A snippet:
A failed doctrine
Collectivism is the belief that we, as individuals, must put the needs, goals, and desires of society ahead of our own. It is a particularly frightening mindset because it appeals to virtue yet can be used to justify so much misery.
When most people think of collectivism, they think of communism or socialism. Under these systems the virtue of collective ownership was used to justify the most repressive and brutal environments in the 20th century. But collectivism has many other forms, including fascism, ultra-nationalism, the welfare state, social engineering, political correctness, and internationalism. In each of these varieties, autocrats make and enforce their judgments in the name of the greater good. If these custodians decide that limiting your freedoms or taking your income or savings furthers society’s goals, then that is simply the price to be paid for a better world.
But utopia is never reached. The more social objectives the government sets, the more taxes it collects, the more money it spends, and the more laws it passes, the worse the situation becomes. The failure of central authorities to deliver on their noble goals is the ground truth of not only conservatism and libertarianism, but any reputable school of economics, American and world history, political philosophy, or constitutional law.
That’s collectivism in four paragraphs. The best sources I have read on the subject lie five decades apart yet are equally effective: Atlas Shrugged and Liberty and Tyranny. And these are just two of the many books that force you to think through the progressive ideological agenda to its inevitable and miserable end.
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