The Wake

After 9/11 I went through a radical change in my outlook on life. Those attacks were the direct cause of the first part of my change –- the realization that people are fundamentally responsible for their own actions. I was no longer willing to make excuses for people and no longer saw people as groups, but as individuals. Group identities remove individual responsibility.

The last part of this change was the extension and application of the first. I used to be a Socialist because I thought that it was just. I thought that people deserved to have their needs taken care of if they were unable to do it themselves and that the rich had a duty to the poor.

The expectation of responsibility and the justice of Socialism cannot coexist within the same system of personal responsibility. If Socialism were truly just, then people cannot be responsible for themselves because the system removes choice from a person’s life. The government redistributes wealth with the threat of violence into programs without an individual’s choice. The government decides where, when and which medical treatments you will receive. And through the crushing tax system, the government dissuades economic achievement.

Then I read Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged. It deals directly with the inconsistency that I was experiencing. In this book, socialist-minded people use the power of the government to pass laws for the good of the people at the expense of the successful. Although the plot of the book is a little dated and thin, there are brilliant passages where Rand speaks to the reader, relating her Objectivist philosophy.

People are only responsible for themselves, not others. This statement is ultimately freeing for the individual and devastating for the left, whose entire ideology is based on guilt. The mentally handicapped aside, most people who are “in need” are there through their own choices. The left would like to prey on the guilt that people feel about their own personal gain, all in the name of the common good. When you realize that you have done nothing to put people in their predicament, the left loses its hold on you.

This is why the left is so against a true, free-market system. In a true, free market, people must be responsible for themselves. There is no room for people to ride on the success of others, which means there is no room for the people who gain power through the free riders in the power structure. That’s what the left boils down to –- control. A leftist doesn’t believe that you, as a person, are intelligent enough to make the “right” decisions. It’s a political ideology that is based on controlling their fellow citizen while screaming about how “the system” needs to be overthrown for true freedom to be a reality. They’re a gaggle of hypocrites.

Michael Phyle welcomes comments at phyl0005@umn.edu.