Despite socialism’s long history of failure and oppression, there are those for whom it is still the only economic model from which to govern. To these people I ascribe the attribute of evil. They know full well the horrors it wrought over millions of human beings in the name of ’social justice’ and ‘equality’, yet they still direct government and society toward collectivism.

The Obama administration has the smallest number of people, of any administration in history, with any real experience in the private sector or running businesses. Supposedly Obama was elected to help restore the economy, yet he and the people he’s surrounded himself with know nothing about economics. Which partly explains why he’s focused on things unrelated to economic recovery like taking over the Health Care system and Cap and Trade. But he and statists like him really do not care about helping people or creating a climate conducive to job growth. Rather, for Obama and his ilk it is and always has been about centralizing economic activity in the hands of a few government technocrats — a path shown historically not to work.  Yet, these Ivy League academics, having spent their entire careers living off the taxpayer and never having run so much as a lemonade stand, believe they can do a better job directing the economy than the people (free market).

The Obama politburo will direct our lives and impose all manner of restrictions and taxes on the rest of us while exempting themselves. The newly passed (and hopefully soon to be repealed) ObamaCare has been written to exempt members of Congress — like most politicians who send their children to private rather than government schools. Every choice they claim for themselves they would deny to others.

Take a look at other countries with nationalized health care systems. The result has been in every instance: rationing, denial of care, lower quality, lack of innovation, and even euthanasia. The political left calls this a ’superior’ system due to its ostensible equality, although the rich and politically connected still receive better care. So-called progressives have never truly been about equality, but a bureaucratic managerial class and everyone else.

The greatest threat to life and liberty has always come from politicians and their supporters among the intelligentsia. Thomas Sowell fully demonstrates this in his new book, Intellectuals and Society, in which he points out: “Scarcely a mass-murdering dictator of the twentieth century was without his intellectual supporters, not simply in his own country, but also in foreign democracies … Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Hitler all had their admirers, defenders and apologists among the intelligentsia in Western democratic nations, despite the fact that these dictators each ended up killing people of their own country on a scale unprecedented even by despotic regimes that preceded them.”

Walter Williams, another economist, explains why socialists are so hostile to free markets:

Tyrants denounce free markets and voluntary exchange. They are the chief supporters of reduced private property rights, reduced rights to profits, and they are anti-competition and pro-monopoly. They are pro-control and coercion, by the state. These Americans who run Washington, and their intellectual supporters, believe they have superior wisdom and greater intelligence than the masses. They believe they have been ordained to forcibly impose that wisdom on the rest of us. Like any other tyrant, they have what they consider good reasons for restricting the freedom of others. A tyrant’s primary agenda calls for the elimination or attenuation of the market. Why? Markets imply voluntary exchange and tyrants do not trust that people behaving voluntarily will do what the tyrant thinks they should do. Therefore, they seek to replace the market with economic planning and regulation, which is little more than the forcible superseding of other people’s plans by the powerful elite.

While American politicians have not yet - operative word being yet - reached the depths of historical tyrants like Stalin or Mao, they still share a similar vision. That fact alone makes them extremely dangerous. The only way a nation is both free and prosperous is by releasing economic activity from the shackles of government and maximizing individual liberties. Ridding government of its current socialist infestation and shrinking it back down to its constitutionally defined size and role is the only thing that can restore this country.