.” A limited version of this is the provision in PelosiCare that requires people to buy health insurance or bay a tax equal to two-and-a-half percent of their adjusted gross income to the government. The failure to comply would result in a fine up to $250,000 and/or five years in federal prison.

A former resident of Czechoslovakia describes the economic privation in the socialist/communist workers’ paradises of Eastern Europe. What is worse still, as the writer so vividly portrays, is the destruction of the human spirit that such all-enveloping states engender. Much is written, correctly, about how government nanny-statism stifles human initiative. Anecdotal evidence and broader studies show that people defer looking for jobs until the unemployment benefits are about to run out. Extending unemployment benefits just pushes that day of reckoning and responsibility into the future. And that is a mild case.

As the line between the political and the non-political in all its aspects, but most crucially in the economic, is blurred, so is the line between the public and the private. Private groups cannot compete with the state, which subsidizes its own success through enforced financial exactions from the people and changes the rules in its favor until competing private associations disappear. An example would be favored labored unions affiliated politically with the government. Those private associations that cannot be made to disappear in this manner are dealt with more directly. The abolition of churches or young people’s groups such as the Boy Scouts will occur in the name of separation of church and state or of goals of non-discrimination against favored groups. In any case, the public option ends up to be the only option. The state more and more assumes the form of a penetrating fog, a Leviathan from which there is never escape for the increasingly isolated individual.

The result is a destruction initially of human initiative. To the extent it continues, it is focused not on innovation and improvement of people’s lives, but on getting ahead in the world of politics, which is the world of rationing of increasingly scarce goods. Survival in a political order that becomes more and more cut-throat is the only way to participate in the only thing that politics does, that is, create an order within which winners and losers for such scarce resources are picked. It hardly makes sense for most to strive in a game that very few will win and then not on the merits of their contribution to society’s or individuals’ welfare.

Over time, the destruction of initiative so enervates human existence that the participants become mere shadows or simulacrums of full humans, never able to attain human flourishing. Even if their basic needs are taken care of (a big “if”), they cannot look forward to an improvement in their lives or in the lives of their children. They do not control their future. Rather, their reward is the satisfaction that their neighbors’ misery equals their own. That fosters minding their neighbors’ affairs to assure that they are not getting an advantage. Such envy and paranoia is thin glue for social cohesion and, sooner or later, will lead to an explosion of discontent from those who have not yet been lost entirely to abject submission to the state.

If such an explosion comes, and the socialist nightmare finally ends, many of the same people will be too far destroyed psychologically to cope with the new reality. The demands of freedom with its foundation of free will and personal responsibility are simply too much. It is like asking someone who has been forcibly addicted all his life to a powerful narcotic suddenly to pick himself up and fend for himself cold turkey.

That describes the people of the old Soviet bloc countries, as those people lived then within a system that deprived them of material comfort and, worse, of their soul. It also describes many of them today, especially the elderly and those who grew up in the most oppressive regimes, such as in the Soviet Union itself. It is a ghastly system that today can only be defended by those, such as academics, who spend their lives in the realm of theory and ideology, and by other members of the “out-of-touch” elites, rather than in the domain of the ”lived life.” Given the influence of such academics on an American administration whose leaders have their roots in the academic and social world of the Left elite, one has cause for concern about the growth of government.

HT: Byron Stier