Opinion Pieces

Originally published in the Columbus Dispatch.

Our Founders George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and Benjamin Franklin were ideologues who didn’t always agree. These revolutionary thinkers were the authors and influencers of the most significant documents in our nation’s, and arguably the world’s, history: the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The Founders laid forth the radical ideology that the individual is sovereign, and government is subservient to the people.

Our founding documents are rooted in this ideology that government ought to exist to protect our natural rights, not exist to give us those rights. The Constitution establishes the limiting principles of what the government both can and should do. Otherwise, we would not have a government of the people, but, rather, people of the government.

The old idea that’s found new life is that if the government can do something, it must. There’s no concern if we trample on the very rights government was created to protect. Private property or free markets are just speed bumps to the government fixing everything for everybody.

We see that impulse today, with many on the left arguing that because the government could conceivably provide socialized health care for every American, it should.

Even the calls for “Medicare for All” fail to acknowledge the 40 percent of current seniors choosing Medicare Advantage plans modeled on and run by the private sector. Medicare for All would ban these plans along with private health insurance, because proponents believe government knows better than you. That’s the fatal flaw of socialism: ceding the choices in your life to the government.

Spoiler alert: government doesn’t know best.

Look abroad and we see the repeated failure of this government-knows-best conceit. Venezuela is just the most recent socialist example of a government that exists to serve itself, not the people. These governments have crumbled as their people grew tired of poverty and rationing, waiting in line for medical care and living off the scraps of the government. If socialism is designed for the community as a whole, why is there so much disparity between the government and the people?

People vote with their feet, and I don’t see any refugees flowing into Venezuela. Those jumping the Berlin Wall were always headed in one direction: west, toward freedom.

I’m old enough to remember the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the USSR. As in Venezuela, these began with a popular uprising from citizens tired of a government that promised them everything but delivered only near-universal poverty for anyone unaffiliated with the socialist leaders.

Socialism, like any political belief, is an ideology. It’s just that socialism, when faithfully implemented, leads to the fall of nations and oppression of the masses.

Ronald Reagan had it right when he said, “Socialism only works in two places: Heaven, where they don’t need it, and hell, where they already have it.”

Winston Churchill also captured this contrast, saying, “The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.” I will be the first to admit our free-market democracy is imperfect. Our Founders recognized this fact, writing that we are working toward a “more perfect union,” a goal always on the horizon to work toward.

Our Founders envisioned a limited government that exists to serve people, not oppress them. If believing that makes me an ideologue, so be it. Capitalism has led to immeasurable prosperity, a possible path out of poverty and unlimited philanthropy.