"The Left Is Running Out of Utopias"

The Democratic lawmakers who have gone on the lam in Wisconsin and Indiana—and who knows where else next—are exhibiting a literal fight-or-flight response, the reaction of an animal facing a threat to its very existence.

Why? Because it is a threat to their existence. The battle of Wisconsin is about the viability of the Democratic Party, and more: it is about the viability of the basic social ideal of the left.

It is a matter of survival for Democrats in an immediate, practical sense. As Michael Barone explains, the government employees' unions are a mechanism for siphoning taxpayer dollars into the campaigns of Democratic politicians.

But there is something deeper here than just favor-selling and vote-buying. There is something that almost amounts to a twisted idealism in the Democrats' crusade. They are fighting, not just to preserve their special privileges, but to preserve a social ideal. Or rather, they are fighting to maintain the illusion that their ideal system is benevolent and sustainable.

Unionized public-sector employment is the distilled essence of the left's moral ideal. No one has to worry about making a profit. Generous health-care and retirement benefits are provided to everyone by the government. Comfortable pay is mandated by legislative fiat. The work rules are militantly egalitarian: pay, promotion, and job security are almost totally independent of actual job performance. And because everyone works for the government, they never have to worry that their employer will go out of business.

In short, public employment is an idealized socialist economy in miniature, including its political aspect: the grateful recipients of government largesse provide money and organizational support to re-elect the politicians who shower them with all of these benefits.

Put it all together, and you have the Democrats' version of utopia. In the larger American culture of Tea Parties, bond vigilantes, and rugged individualists, Democrats feel they are constantly on the defensive. But within the little subculture of unionized government employees, all is right with the world, and everything seems to work the way it is supposed to.

This cozy little world has been described as a system that grants special privileges to a few, which is particularly rankling in the current stagnant economy, when private sector workers acutely feel the difference. But I think this misses the point. The point is that this is how the left thinkseveryone should live and work. It is their version of a model society.

Every political movement needs models. It needs a real-world example to demonstrate how its ideal works and that it works.

And there's the rub. The left is running low on utopias...READ at TIADaily.com (The Intellectual Activist by Rob Tracinski).

Obama's Utopia Will Spend Us Into Chains and Then Into Oblivion

Dr. Miklos K. Radvanyi writing at Frontiers of Freedom (ff.org) shows us how Obama is just another power luster in the mold of the Marxist-Leninist worldview. They somehow know better than anyone else how to run an economy and how people should live and what they should think and do with their lives. Obama is indeed a small man with small ideas that have been tried and found to have failed utterly and with devastating consequences to ordinary people trying to live their lives with meaning. Obviously, 50 million dead from starvation or in the gulags of Soviet Russia, another 30-40 million dead in the Nazi Germany's concentration camps and untold millions dead in China from madman Mao is not enough for men with the minds of thugs. To rid ourselves of these types good people who believe in man's right to his freedom of both mind and body need to stand up at every outrage and make their voices heard. We are in an outrage now...with Obama spending us into oblivion. Read Dr. Radvany's words below. He lived through this socialism in Hungary - he knows what it is that we have here in America and where it will lead us.

The first decade of the United States’ political history in the 21st century will, when written, furnish the most striking and convincing proof of the great Western civilization’s decreasing sense of identity against the onslaught of a small minority’s tenaciously egotistical obsession with elitist purity, boundless hatred for universal freedom, ruthless opposition to popular sovereignty, and a destructive sense of social justice.

...What really matters is the Marxist-Leninist worldview that mandates total control over both ideas and actions by the absolute power of an enlightened few, including the entire world, together with every human being in it. The two false buzzwords in this circle of anti-Western fanatics are “progress” and “collectivism”. Their definition of progress, known as historical determinism, is, in reality, historical revisionism that is based on tyrannical intolerance and visceral hatred toward humanity. Similarly, the true meaning of collectivism is not the voluntary participation of the majority in the democratic process, but the creation of a welfare state through the perverted application of the democratic principles...

... Brushing aside arrogantly the obvious fact that economies controlled by vast government bureaucracies unfailingly met inglorious ends at every country in the past, the Obama administration has proceeded from day one to build up a monster government outside the constitutional framework of the American Republic.

Borrowing from Jean Paul Marat of the French Revolution, whose newspaper proudly displayed the motto of the most extremist revolutionaries “Let us tax the rich and subsidize the poor”, the democrats dominated White House and Congress have already initiated and passed legislation aimed at enforcing economic equality, destroying existing financial incentives, competition, profit and individualism in an essentially free market economy. With incompetent levity President Obama and his comrades continue to proceed on their misguided experiment, like all the destructive utopians of the world in the 19th and 20th centuries before them. Irresponsible spending, punitive taxes and slow economic growth have already caused grave and perhaps irreparable damage to the United States and its traditionally vigorous free economy. READ "Obama's Presidential House of Cards".