The View From 1776

Guy Sorman’s City Journal essay deals primarily with the European Union.  But his assessment applies equally to the United States.

Our deficit spending and huge national debts, on both sides of the Atlantic, have their root cause in the secular religion of socialism.  From the days of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in mid-18th century, believers in socialism have operated on the utopian faith that, once income is taken from “the rich” and redistributed equally, there will automatically be more than enough goods and services to make everyone happy. 

In socialist theory, only the greed of rich capitalists, who take as profit what really belongs to the workers, stands in the way.  This utopian thesis underlies the tax-and-spend policies of the Democrat/Socialist Party, as well as the New York Times’s continual harping on the “income gap.”

Forewarning of Europe’s slide into the slough of economic despond became evident in early 19th socialism in France.  Alexis de Tocquevilles 1856 book, The Old Regime and the French Revolution, described the degeneration of individual morality in France after the Revolution.  The English and the Americans, he wrote, continued to value individual political liberties above all other constitutional benefits, while remaining devout Christian nations.  The French, in dour contrast, were indifferent to matters of state affecting the general welfare.  They were concerned with one thing only — socialistic equality of status.  Each person focused greedily upon what he demanded as his share of public largesse. 

Consequently, Tocqueville wrote, so long as their rulers paid public tribute to equality, the French endured a succession of socialistic constitutions and republics that could be described only as despotic. 

As in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, our miring in the slough of despond comes from our sins: abandoning Judeo-Christian personal moral responsibility and worshipping the secular gods of the socialistic welfare state.