The Political Utopia

“Tyranny is the use of power to dehumanize the individual and delegitimize his nature. Political utopianism is tyranny disguised as a desirable workable and even paradisiacal governing ideology.” So says Mark Levin in his book, Ameritopia. If you stop and think about it, he’s right. Look throughout history and see what tyrannical dominions did, how they treated their subjects. Kings and queens the world over have thought of their subjects as possessions to be used as they saw fit, not as human beings with rights.

Political utopianism, the ideology that the far-left radicals are pursuing, is just that. They are espousing the virtues of equality of everything from economics to so-called basic human rights. When everything, and everyone, is equal, there is no exceptionalism, there is no individualism. The worst-case scenario is there is no freedom; of thought, belief, speech, press, self-preservation or protection. It is tyranny when the government controls everything so that all are equal; except the government, which is privileged because they are the ones giving to the people.

It has been said many times by many people that if you do not study, and understand history, it will repeat itself. It is obvious that the ones promoting equality for all, basically totalitarianism, have not read a single line of history. It has been well documented over the centuries that such societies do not endure the test of time. Karl Marx’s theory of ‘From each according to his ability to each according to his need’ (equality for all) is unsustainable as those that are working the hardest soon realize that it doesn’t pay them to work that hard; especially when those that don’t work receive their support with no effort.

Margaret Thatcher stated it best, “The thing about socialism is, sooner or later you run out of other people’s money.” Equality for all is just that – the government cannot give anyone anything until it takes from someone else. As Thatcher said, sooner or later that flow of money will disappear because those that the government is taking it from will either 1) leave or 2) become one of the recipients of government handouts. When everyone is on the handout bandwagon there will be no one to pull it.

The far-left are saying they only want to tax the top one percent; the wealthiest. That sounds really good to someone who is in the bottom one percent, or even the bottom ten percent. After all, why should those people that don’t work have all that money while the working man is starving? Throw in the statistics that the bottom ten percent are normally minorities and then you have racial divide on top of class division. What is the far-left’s answer to that question: take the top one percent’s money from them and redistribute it to the bottom percentile through government handouts. The top one percent didn’t get there by being stupid with their time, effort, or money. They will not give it up. If need be, they will take their money and leave the country. When that happens then the taxation falls to the next level down, then the next, and the next. Sooner or later there will be no one left to tax.

The state of Illinois came up with a grand scheme to keep its biggest taxpayers from leaving. That state instituted a tax on anyone leaving the state. Tyranny comes to mind. How can a government demand that a person stay within its’ boundaries or punish whoever wants to leave unless that government is tyrannical? If the ones paying the bills aren’t there to pay them, then that utopia is jeopardized. Thus, Mark Levin was correct in his assumption that political utopianism is tyranny.

How did Hitler win over the hearts and minds of the millions of people in Germany and Austria? He did it through promises of equality and prosperity for all. He propagandized the media of the day. He then turned his utopia into the Nazi regime it became. It took the world to defeat him. He had his loyal followers in the Nazi Party that had everything he promised. What the rest of his people had was poverty, strife, and terror. You either followed him totally or you were exterminated along with the rest of his enemies. He ruled with an iron fist as all totalitarian rules have done. What happened to the utopia he promised? He couldn’t deliver it as he well knew from the beginning. Utopia cannot exist alongside human nature.

Equality cannot ever be achieved. Ever. Not everyone is equal because not everyone has the motivation or ability to be equal to everyone else. Worker’s rights, immigrant’s rights, gay rights, black’s rights, transgender’s rights, the list goes on and one and is never-ending. Therefore, not everyone can be equal. As soon as one group is equal to everyone else, another group emerges demanding equality. This is not to say that everyone should not have equal rights under the law.

Everyone should have the ability to be housed, in a home they can afford; everyone should be able to feed themselves; everyone should be able to have healthcare available to them. Not everyone has the inalienable right to have these things given to them at the expense of the rest of the people. Not everyone is willing to put in the time and effort to afford what the next person has. Some can afford a huge, multi-million-dollar mansion while others can barely afford a two-room apartment. It is the effort put in that makes the difference. Equality, therefore, is equality in misery.

Dr. Ben Carson, the nation’s leading neurosurgeon now HUD secretary, grew up in poverty. Yes, he took advantage of government assistance to eat, be housed, go to school. The difference between Dr. Carson and the average poor person, of any color, is Dr. Carson had the motivation to get out of poverty and become successful. As Bill Gates once said, “If you are born poor, it isn’t your fault. If you die poor, it is.” In the far-left’s vision of Utopia, there can be no success for the individual because individualism is not allowed.

Liberty and equality cannot coexist. The Founding Fathers knew this. They did not create a government that restricted individualism and individual exceptionalism. It was just that individualism that helped create this great nation. It took innovators and free thinkers dedicated to a land of opportunity and freedom to go against the mightiest army and navy in the world. It was that need for freedom and liberty that drove the colonists to fight against King George and the mighty British military. That need was for the common good but brought about by the individuals with the passion for freedom to achieve those freedoms and liberties.

In the last 240 plus years this nation has created the world’s most remarkable things. We have been the leaders in innovation, manufacturing, and technology. We are not a perfect nation by any means because humanity is imperfect. This is another reason utopia will not ever succeed: man’s imperfection. Utopia tries to make the imperfect perfect. Without that perfection, it does not work. Equality demands perfection from all; perfect thought, perfect behavior, perfect obedience to government. Man is not perfect and never will be. God instilled in us free will and that free will demands expression. Without the motivation to succeed, to prosper, we might not have the electric light, automobiles, telephone or cell phone, computers, etc. It took unequal people to achieve this.

Right now, in Hong Kong, there are people protesting the tyrannical dominion of communist China. China is a working model of equality. Everyone is equal to everyone else. Everyone thinks the same, behaves the same, suffers the same; except in Hong Kong. The British had control of Hong Kong for years and those people knew what freedom and liberty were. That is their Utopia and they are fighting to keep it. They do not want to go back under the iron-fisted rule of a tyrannical central government. Hong Kong is the antithesis of Beijing. There is prosperity, free speech, free will, and exceptionalism in everything you see on that tiny island. There is poverty, suffering, and oppression in mainland China. A stark difference between the totalitarianism of an equalized government and a free, liberty-based society.

Barack Obama stated the utopian agenda so eloquently when he said that the individual did not create anything, it took the whole country. That is equality. It destroys the individual’s claim to creativity. Did Mr. Obama start the drive to political utopianism? No. This drive to socialistic tyranny started decades ago when the American people, in their complacency, started giving up their rights and freedoms to government regulation and assistance.

The best way to describe the advent of political utopianism is, as stated by Mark Levin in Ameritopia, “It usually takes the form of material ‘rights’ delivered to the individual by the state. Consequently, equality and liberty are both subjects of utopian demagoguery and manipulation. Liberty is encouraged if its end is equality. Liberty, by itself, is not.

“Equality is also disguised as or confused with people’s sovereignty – that is, the conflagration of ‘the people’s will’ with egalitarian campaigns, such as ‘social justice,’ ‘environmental justice,’ ‘immigrant rights.’ ‘workers’ rights,’ etc.”

Other ways that our liberties are being restricted is through the misconceptions of ‘child safety,’ ‘security,’ ‘health issues,’ ‘government assistance,’ etc. With the advent of the social welfare system came the start of political utopianism; the start of liberty’s downfall. When the people started depending on the government, which depends on taxes paid to it from the people, the people started giving up their rights and conforming to the social utopia envisioned by the far left. Was the left as radical in the 1920’s, 30’s, even up to the 1990’s as they are now in the 2010s? Not outwardly.

The left has slowly but surely been indoctrinating the country into their utopian vision. That was the only way to achieve their goal. Once the ideology was out in the open during the Obama era, it was no longer necessary to be discreet about their ultimate end. The left now has at least one full generation indoctrinated into the utopian ideology as can be seen with the calls for socialism by many young people and the celebration of openly socialist politicians.

As I stated earlier, this did not start in the recent past. In 1887, Congress created the Interstate Commerce Commission. This was the start, the embryo, of our socialist society. In 2016, Congress passed 2,966 pages of laws and other federal agencies churned out 97,110 pages of new regulations. Even President Calvin Coolidge was concerned about the power growth in government. “This is not the government which was put into form by Washington and Hamilton and popularized by Jefferson. Some of the stabilizing safeguards which they had provided have been weakened. (The Conservative Sensibility, George F. Will, 2019)

Gary Lawson described one small part of the monstrosity that had developed in our government with his description of the Federal Trade Commission:

“The Commission promulgates substantive rules of conduct. The Commission then considers whether to authorize investigations into whether the Commission’s rules have been violated. If the Commission authorizes an investigation, the investigation is conducted by the Commission, which reports its findings to the Commission. If the Commission thinks that the Commission’s findings warrant an enforcement action, the Commission issues a complaint. The Commission’s complaint that a Commission rule has been violated is then prosecuted by the Commission and adjudicated by the Commission. The Commission adjudication can either take place before the full Commission or before a semi-autonomous Commission administrative law judge. If the Commission chooses to adjudicate before an administrative law judge rather than before the Commission and the decision is adverse to the Commission, the Commission can appeal to the Commission. (Conservative Sensibilities, George F. Will, 2019)

What Mr. Lawson said, in a nutshell, is that the Federal Trade Commission has absolute power in conducting its’ business and if its’ rules are broken can investigate and adjudicate within its’ own authority with no oversight from anywhere else. This is just one example of government overreach and abuse of power. Since the start of the 20^th Century, the various government agencies have become so numerous and large that instead of being the exception to the rule, Philip Hamburger once said, they have ‘swallowed the rule.” Administrative law has “dwarfed statutory law and has become the federal government’s pervasive mode of dealing with the public.” Federal agencies’ regulation filled 18,000 pages of the Code of Federal Regulations in 1938 and 175,000 by 2014. (Conservative Sensibility, George F. Will, 2019)

This is exactly what the Founding Fathers feared most; a tyrannical government that was so large as to be unstoppable in its’ thirst for power over the people. The power that is not enumerated in the Constitution is left to the several states and the people of the country. What the federal government has done is overreach those boundaries a little at a time until it has gotten to the point where the people cannot live without it. With each new agency, each new department, there are more and more regulations and restrictions on the people and more and more power to the federal government. The political utopianism has been in the making for well over a century.

Before I could graduate high school in 1978, I was required to take a course called Government. This course taught the way government should be run, what government was, what powers the government had. Sadly, there was no comparison to what the government was to what the founders intended. I was not taught the Constitution and what it said about separation of power, enumerated powers, responsibilities of each branch, etc. I was taught the Preamble and the Bill of Rights. The sad thing is that my children were not taught these things. I taught them what the Constitution was and what rights and privileges we, the people, have.

The government-run schools don’t want the people to know how the founders intended the government to be restricted. They don’t want the people to know what rights they have or what power they have over the government. This is why young people today are demanding a more and more socialist society, equality for all, the political utopia. What these young people aren’t taught is that Marxism, Stalinism, socialism, and equality for all are all terms for tyranny, suffering, and oppression for all.

American exceptionalism is a very unique thing. The founders created a never-before-heard of style of governance of, for, and by the people. That, in and of itself, is unique. No other country in the world had ever been so governed and no other country in the world has ever done it since. There are democratic countries other than the United States; the United Kingdom is now democratically run by a parliament for example, but the monarchy remains. It is our exceptionalism that has made this country the greatest power in the world. What took Rome, Greece, and Britain hundreds, or thousands of years to achieve, the United States did in a little over a century; we became a world power that others sought out for help in crises. Today, it is the United States that polices and subsidizes the world. It is our military might that protects weaker countries. Even the once greatest military in the world, the British, come to us for help. The left’s vision of a political utopia would destroy that.

Equality for all is equality for none. Socialized medicine is not exceptional healthcare for all. It is healthcare only for those that keep producing for years; whether or not the sick had paid into the system. It doesn’t matter if a 70-year-old person had paid into the system their entire life, if they needed a major medical procedure and there was a 16-year-old patient, that had not paid in a penny, that needed a similar procedure the 16-year-old would receive care and the 70-year-old would not. Why? Simply because the younger patient has years of work ahead of him/her and the 70-year-old does not. Yet, socialized medicine is being called Medicare-For-All.

No country in the world has ever made socialism or communism work for the benefit of the people. The left keeps espousing the benefits of the Scandinavian countries and their socialist societies. What the left doesn’t say is that those countries are taxed so high that private ownership is practically unheard of and that most of them are on the verge of bankruptcy. Is that what you want for our country?