American labor unions are pushing candidates for the Democratic Party’s 2008 presidential nomination toward expansion of the welfare-state and massive inflation of the sort that the Great Society spawned.
After both World War I and World War II, the British Labour Party led England into its destructive liaison with socialism that destroyed British industry and reduced England to the “sick man of Europe.”
Harold Meyerson’s January 31, 2007, column in the Washington Post describes the behind-the-scenes power exerted by labor unions, especially the government employees unions. Their immediate goal is imposition of universal, socialized medicine, of the sort championed in 1993 by Hillary Clinton.
If labor unions succeed, two results are inevitable.
First is a resumption of the devastating inflation caused by President Johnson’s Great Society, the most recent push forward of socialism. Raising taxes to pay for socialized medicine will throw business into another recession, thereby reducing income tax revenues at the same time that Federal expenditures will be required to expand. Even if business later booms, the funding requirements for present Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid programs, before universal socialized medicine, dwarf the prospective tax revenues.
The only way to finance socialized medicine, in the final analysis, will be the Federal Reserve’s creating more money via bookkeeping entries. By definition, more money without an offsetting increase in production of goods and services is inflation. And it is always the working people who get wiped out by inflation.
The second result will be the sine qua non of socialism: further steps toward collective tyranny.
Anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, opposing Marxian collectivism in 1872, described what life was to be under socialism:
The government will not content itself with administering and governing the masses politically, as all governments do today. It will administer the masses economically, concentrating in the hands of the State the production and division of wealth, the cultivation of land…All that will demand the reign of scientific intelligence, the most aristocratic, despotic, arrogant, and elitist of all regimes. There will be a new class, a new hierarchy…the world will be divided into a minority ruling in the name of knowledge, and an immense ignorant majority. And then, woe unto the mass of ignorant ones! (quoted in David Horowitz’s, The Politics of Bad Faith).
Sir William Beveridge, one of the British Labour Party authors of socialized medicine and other welfare-state services after World War II, stated the necessity quite forthrightly.
…the State,” he wrote, “ in this field is not wholly master of events so long as it desires to preserve the freedom of individuals……the State cannot undertake the responsibility for full employment without full powers.
In other words, central planning necessary for imposition of socialism can not become effective without subordinating the rights of individuals to the goals of the planners.
Socialist Paul Ricoeur, writing in the American socialist journal Dissent, put it this way:
…the problem of political power in a socialist economy is not fundamentally different from the same problem in a capitalist economy;…political power in a socialist economy offers comparable or even greater possibilities of tyranny.…One must go still further and assert that the socialist state requires a more vigilant popular control than the bourgeois state. And this precisely because the socialist state is the more rational, extending design and planning to areas of human existence that previously had been left to chance or improvisation. Since the rationality of a state which plans to end class division is greater than that of its predecessors, its potential power and the opportunities offered to tyranny are also greater.
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