The admirable entrepreneur Magatte Wade concludes that Senegal, the country of her birth, is poor because it is awash in regulations. She is correct, but her conclusion does not go deeply enough. Why do regulations exist? What are the conditions that create them? How do we get rid of them? The answers are important because we in the United States have the same problem, just not as pronounced. Will we end up as poor as Senegal if we allow regulations to continue to grow and to control and limit our lives? Yes! So beware!
Regulations are a method by which the government controls the people. Are they inevitable? What kind of government uses regulations to control its people? Is there an alternative that will create prosperity?
Collectivism is an ideology that can easily be understood by looking a honey bee hive. The hive is the collective, the group, tribe, community, country, religion, or race. All worker bees have a duty to sacrifice their lives for the “common good” of their hive. They do not have rights which, philosophically, are the opposite of duties. The group takes precedence over the individual. It is the survival of the group that is all important, not the survival of the individual. Any dreams, aspirations, or goals of the individual worker bee are irrelevant. Only the collective matters.
This social organization works for insects, but it has been failure for human beings. 20th century examples are Hitler’s Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, Mao’s Red China, and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. The 21st century example is Venezuela which was once the richest country in South America. Its people are now starving. Collectivism is all about the enslavement of the workers bees in its hive. It is the ideology of slavery.
There are three forms or variations of collectivism: socialism, fascism, and communism. Communism is the most extreme version. It is pure tyranny. Under socialism the government owns the means of production. Under fascism the means of production are privately owned but controlled by the government through regulations. Regulations are fascist!
The forms of collectivism differ in degree, but not in kind. They are all honey bee hives. Some political commentators consider fascism the most efficient form of collectivism because the government takes advantage of its most able individuals to manage the means of production. But, all individual subjects (not citizens) are still considered worker bees who have a “duty” to serve their collective, their group. It is also to the advantage of the government that worker bees do not realize that they are virtual slaves to their hive. The government wants its worker bees to believe their illusion of freedom and happiness because that will motivate them to work harder, and thus to better serve their hive. It wants them to believe that they are citizens, not subjects. It does not want them to realize that they are slaves.
Fascism is also known as the “politics of pull”, of who you know, not of what you know. The name, crony capitalism, is an example of government manipulation of language and the functioning of its “useful idiots” to fool the public. Crony capitalism is really fascism. The essence of capitalism is freedom, so how do you get a regulation out of that? Our mixed economy today is an unstable mixture of capitalism and collectivism. What form of collectivism do you think is most prevalent in our mixed economy? The answer is obvious; it is fascism. Our economy is unstable because it is a mixture of two opposites. It must always move in one direction or the other, and we have been moving toward collectivism for more than 100 years.
Individualism is the opposite of collectivism. It logically follows from the concept of individual rights. When your government honors and respects your rights, the result is freedom. The United States was founded as a country of individualism. For reference, please see the Declaration of Independence, the greatest political document in history. The U.S. was founded as a free country and was pretty much free for the first 100 to 150 years of its existence. That is the fundamental reason why she quickly became the richest country on earth. A nation’s prosperity is proportional to its freedom. If you look at the world you will see that all dictatorships are poor. The most prosperous countries are semi-free. There are no fully free countries because the requirements of freedom are not yet widely understood. Please help people to understand!
Freedom is the underlying reason that explains why some countries are rich and others are poor. It is a fundamental principle hidden in plain sight! Freedom requires that a nation’s government remain small and of minimal power, as per our U.S. Constitution. Collectivism results in a big and all-powerful government because controls breed more controls. Politicians always want more power in order to control their subjects, so don’t be a useful idiot and help them! The founding of the United States was unprecedented in history–the only nation of individual rights, and thus of freedom. But we are rapidly losing these irreplaceable values at an accelerating rate. That is the root cause of our economic problems. If Trump wants to make America great again, all we need is our freedom back!
How We Thrive: Why are some countries rich, and others poor?