Utopia is not an option

War is never good for anyone. It can be necessary for self-defense, but as Sherman said, it’s “all destruction,” and leaves nothing but death and ruin behind it. This was Europe’s condition after WWII. The allies won, but few had been able to continue to plant food and/or produce other-than war goods for years. Although only part of the USSR was considered to be part of Europe, the USSR also had been devastated by the war.

So this agricultural expert and politician named Lysenko came up with this terrific idea. “Don’t wait until the snow melts, sow the flax seed on the snow,” he said. The theory was that the flax would use the water in the snow to germinate. The seeds would somehow find root under the snow, and the USSR could get a crop out more quickly than nature usually allows.

Actually, this became government policy. Farmers and people who lived on the land and worked every day of their lives by farming, thought it was a bad idea. But Lysenko knew better, he said, and beside, he was part of the government, so the farmers had to do what he “suggested.” They sowed the flax on the snow.

The flax seed became sodden and bloated as the snow melted, and it all rotted. The end result was that not only did the USSR lose the crop that year, but also for many years to come because they’d wasted their seed.

This is one of the saddest lessons of recent history and one that not a lot of people know about. It doesn’t fit into their utopian agenda so they don’t talk about it.

It’s kind of like the US’s Social Security program. Social Security is a Ponzi scheme. It doesn’t generate any profits or revenues. It relies entirely on seed money “donated” by taxpayers. The theory behind it is that the “next generation” will always be larger than the number of retirees who are collecting Social Security benefits, so the amount of money paid into the system will always exceed the amount of money paid out.

The Boomer generation screwed this all up by barely replacing themselves population-wise. The Boomers are living longer than any preceding generation. The Boomers also expect more, in terms of income and services. After all, they’ve paid into the system all of their working lives. (Think how much better off we’d all be if they’d been able to invest all that money into a profit-making enterprise – if only their own personal profit-making enterprise.)

So about 1997 or 1998, even Congress couldn’t pretend that Social Security could continue to function. Up until then, the funds for Social Security had been kept in an account separate from the general funds the government collects through income tax and so on. Congress fixed the Social Security problem by tearing down the barrier. They said, basically, “Don’t worry, we’ll pay for Social Security out of general funds if we have to.” This was -- and still is – hailed as the wondrous “rescue” of the Social Security.

If a corporation does this, it’s called “looting the pension fund” and the company would face federal prosecution.

But I digress. Obama made a speech today to the impressionable and apparently not very well educated students at some university. He’s just telling the same ol’ story – “We can spend our way out of this economic disaster, and by socializing medicine, making college available ‘free’ to everyone, and by raising energy costs by orders of magnitude through cap-and-trade, we will lay the foundation for a better future.” This isn’t a direct quote, but a pretty accurate assessment of his remarks.

He keeps insisting that we can have a free and prosperous society built on socialist underpinnings. His “new foundation” consists of government control of key sectors of the US economy. Not necessarily government ownership, but tight government control.

He’s not seeing 1 + 1 = 2. Centralized government control plus heavy-handed regulation does not amount to the preservation of liberty and prosperity. Government control means transferring the decision-making capability of citizens to the government. The government can’t possibly decide case-by-case what you and I and each of our neighbors wants and needs, and what we are capable of doing and getting. The government can only pass one-size-fits-all laws and regulations that put us all in a strait jacket, a sort of dictatorial tyranny of democracy.

The Founding Fathers established a republic – not a democracy – exactly to prevent this result. The USA employs democratic “majority rule” dynamics for legislation, but also is supposed to ensure the individual liberty of every citizen. And these individual rights are more important than the will of the majority. This government was founded to protect individual rights, not to implement majority rule.

Look around, Mr. President. Look at the socialist democracies and the communist states. Most of them are stagnant, allowing only so much growth – through capitalist enclaves and government-approved enterprises – to fund the socialist/communist social programs. The citizens have little incentive to achieve, and it becomes too painful to even to dream about achieving anything. They live with a certain sense of futility, purposelessness, and a biting cynicism. In place of individual rights, they have the assurance of a minimal level of health care, the assurance of subsistence in old age, and educational systems that produce only well-indoctrinated “good soldiers” too intimidated to think freely and creatively.

This is where you’re taking us, not to some kind of heaven on earth. Open your eyes. Look at reality. Utopia is not an option.