by William Sullivan, American Thinker:
In his excellent podcast series, “Cold War: Prelude to the Present,” Bill Whittle opens the series by describing the Berlin Wall as “not only a wall between East and West Berlin.” He continues:
It was the division of humanity into two different camps…
On one side of the wall, the Eastern side, were the collectivists, who believed that society takes precedent over the person. This collectivism was advertised as new and scientific, but the fact is that collectivism has been the default position of humanity since humanity began.
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No, the actual newcomer to this clash of visions were the individualists on the Western side. The first government in history dedicated to the idea of the individual being more worthy of protection than the State, had just turned 170 years old when the 40-year conflict known as the Cold War began.
This was, indeed, the ideological framework of the Cold War. And comparatively speaking, it was true. Freedom of speech and the press, religious freedom, the innate right to own firearms as a means of self-defense and against a tyrannical government, and due process under a system of laws that apply equally to all citizens — even if these concepts were not always adequately observed or protected in the United States, they were at least designed to uphold a national creed, enshrined in a constitution, that grants the individual citizen protective advantages that are prohibited to the State.
No such rights existed in the Soviet Union, and the power dynamic between its citizens and the State was designed with a precisely inverse aim in mind.
But America was already headlong into collectivist experiments that were slowly transforming the West to be more like the East by the time the Cold War came to a close, and we should harbor no illusions about that.
“Collectivism” and “entitlements” are synonyms if you break the understanding of those words down to brass tacks. Both could be described as a governmentally-enforced societal responsibility for citizens to provide resources to the government, in order for the government to redistribute the confiscated resources to those whom the government has determined “need” those resources more than the citizens from whom the resources were confiscated.
The power to discriminately confiscate wealth from individual citizens in order to provide for other citizens was, quite purposefully, not enumerated in the Constitution as a power of government. As such, the Founders likely never imagined that it could be done.
More than any other moment in American history, the Sixteenth Amendment opened the door to America’s path to collectivism. Fueled by academic, political, and media resentment for the captains of industry in the late nineteenth century, American representatives ratified a federal allowance to discriminately tax individuals’ income in 1913, thus implementing a key feature that Karl Marx prescribed as one of the Ten Planks of Communism in his Manifesto – a progressive income tax.
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