Progressives claim they are committed to moving society forward. But who gets to decide which way society should go? Which way is forward? Progressives seem to believe that the answer is self-evident, that there is one obvious path and all that's lacking is the political will to go there. This may provide an explanation for the strange fascination Progressives seem to have with dictators like Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro. Unimpeded by dissenting visions of progress, these totalitarians really get things done.

Contrary to Progressive rhetoric, there is no single way forward. Progress for one citizen may not be progress for another. Our founders created a country unlike any country that had ever existed before, where people could define “progress” for themselves and be free to pursue it (within the boundaries of the rule of law) unencumbered by coercive government. All would be free to pursue industry, or art, or charity or whatever else made them happy. There would be no single vision to which all would be forced to submit, except perhaps the vision of freedom itself, which would require everyone’s blood and sweat to defend.

Progressives reject this founding principle. They seek to collapse all of our many hopes and dreams into their singular, “enlightened” vision of the Common Good. They would rob each of us of the freedom to define and pursue our own notions of progress, by forcing all of us to bear the cost of enacting theirs.

The free market economic system consists of multitudes of citizens voluntarily engaging in productive activity that benefits everyone else. When just one person, responding to an opportunity for personal profit, decides to offer goods or services to the rest of us, we are all a little bit richer for it. This is a simple application of the economic law of supply and demand. When demand is held constant, an increase in supply puts downward pressure on price. When we pay less for something, we have more left over to save, spend or give away. If there was only one plumber in the country, no one would be able to afford his services. Three cheers for all the other plumbers!

The collectivist economic system consists of rulers directing citizens to produce only those things the rulers determine to be useful to society. In addition to direct coercion, the rulers use economic mechanisms, including the levying of high taxes on goods and services of which they don’t approve, and the redirecting of tax revenues to provide generous subsidies to those they do.

The differences between these two systems can be reduced to this: voluntary activity vs. involuntary, freedom vs. coercion.

At the heart of Marx's axiom, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" is the disconnection of the sustenance a man derives from society from the goods and services he contributes. This is one of Marxism's fatal flaws.

Rational people always do the least amount of work necessary in every situation. This is called efficiency. Doing otherwise is similar to deliberately purchasing the more expensive of two identical products. Since, under Marxism, work is disconnected from sustenance, men stop working… until someone shows up to enforce the from side of the axiom and points a loaded gun at them. At that moment, work is immediately reconnected to survival and the men reluctantly start working again.

And there you have the essence of the Soviet Union's economic system.

It would be one thing if Liberals simply wanted to expand the quality of benefits granted to the most needy in society - to expand the amount of comfort and relief granted to the most unfortunate. Depending on how you define "unfortunate," I would likely support such an effort. But this has not been their practice. What Liberals really seem to want is to expand the number of people whose sustenance is disconnected from their work. They want to expand the number of people who simply receive the basics of food, clothing, medicine, shelter and internet access, just for showing up at a government office to collect a voucher.

Unchecked, this continued expansion must eventually result in a majority of citizens deriving their sustenance, not as a result of their contribution to society, but for nothing else other than being alive. This seems to be the Liberal's unstated goal. For society to function, this disconnection, as was true for the Soviets, will eventually require loaded guns pointed at all of us.

One man's need cannot entitle him to another man's property.

If it can, society will suffer from a great epidemic of people in the Need Business, as there are few, if any, paying occupations that require less work than being needy.

There is NO VIRTUE in being generous with other people's money.

Social Justice, in as far as the term refers to something other than regular old Justice, is a moral pretext for inciting citizens to covet their neighbor's property.

Many Americans in the late 19th and early 20th century suffered from real poverty, which differed from today’s poverty in that it included large amounts of hunger and misery. Perhaps we should grant the progressives of that era some credit for seeking to bring real relief to real suffering. Perhaps we might even credit them with some success.

But today, the progressive moral ground of the last century is mostly gone. The poverty of today's America often includes large helpings of food and leisure, evidenced by the growing problem of obesity among the poor. But modern progressives continue to appeal to the misery of the poor, and society's obligation to relieve it, as grounds for suffocating the rest of us with ever-increasing government.

Why is this? Can't they see that prosperity has reached most of the citizens of this country? Don't they understand that much of the misery that remains is largely due to the side-effects of government itself? What accounts for their continued crusade to push government ever deeper into our private lives?

Here's a theory: perhaps a concern for the less-fortunate is really just a cover for psychological pathology. According to this theory, what many progressives of today really crave is not relief for the poor, but order. They are desperate to reduce the inherent chaos of the combined activity of three hundred million free people. There's just too much consuming and carbon dioxide belching going on for their liking. Perhaps a concern for the needy is nothing more than a morally convenient excuse to indulge a psychological disorder. Call it Progressive OCD.

Though not a Libertarian, I am a great admirer of the Austrian economists. They recognized the enormous power of individual liberty to unleash constructive human action and the converse power of oppressive government to restrain it.

There are 3 basic types of progressives.

1. Ordinary people who have been incited to covet their neighbor's property.

This is the Progressive political base. Properly harnessed, their discontent provides an enormous source of destructive political power.

2. Elites seeking relief from the personal guilt they feel for their own wealth and comfort.

While personally benefiting from Capitalism, they blame Capitalism and not themselves for society's "economic injustice". They obtain relief from guilt by helping to enable government to redistribute the nation's wealth. Since they pay in the process, they enjoy a sense of moral pride that their motive is pure and disinterested, though forcing others to sacrifice in order to gain relief from personal guilt seems patently selfish.

These are the politicians who acquire political power by peddling the collectivist utopian dream - at once appealing to the appetites of the base and the moral vanity of elites.

Perhaps there is a natural progression from free-market democracy, towards socialism, ending up in mercantilism, that free-market destroying, unholy alliance between "Big Business" and "Big Government."

Assuming that a democratic country starts out with a substantially free market, most citizens will enjoy increasing amounts of wealth as the system efficiently directs capital to the most productive and profitable uses. This benefits most everyone, but not equally. The most productive (and in some cases lucky) accumulate more wealth than the others, and this enables them to accumulate even more. The so called, "gap between rich and poor" inevitably increases.

At some point, certain politicians see an opportunity for power and begin to exploit the gap, claiming that it is an unjust effect of the free-market. These politicians promise to moderate the cruel and impersonal mechanisms of the free-market with their own wise planning, in order to distribute the nation's wealth more equitably. So, under the pretext of social justice, politicians begin to take control and re-jigger the economy so that their judgments (and power) replace the impersonal mechanisms of the free-market.

Here's where the plot thickens: On the way to The Worker's Paradise, things take another turn. In this new environment, those who have accumulated wealth now have an incentive to redirect significant resources away from productive uses, towards influencing the political process. The enormous stakes attract enormous amounts of talent and money. As a result, those with resources gain greater and greater influence over the politicians who now, under the pretext of social justice, have significant (and growing) control of the economy. This is Adam Smith's mercantilism.

At the time Adam Smith was writing, Marx was still a couple generations away. The real enemy of the free-market, Smith believed, was mercantilism. Welcome to USA circa 2009, perhaps?

Libertarians believe that government should have only a small role in a free market. They seem to think that, if government would just stay out of the way, prosperity would flourish spontaneously. However, freedom is not the natural state of man and free is not the natural state of the market. As Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal has pointed out, freedom and free markets are an achievement of civilization, requiring institutions that have resulted from centuries of acquired wisdom. If you handed racquets and balls to ancient nordic barbarians, it is unlikely the result would be tennis; it would probably look more like ice hockey.

Like any violent sport where raw human interests collide in the heat of competition, the free market requires a set of clear and consistent rules, enforced by strong and impartial referees. This is the active role of government, not to distort the market by picking winners and losers, but to protect the market from those who would seek political control over it for their own interests and the interests of their constituents.

No doubt, Libertarians are right that the current American government is far too big. But size isn't the main problem. Rather than acting as an impartial referee, our government (think congress) consistently throws the game in favor of those who pony up the most campaign cash.

[Note: this was originally written a number of years ago, but seems apropos once again.]

Washington DC - Today, in what many are calling a stroke of political genius, President Clinton and Al Gore announced a targeted repeal of gravity, the physical force that makes things heavy. Clinton said, “Its time the working people of America got a break from the often dangerous effects of gravity. It's time to put this killer in its place.”

The President assured Americans that the program would not repeal all of gravity because that would cause the earth to spin off into space. The president said, “This is a targeted repeal. It will be designed to help those who need it most, without disturbing places like Chicago, which has a special need for gravity due to its unusually high winds.”

Republicans responded with predictable skepticism and asked how the President could possibly propose to violate a fundamental law of nature. They have promised to block any such legislation.

In response, the President said, “Whenever I have proposed legislation that would help the working people of America, the opposition has come back with the same cynicism.” He went on to say, “Mr. Lott, Mr. Gingrich, tell Doris Glissmeyer of Butte Montana that you plan to block this”. Mrs. Glissmeyer, who was present at the press conference, recently lost her husband to gravity in a tragic fall off the face of a cliff. Al Gore later commented, “This is typical of the Republicans, they know that if things weigh less, Big Business won’t be able to charge as much.”

Polls show that 75% of Americans favor a targeted repeal of gravity. One person who was asked about the program said, “I think its wonderful how this administration has found innovative ways to reduce the burden on working Americans, it shows how much they really care about us.”

The bill would be submitted in the next session of Congress. If passed, the program would be phased in gradually over 4 years, starting in the most mountainous regions.

The Constitution grants to the Federal Government the power to regulate interstate commerce.

When we hear the word “regulate” most of us probably think of prohibitions and restraints. But, to the founders, the word regulate meant to “make regular” (think Metamucil). The purpose of this power was to guard the nation from interstate protectionism by allowing Congress to enact laws that would facilitate the free flow of capital and goods around the entire county.

In practice, Congress has too often used this enumerated power to accomplish the very opposite of what was intended. They have repeatedly used it as the legal pretext to invade and disrupt just about every nook and cranny of the economy. There is probably not a single thing in your eyesight right now that is not “regulated” in some way by Federal statute.

What was intended to create economic regularity, has resulted in economic constipation.

Wealth is not a zero sum game. That is, an increase in one person's wealth does not require a decrease in someone else's. When individuals engage in free trade, they each must profit or else one of them would refuse to trade. John Stossel of ABC news talks about the magical "thank you - thank you" moment, repeated millions of times a day in free economies. It happens, for instance, when a customer hands a Starbucks employee two dollars and receives a delicious cup of coffee in return. At that moment wealth is created, and those who engage in the trade both enjoy a profit.

Power, on the other hand, is a zero sum game. That is, an increase in one person's power requires a decrease in someone else's. This is also true of government power. The power to regulate the activities of citizens or to tax their wealth must come at a corresponding price to those citizens that are regulated or taxed. Individuals lose the freedom they once had to participate in those activities or to spend money they have earned the way they choose.

Ironically, Progressives and Liberals seem to have this exactly backwards.

They seem to believe that wealth is a zero sum game but that power is not. They believe that an increase in one person's wealth must require an unjust decrease in someone else's. So they work to bring about economic justice -- the coercive redistribution of wealth from "exploitive" producers to the needy. They believe that individuals are increasingly empowered through their connection with an increasingly powerful State. So they work to expand the power of government to reach in and to "bless" every aspect of human existence.

The propaganda success of Socialists in the West was one of the greatest scandals of the 20th century. For most of the century, Socialism was hard at work in the far corners of the earth producing vast amounts of poverty and human misery. Meanwhile, in the West, Socialists succeeded in discrediting their rival, Free-Market Capitalism, by characterizing it as a system that cultivates and leverages human greed.

Free-Market Capitalism is a system based on an individual's freedom to exchange goods and services with others and to keep any surplus wealth created in the process. It is a description of what people do when they are free. 

Socialism is a system based on an individual's obligation to share the wealth produced by his ingenuity and labor with the State. It is an ingenious system that enables one group to harness the power of government to control others and to confiscate their property.

It is usually difficult for those in Socialist countries to opt-out of the system. Some countries have even constructed fences to keep their citizens in. Capitalist countries, in contrast, have sometimes required fences to keep the citizens of other countries out. If people vote with their feet, then Socialism has a great tradition of disenfranchising its own.

The success of Socialist propaganda can be attributed, in part, to the clever application of a moral fallacy: that it is inherently evil for an individual to act according to his own personal interest. But all human motivation is based on personal interest. This is not moral weakness; it is logical necessity. A person's motivation is the very same thing as his interest.

This is not to discount the virtue of many instances of self-denial. Self-denial can be a manifestation of great virtue, but it is not a virtue in itself.   The term self-denial merely describes behavior; it does not explain it. The real virtue at the heart of any heroic act of self-denial is love, which involves one person's interest in the well-being and happiness of another.

The 18th century economist and philosopher, Adam Smith, noticed that free commerce between individuals promotes civil accord, because the system requires individuals to rely on the good-will of others. Since, in a truly free market, no one can be coerced to purchase goods or services from any particular person, all citizens are motivated to cultivate deep reservoirs of good-will with others. Each person has a very real and material interest in the happiness of others. Though not the same thing as love, this personal interest in the happiness of others motivates cheerful service. When people live in freedom, civility is a social and economic necessity.

Socialism, in stark contrast, promotes civil discord. Since the system is based on coercion, an individual has little use for his neighbor's good-will. Instead, the system motivates all to acquire as much raw power as possible, or, failing that, to purchase the favor of those who already have it. In the democratic, mob-rule form of Socialism, this power is often obtained through coalitions that band together to leverage the power of the State to control the lives of other citizens, confiscate their property, and to obtain special rights for themselves.

Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher played important roles in accelerating the collapse of the Soviet Union, but it is critical to understand that these great leaders and their policies did not destroy the Soviet Union. Socialism destroyed the Soviet Union and Socialism can destroy the United States of America.