American voters will soon participate in a drill to rearrange the deck chairs on their titanic ship of State. Election Day is November 2, 2010.

Many are caught up in the idea that a new crew with better ideas will help navigate through rough seas. However, few have recognized the looming economic iceberg of unintended consequences, the unavoidable cumulative result of a drift toward greater command and control by both captain and crew—those past and present.

Fundamentally nothing changes in the corporatist managed economy of the United States, including the growing scope of government involvement in the daily affairs of individual persons, regardless of whether it is expansion at the hands of Democrats or Republicans.

The attempted management of national economies as a focal point of human concern has had a century of opportunity to demonstrate that the use of coercive force can bring peace and prosperity to more individuals than can the independent choices and actions of all those same individuals.

In fact, the twentieth century presented perhaps the biggest retrograde series of failed experiments in history, all attempting to demonstrate the efficacy of the various strains of political and economic collectivism. The most hideously ambitious were represented by such iconic tyrannical regimes as the Third Reich, Soviet Union and Communist China. All were characterized by blind faith in the use of physical force wielded against all other men in society by some variant of an elite leadership.

All of those so-called “noble ideas” about the greater good and social utopias look like so much bloody nonsense in that context now. And the bloodiness is literal, for that is where all such great notions end when setting the course relies on the use of physical coercion to navigate toward the ultimate vision of an elite class.

A tremendous obstacle to political liberty has been created as a result of adherence to failed economic and political doctrines in the last century. Georges Santayana remarked that those who do not learn from the past are condemned to repeat it. Until individual Americans—and individuals everywhere—begin to take personal responsibility for understanding the fundamentals of natural rights and individual responsibility, the ship of fools will eventually hit that iceberg and sink with few survivors.

©Copyright 2010 Edward Podritske