The View From 1776

Liberal-progressives, giving them the benefit of doubt, are motivated by sincere faith that their secular materialist religion can transform human nature and perfect political society.  To force everyone into equality of income and station, liberal-progressives employ mainly heavy taxation and strangling regulation.  When voters inevitably resist, stronger measures must be brought to bear (for example, making it a crime not to buy Obamacare’s nationalized health insurance).

Liberal-progressivism, communism, National Socialism, and Fascism all are manifestations of the same underlying secular religion that rejects faith in our Creator God and substitutes worship of the political state (which amounts to liberal-progressive self-worship).  Dependents on the welfare state are obviously more easily herded by the collectivized political state, as the German Empire’s Chancellor Otto von Bismarck observed when he created the world’s first welfare state in the 1880s. 

President Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi are firmly persuaded that nationalizing health care is an essential component of Franklin Roosevelt’s so-called Second Bill of Rights, which substituted “security” in the arms of Big Brother for freedom from arbitrary government power limned in the original Bill of Rights.  Liberal-progressives equate individualistic self-reliance with greed.  Liberal-progressives, confident that they alone know what is best for society, aim to bring the masses under as nearly complete regulation of their everyday lives as possible.

Our present-day welfare-state servility differs only in degree, not in substance, from government under Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and Pol Pot.  Liberal-progressives, looking down from their academic ivory towers, express their plans in vast computer models covering entire industries at one shot, abstractions entangled in 2,000± pages of incomprehensible legislation, implemented through tens of thousands of regulations promulgated by hundreds of new bureaus.  That separation from reality affecting individual people, cramming everyone into one-size-fits-all regulatory boxes, too easily becomes the cold-heartedness of Stalin, who allegedly said, “One death is a tragedy.  A million deaths is just a statistic.”

Guy Sorman, on the City Journal website, reminds us of the hideous results stemming from this mode of thinking.

Communism’s Nuremberg
The crimes of the Khmer Rouge are inextricable from Marxist/Leninist ideology.

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The true explanation, the meaning of the crime, can be found in the declarations of the Khmer Rouge themselves: just as Hitler described his crimes in advance, Pol Pot (who died in 1998) had explained early on that he would destroy his people, so as to create a new one. Pol Pot called himself a Communist; he became one in the 1960s as a student in Paris, then a cradle of Marxism. Since Pol Pot and leaders of the regime that he forced on his people referred to themselves as Communists—and in no way claimed to be heirs of some Cambodian dynasty—we must acknowledge that they were, in fact, Communists.

What the Khmer Rouge brought to Cambodia was in fact real Communism. There was no radical distinction, either conceptually or concretely, between the rule of the Khmer Rouge and that of Stalinism, Maoism, Castroism, or the North Korean regime. All Communist regimes follow strangely similar trajectories, barely colored by local traditions. In every case, these regimes seek to make a blank slate of the past and to forge a new humanity. In every case, the “rich,” intellectuals, and skeptics wind up exterminated.

Liberal-progressive-socialism is a form of slavery, or more accurately, a sort of neo-feudalism in which the individual has no rights independent of the figurative “piece of ground” to which the political state has assigned him.

Assuredly, that is not what motivated members of the Continental Congress in 1776, nor of the Constitutional Convention in 1787. 

President Roosevelt proudly proclaimed his abandonment of our nation’s founding ethos in his January 1944 annual message to Congress.
 

The one supreme objective for the future…can be summed up in one word: Security.…We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all…Among these are: the right to a useful and remunerative job…The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation.…The right of every family to a decent home; The right to adequate medical care…The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment; The right to a good education.  All these rights spell security.

Security, however, amounts to selling one’s soul to the Devil for materialistic gain.

Hilaire Belloc described it in his 1912 book, The Servile State. He noted that, while the just-beginning socialist state in Great Britain was doing nice things for workers, it was at the price of their liberty to decide whether to work, when to work, or where to work.  Recipients of unemployment benefits, for example, had to report to employment offices and take whatever jobs were offered to them, or face punishment. 

Gerald J. Russello reviews The Servile Mind: How Democracy Erodes the Moral Life, by Kenneth Minogue, a book which, almost a century later, elaborates Belloc’s thesis.

Real Social Justice

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Social justice [as envisioned by Luigi Taparelli D’Azeglio, an Italian Jesuit scholar in the 19th century] entailed a social order in which government doesn’t overrun or crowd out institutions of civil society such as family, church and local organizations. Rather, they are respected, protected, and allowed to flourish.

Today, well-meaning policy makers and activists often do just the opposite as they try to overcome social challenges. Rather than viewing society as a network of smaller associations and communities, they mistakenly equate society with the state, centering its identity upon civic government.

As a result, these policy makers and activists conceive justice in terms of how much government directly addresses the needs of individuals. They too often bypass the web of intermediary institutions or deem those institutions irrelevant—or detrimental—in addressing and solving large social problems.

Take poverty, for example. Today, many of those who pursue “social justice” for the poor simply call for more government spending on welfare programs. Yet federal welfare programs continue to discourage marriage and work—the two most important factors for escaping poverty, as much research shows.

An editorial from the November 26, 2010, Wall Street Journal:

Harbinger in Hamtramck
The bankruptcy lesson from a Detroit suburb.

More bad news out of Michigan: Facing a $3 million deficit on its $18 million budget, the Detroit suburb of Hamtramck is seeking permission to file bankruptcy. Other towns may not be far behind.

Hamtramck suffers from high unemployment and falling income, but its budget problems go deeper than the recession. The town began running million-dollar deficits 10 years ago due to union contracts that would make Greeks blush. City workers were entitled to annual wage increases at four times the inflation rate and eight paid weeks of vacation each year. That’s in addition to 15 paid sick days, three paid emergency leave days, three paid personal days and one paid birthday.

In 2000 the state appointed an Emergency Financial Manager who in five years managed to balance the budget by cutting the city work force, privatizing services and selling bonds. He got the unions to renegotiate some benefits by promising retirement service credits and promotions, but that set the city up for future pension woes.

Fast forward and the city again teeters toward bankruptcy. Workers still receive five weeks paid vacation and their health plans have no co-pays or deductibles. City health costs have risen nearly 40% this year and are expected to shoot up another 40% next year. Pension costs have climbed 36% in a year.

City manager Bill Cooper says that barring a favorable legal ruling in a dispute with Detroit, the town will run out of money by February. While the city has cut non-union staff and payroll, Mr. Cooper says the only recourse now is to prune public employee compensation.

The city has asked its unions for concessions, to no avail. So Mr. Cooper has now asked the state for permission to declare bankruptcy—the only way the city can force the unions to renegotiate their contracts. Michigan has never allowed a city to declare bankruptcy, and soon-to-depart Democratic Governor Jennifer Granholm isn’t eager to oppose her union supporters.

Instead the state has offered another Emergency Financial Manager and several loan and bond options. The city already owes $600,000 a year in bond payments from its last rescue and can’t afford more debt. The state, which is running a $1.4 billion deficit, also can’t afford to bail out Hamtramck and other municipalities that will soon come knocking. There are 68 municipalities on the state’s fiscal watch list, and 38 have higher stress scores than Hamtramck.

Municipalities nationwide are running a $574 billion unfunded pension liability, on top of $3 trillion in state unfunded liability. Philadelphia’s pension fund is set to run dry in 2015 and Boston’s in 2019. Chicago’s fund will be broke by 2019, when over half of the city’s revenue will be dedicated to pensions.

While many cities blame their deficits on the recession, their insolvency is the natural result of politically dominant public unions. By allowing workers to collectively bargain, states and cities have ceded control of the public purse to workers whose main interest is enlarging government. Hamtramck is a harbinger of bankruptcies to come, and a case study in why politicians from FDR to Fiorello LaGuardia opposed the creation of government employee unions.