America's Socialist Past

by Ryan Siefert - June 28th, 2009 - American Thinker

There seems to be a need in American society to have to relearn the same hard lessons over and over again, regardless of whether the results were seen on the other side of the planet or suffered through by our own people.

We're living in a country that elected a President that believes in redistributing wealth. He's mentioned this himself, from the "Joe the Plumber" incident to his critique of the failures of the civil rights movement. Whether you call it Socialism, Communism, Marxism, or by its simpler name, theft, they are all part of the same economic system that destroys private property and puts everything in central control of the state.

The lesson we, and the rest of the world, [] fail to learn is how socially and economically destructive this sort of system is. The problem is, these lessons don't have to be learned from studying the histories of far off lands, for we have numerous examples of collectivist/socialist experiments here at home.

In Jamestown, there was no welfare state. Originally meant to be a trading colony, too many of the original inhabitants were adventurers or people seeking to gain wealth through the export of things they could find in the new world. Preoccupied with their own ideas of fortune, they found that in the wilderness of what was North America their habit of avoiding physical labor meant life or death. It was here that John Smith proclaimed, "He who will not work will not eat." It worked...sort of. While success still eluded the colony, the mortality rate did go from 60 percent to 15 percent.

This is an excellent article that explains some of the lessons of how America became a nation dedicated to free enterprise. The reality is that socialism was tried, again and again, and it failed, again and again. In the harsh world of the 17th and 18th centuries, where failure meant death, these lessons were learned well and taken to heart by the vast majority of Americans.

Life has become too easy. The illusion that socialism does not harm the nation has become blurred. The reality that freedom is better for all in the long run has been forgotten. The real irony in this is that it will be the young who so adore him who will pay the price for Obama's return to a tyranny that does not work.