Plenty of cults exist - every cult has its 'religious dogma', its idols, its 'prophets', its 'science', its 'proof' and its intolerant liturgy of demands. Cults everywhere: Corona, 'The Science' or Scientism, Islam, the State, the cult of Gender Fascism, Marxism, Darwin and Evolution, Globaloneywarming, Changing Climate, Abortion...
Tempus Fugit Memento Mori - Time Flies Remember Death
Few revolutions in history are truly revolutionary in the sense of a one-time cataclysmic change. What seems like a 'break' or a fissure from past practices, is usually the result of a long process of social, economic and quite importantly cultural change. The danger today is that the acceptance of socialism, of government and of the 'state' solutioning all ills – real and mostly imagined – has created 3 generations of voters, who in the majority, fervently reject most of the aspects of the European Enlightenment tradition. As Hayek knew, the expansion of the state, or any centralised power, leads ineluctably to slavery.
Revolutions are usually preceded by long periods of political-economic change and flux. The American, French, Russian and the English civil war were revolutions in the sense that as events, they changed the socio-economic parameters and influencing future generations – but they had decades and more of antecedents and causations. Hitler's revolution and the nazification of Germany was likewise an explosion of racist and supremacist evil premised on state management of the political-economy, which was in turn premised on a set of ideas with over 80 years of German and French intellectual, political and cultural support.
And so it goes with the socialisation of the United States.
With over 60 years of government interference resulting in an economic contraction of epic size, the cultural ethos and the 'zeitgeist' demand, wail, cry and beg for ever more government, and ever more statist management. Prophet Obamed represents the leading edge of this slow, but ferociously tenacious, establishment of US socialism.
Hayek quoting De Tocqueville predicted this steady drift – abetted by a change in popular culture – towards the knave status which is the logical outcome of socialist or communal organisation.
“Democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom, socialism restricts it. Democracy attaches all possible value to each man; socialism makes each man a mere agent, a mere number. Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.”
Socialism ineluctably leads to slavery. Why? Because state control inevitably demands a loss of freedom – freedom in any and every sense be it in private property, speech, organisation, beliefs or in leisure. As Hayek confirms, “In this sense socialism means the abolition of private enterprise, of private ownership of the means of production, and the creation of a system of 'planned economy', in which the entrepreneur working for profit is replaced by a central planning body.”
Hayek's 'central planning body' can take many forms: regulatory agencies; government ownership of business; government favoritism of some businesses over others; government decrees, statutes and laws designed to achieve some 'collective' benefit [auto emissions is but one simple example out of literally thousands]; government guarantees which create moral hazard; excessive taxation; wage and price controls; and the creation of unaccountable government bureaucracies which distort normal markets and normal decision making.
You don't need a collective Soviet council or Board of Commissars to establish Hayek's 'central planning body.'
The Prophet Obamed was and is a left wing radical. His voting record and his statements support that fact. So does his current actions in the socialisation of America – with enthusiastic 'intellectual' [a euphemism for someone who cannot work, but can make up arcane and petrified and factually irrelevant ideas]; and media support. Obamed's 'central planning body' is a collection of government bodies, agencies, regulatory groups and politicians – all organised by the office of the President and a small group of key Democratic politicians. The Prophet Obamed is really a Commissar – one who has always believed in the benign and efficacious powers of the state to re-organise and re-make America into something resembling Europe.
His actions thus far make this clear:
-government bailing out bad mortgage holders [$275 billion program], which creates moral hazard and further distorts markets
-government ownership or at least control of the major financial institutions of the US
-ditto with the insurance market
-the socialisation in part of the US health care market [which will kill innovation and the drug firms]
-the probable nationalisation of failed auto firms
-media control and limits on what is termed 'free and fair speech' [destroying talk radio for eg.]
-a $1.5 – 2.0 Trillion dollar systemic extension of government spending [this spending will not contract in future years]
-protacted funding of multi-cultural and other politically-correct programs which create clients of the state [an example is the tens of millions given to US Muslim organisations]
-a reduction in military and intelligence spending [when the opposite is needed]
The result of Obamed's plan is to radically push the socialisation of the US and further impose cultural marxism on a nation which was created as the anti-thesis of communal/centralised constructs.
Obamed no doubt believes in Mussolini's maxim, quoted by Hayek to open up his chapter on the inevitable consequence of state planning [slavery]; 'We were the first to assert that the more complicated the forms assumed by civilsation, the more restricted the freedom of the individual must become.'
Strutting like a Mussolini the new Prophet regales his fellow inferiors on how terrible the US is; what a colossal failure its experiment has become; and how he and only he can save, regenerate and expiate the sins of, America.
One could be forgiven in thinking the Prophet Obamed is just another deluded Marxist clown. One of his great accomplishments will be to destroy what little individualism, dynamism, and optimism is left in America. As Victor Hanson the professor of ancient history wrote on his website, cultural marxism is necessary for a socialist state to form:
“I deserve, I am owed, I must receive is our mantra. We must become more like the world, rather they like us. War is caused by miscommunications rather than intrinsic evil that is difficult to negotiate away. America is simply one of many nations, exceptional only to the degree that we suffer from unusual race, class, and gender transgressions. The founders and their epigones were mostly preeminent as racist and elites, not geniuses who knew far more than 99% of us today.”
The zeitgeist is clearly left wing and culturally marxist. These are the pre-requisites to reorder institutions and expand governmental power and scope. The consequences as Hayek wrote, are however clear and easily foretold. It leads to some form of slavery.
