Collectivism is often advocated in terms of idealized outcomes: security, social justice, and economic equality ("share the wealth"). To achieve these outcomes, however, requires the abandonment of Western Civilization’s Individualist traditions along with its human and economic freedoms. Under a collectivist system, the moral and social values prescribed by the ruling authorities are set above those of the individual.
The Socialist economic system is characterized by arbitrary central government planning and coercive control of people, property, business enterprises, occupations and wages using a system of taxes, regulations and welfare programs. Ruling authorities determine production and consumption, choose economic winners and losers, and bestow special privileges upon favored groups and activities.In the late 1800s, some American liberals, notably intellectual elites, became enamored with the new European collectivist theory. One collectivist idea that took hold in the U.S. was the government public school system. By 1913, all states had adopted a public school program of taxation and compulsory attendance regulations.
Under the name of Progressivism in the early 1900s, advocates tried - and failed - to gain a foothold as a political party. Proponents in the Franklin Roosevelt Administration subsequently implemented several collectivist agricultural and industrial experiments, but these proved unsuccessful and were eventually discarded. He was successful, however, in creating a federal Social Security program, which collects taxes on behalf of the worker but is never ‘owned’ or controlled by the worker.
Between the 1930s and 1950s, collectivism evolved into a fascist Nazi regime in Germany and a totalitarian communist state in Soviet Russia. Despite the lessons, a form of socialism – welfare-statism characterized by extensive government redistribution of incomes through taxation and the expansion of cradle-to-grave welfare institutions - took hold in many Western European nations.
Excerpt from “Socialism vs. Capitalism: Which is the Moral System:”
”Under socialism a ruling class of intellectuals, bureaucrats and social planners decide what people want or what is good for society and then use the coercive power of the State to regulate, tax, and redistribute the wealth of those who work for a living. In other words, socialism is a form of legalized theft. ”The morality of socialism can be summed-up [by] envy … Envy is the desire to not only possess another’s wealth but also the desire to see another’s wealth lowered to the level of one’s own. … It is the social system which uses compulsion and the organized violence of the State to expropriate wealth from the producer class for its redistribution to the parasitical class. “According to socialist doctrine, there is a limited amount of wealth in the world that must be divided equally between all citizens. One person’s gain under such a system is another’s loss. “According to capitalist teaching, wealth has an unlimited growth potential and the fruits of one’s labor should be retained in whole by the producer. But unlike socialism, one person’s gain is everybody’s gain in the capitalist system. Wealth is distributed unequally but the ship of wealth rises for everyone. “When government redistributes wealth through taxation, when it attempts to control and regulate business production and trade, … the winners are those who scream the loudest for a handout and the losers are those quiet citizens who work hard and pay their taxes.”
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