Always looking for a government solution, President Obama has been on a fundraising speech binge the last few weeks, telling his supporters his latest plans to tax us more and regulate more of our lives. To Obama, the rich are the problem and the solution always includes a Marxist redistribution of wealth.
The rich are the problem unless they are Democrats, that is. Traveling to the Seattle area last week, he was at the home of former Costco CEO Jim Sinegal and Bruce Blume, the CEO of the Blume Co., a real estate development firm.
And while he portrays his advocacy of a centralized Marxist government as the path to the future, it’s important that we understand that Karl Marx was not some kind of prophet of future political systems. Marx’s philosophy was enmeshed in the feudal and slave economies of past centuries.
Not seeing the ability of a people to rule themselves, Marx mistakenly saw capitalism as a new system of centralized control. And as a new system of centralized control, it had to be opposed by a more powerful centralized power – a dictatorial communist party. This came to be known as dialectical materialism, in which diametrically opposed economic forces determined the political and social nature of a nation.
But even as Marx and his associate, Frederich Engels, were busy developing their theory that contradictory economic forces at work determined the political system, that theory was being refuted in America. A new political system of participatory government allowed individual initiative and creativity to be at work largely separated from the dictates of a centralized authority. And free enterprise capitalism, with its profit motive, had a self-regulating effect on economic forces that Adam Smith called “the invisible hand.”
As Dinesh D'Souza describes it in his new book, America: Imagine a World without Her, “capitalism channels greed in such a way that it is placed at the service of the wants and needs of others. Under capitalism, helping others is the best way of helping yourself. Capitalism provides a virtue to prosperity.”
Missing the boat on the true nature of an entrepreneurial economy, Marx, Engels, and Vladimir Lenin, saw it as "wage slavery.” They failed to understand the concept of being rewarded for helping an entrepreneur fulfill his vision. Businesses, competing for the best employees, seek to meet the needs of their employees with health insurance, savings plans, vacation time and other perks. In free market capitalism, sole proprietors, business partners, and corporate boards are responsible for the success or failure of their enterprise, not a centralized authority.
They also failed to see that laborers and employees were not in fixed positions, but through hard work and learning about the business in which they were employed, they could become managers, supervisors and even owners of the company they worked for, or they could launch off on their own, becoming entrepreneurs in a new business they had created.
As our nation’s Founding Fathers saw, in their wisdom, less government -- not more -- was the answer to oppression. They created a federal system of government that would have specific limitations on centralized government and give broad powers to the separate states and to the people in general. States would compete to meet the needs of the people and an informed electorate would monitor what their government was doing and replace those in power who were not serving the needs of the people.
Today, however, those desiring to rule over others or build their personal power base, have control of much of government at all levels. And while many people have been lured into dependency on a government run by such people, more and more people are fed up with increasingly centralized government ruling over our lives and want to do something to resist it. As we Americans wake up to the real power we have to bring about change, and get involved in our participatory system of government, we can get back to a government that serves the people rather than rules over us.
Rolf Yungclas is a recently retired newspaper editor from southwest Kansas who has been speaking out on the issues of the day in newspapers and online for over 15 years
