Awakening From The Collective Dream

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Thomas Sowell makes an interesting point about gun control laws, in the wake of the recent Supreme Court decision concerning the Second Amendment:

When you stop and think about it, there is no obvious reason why issues like gun control should be ideological issues in the first place. It is ultimately an empirical question whether allowing ordinary citizens to have firearms will increase or decrease the amount of violence.

He goes on to explain that if gun control had a proven track record of reducing violent crime, the American people could employ Constitutional mechanisms to modify or repeal the Second Amendment:

There is no point arguing, as many people do, that it is difficult to amend the Constitution. The fact that it doesn’t happen very often doesn’t mean that it is difficult. The people may not want it to happen, even if the intelligentsia are itching to change it.

When the people wanted it to happen, the Constitution was amended 4 times in 8 years, from 1913 through 1920.

There is no such public enthusiasm for gun control laws, because they obviously don’t work.  “Gun-free” cities like Chicago produce bumper crops of bullet-riddled corpses.  There is nothing confusing or mysterious about the failure of gun control to reduce violent crime.  For all its resources, the State is rarely able to prevent violent crime.  In a vast population justifiably concerned about its privacy, the prevention of violent crime is a duty for the armed citizen.  Accepting this simple truth does not denigrate the importance of the police, or the heroic service of police officers.  Every cop who ever worked a murder scene wishes he could have been there to stop it… and knows he probably won’t be there to stop the next murder.

Gun control is one of many old collectivist fantasies melting away in the harsh light of undeniable truth.  Another is the daydream of “alternative energy.”  Such technologies will certainly be developed in the long run, but they provide no viable alternative to fossil fuel consumption at the present time.  The economic repercussions of fabulously expensive, or tightly rationed, gasoline would be staggering.  The retail price of almost all goods would skyrocket, while industries dependent upon cheap and reliable transportation would wither.  Imagine the blow to employment that would be delivered by the end of affordable commuting in suburban areas.  The “alternative” to oil is not green jobs and clean energy, but unemployed people sitting in the dark.

The entire Western world is suffering a painful lesson about the fantasy of limitless government resources.  The pool of evil, faceless rich people who can be taxed to provide socialist benefits turns out to be quite limited indeed.  Absurd benefits promised to unionized employees are not a perpetual motion engine for State growth.  They’re a locomotive racing toward the brick wall of insolvency.  The ridiculous concept of static analysis lies in ruins, as it becomes painfully obvious to all but the most delusional true believers that rising tax rates and government spending do strangle economic growth over the long term.

The mythology of wise and compassionate government is drowning in a mixture of oil bubbling up from the Gulf of Mexico, and sleaze pouring out of Washington.  The government has many vital duties to perform, but as it grows in size, it becomes less interested in performing them.  Its own ambitions take priority over its responsibilities to a private sector it increasingly comes to view as an adversary… since the State must both demonize the private sector to conceal its own failures, and use compulsive force to extract resources from workers and businesses.  No one should harbor any further misconceptions about maintaining the transparency of the State as it swells in size.

All of collectivism’s dreams are crumbling to dust before the eyes of people who spent their whole lives clinging to them out of desperation, or arrogance.  The alternative to ambition and commerce is not “social justice,” but widespread poverty.  The absence of growth brings collapse, not sustainability.  The Constitutional rights of free people cannot exist alongside “positive rights” provided through redistribution.  Abandoning the security of our borders does not produce a melting pot of happy immigrants.  The government cannot repeal the laws of supply and demand.  The freedom to vote does not render all other freedoms inconsequential.  Prosperity for millions cannot be designed by a central committee. Social justice cannot be created by administering controlled viral doses of injustice.

Waking up from these dreams is not easy.  Every conservative must have the patience and humor of a good teacher.  I believe Big Government is fundamentally immoral, but as Dr. Sowell pointed out, the simple fact that it doesn’t work cannot be overstated.  The collectivist fantasy can end in a relatively controlled manner, with a widespread rediscovery of how freedom and prosperity are inextricably linked… or it can end with the bloody violence of Greece, as angry dependents strip the last measure of their unsustainable benefits from the hide of the middle class.  One way or the other, it is ending.  Twilight falls upon the empty dream of the twentieth century: to sanctify a brilliant elite through the sacred ritual of the vote, and be ruled wisely.

Cross-posted at www.doczero.org.

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