The political slogan “Forward” served Barack Obama well during
this year’s election campaign. It said that he was for going
forward, while Republicans were for “going back to the failed
policies that got us into this mess in the first place.”
It was great political rhetoric and great political theater.
Moreover, the Republicans did virtually nothing to challenge its
shaky assumptions with a few hard facts that could have made those
assumptions collapse like a house of cards.
More is involved than this year’s political battles. The word
“forward” has been a political battle cry on the left for more than
a century. It has been almost as widely used as the left’s other
favorite word, “equality,” which goes back more than two
centuries.
The seductive notion of economic equality has appealed to many
people. The pilgrims started out with the idea of equal sharing.
The colony of Georgia began with very similar ideas. In the
Midwest, Britain’s Robert Owen — who coined the term “socialism”
— set up colonies based on communal living and economic
equality.
What these idealistic experiments all had in common was that
they failed.
They learned the hard way that people would not do as much for
the common good as they would do for their own good. The pilgrims
nearly starved learning that lesson. But they learned it. Land that
had been common property was turned into private property, which
produced a lot more food.
Similar experiments were tried on a larger scale in other
countries around the world. In the biggest of these experiments —
the Soviet Union under Stalin and Communist China under Mao —
people literally starved to death by the millions.
In the Soviet Union, at least 6 million people starved to death
in the 1930s, in a country with some of the most fertile land on
the continent of Europe, a country that had once been a major
exporter of food. In China, tens of millions of people starved to
death under Mao.
Despite what the left seems to believe, private property rights
do not exist simply for the sake of people who own property.
Americans who do not own a single acre of land have abundant food
available because land is still private property in the United
States, even though the left is doing its best to restrict property
rights in both the countrysides and in the cities.
The other big feature of the egalitarian left is promotion of a
huge inequality of power, while deploring economic inequality.
It is no coincidence that those who are going ballistic over the
economic inequality between the top one or two percent and the rest
of us are promoting a far more dangerous concentration of political
power in Washington — where far less than one percent of the
population increasingly tell 300 million Americans what they can
and cannot do, on everything from their light bulbs and toilets to
their medical care.
This movement in the direction of central planning, under the
name of “forward,” is in fact going back to a system that has
failed in countries around the world — under both democratic and
dictatorial governments and among peoples of virtually every race,
color, creed, and nationality.
It is one thing when conservative leaders like Ronald Reagan in
America and Margaret Thatcher in Britain declared central planning
a failure. But what really puts the nails in the coffin is that,
before the end of the 20th century, both socialist and communist
governments around the world began abandoning central planning.
India and China are the biggest examples. In both countries,
cutbacks on government control of the economy were followed by
dramatically increased economic growth rates, lifting millions of
people out of poverty in both countries.
The ultimate irony is that the most recent international survey
of free markets found the world’s freest market to be in Hong Kong
— in a country still ruled by communists! But the Chinese
communists have at least learned, the hard way, a lesson that
Barack Obama seems oblivious to.
We are going “forward” to a repeatedly failed past, following a
charismatic leader, after a 20th century in which charismatic
leaders led countries into unprecedented catastrophes.
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