Larry Abraham on America's Shift Toward Socialism

Lies are eventually found out and destroyed, but truth remains forever. This is truth.

Excerpt from Call It Conspiracy, by Larry Abraham, 1985 (originally published in 1971)

There is an accurate political spectrum. Communism is, by definition, total government. If you have total government it makes little difference whether you call it Communism, Fascism, Socialism, Caesarism, or Pharaohism. It's all pretty much the same from the standpoint of the people who must live and suffer under it. If total government (by any pseudonyms) stands on the far Left, then by logic the far Right should represent anarchy, or no government.

Our Founding Fathers revolted against the near-total government of the English monarchy. But they knew that having no government at all would lead to chaos. So they set up a Constitutional Republic with a very limited government. They knew that men prospered in freedom. Although the free enterprise system is not mentioned specifically in the Constitution, it is the only one which can exist under a Constitutional Republic. All collectivist systems require power in government which the Constitution did not grant. Our Founding Fathers had no intention of allowing the government to become an instrument to steal the fruit of one man's labor and give it to another who had not earned it. Our government was to be one of severely limited powers. Thomas Jefferson said: “In questions of power then let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.” Jefferson knew that if the government were not enslaved, people soon would be.

It was Jefferson's view that government governs best which governs least. Our forefathers established this country with the very least possible amount of government. Although they lived in an age before automobiles, electric lights and television, they understood human nature and its relation to political systems far better than most Americans do today. Times change, technology changes, but principles are eternal. Primarily, government was to provide for national defense and to establish a court system. But we have burst the chains that Jefferson spoke of and for many years now we have been moving leftward across the political spectrum toward collectivist total government. Every proposal by our political leaders (including some which are supposed to have the very opposite effect, such as Nixon's revenue sharing proposal) carries us further leftward to centralized government. This is not because socialism is inevitable. It is no more inevitable than Pharaohism. It is largely the result of careful planning and patient gradualism.