Sparks Commentary: Why your utopian scheme will never work (and may even make things worse)

How I fell in love with my homeland (the United States), particularly in early childhood

Since the earliest years of my childhood, my family and I would go to visit my grandparents’ home in California. Fireworks are perfectly legal where they lived, so we would always celebrate America’s Independence Day with some fireworks, right there in my grandparents’ back yard. It seems safe to say that I enjoyed the fireworks, long before I learned anything about the holiday that these fireworks were supposed to commemorate. As I’ve mentioned in a few other blog posts, I grew up on the stories of the American Revolution. Specifically, sometime in elementary school, I read an illustrated children’s book about the American Revolutionary War. I remember my childhood admiration for General George Washington, and my feeling betrayed by the treachery of Benedict Arnold. I may have lost some of my admiration for the fireworks (old age does that), but I still have great enthusiasm for America. And I’m still happy to watch the fireworks with family, because I know that it helps them to experience these patriotic feelings that the holiday encourages. I also love the freedom of religion that comes from our Bill of Rights, which made it possible to have a Restorationist church like my own. I also love freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and the other rights enshrined in the United States Constitution. I was born in the United States in Sacramento, California – with both sides of my family having been American citizens for generations. I also grew up hearing about how one of my grandfathers had served in World War II. Specifically, my Grandpa Wells served in the Pacific as a Marine. Long before I understood just what a terrible sacrifice that was, I knew that he had put his life on the line for his country – and I knew, in some little-boy way, that this was important. My other grandfather (along with the intervening generation of my own father) got me into World War II movies. When I entered high school, these two generations on my dad’s side got me into the Civil War as well. All of these things remain lifelong interests today, and remain part of my love of the United States.

Alexander Hamilton, whom I shall soon quote herein

George Washington crossing the Delaware, 1776

I learned about some darker parts of our country’s history (and, no, we’re not perfect)

But I also heard in high school and middle school (not to mention college) about some of the darker parts of our country’s history. I learned about our country’s treatment of Native Americans, and I learned about slavery. Contrary to some recent propaganda, the evils of slavery have been taught in American schools for generations. They are not a “new discovery” of the latest generation. There was even a generation in this country where more people fought to abolish slavery (or, initially, just to keep it from expanding westward) than ever fought to preserve that terrible institution. And when I say that they were “fighting” against slavery, I’m talking about hundreds of thousands of battlefield deaths, honored in President Lincoln’s famous Gettysburg Address. Obviously, there were more deaths on the Confederate side. Indeed, that’s why the Confederacy lost – more people on their side were killed. Why would we want this any other way than the Confederacy losing more and getting defeated? Nonetheless, far more took up arms in defense of the Union, than ever rebelled against it. This is proved by the actual size and recruitment numbers of the two opposing armies. And, from New Year’s Day 1863 onward, this defense of the Union became inseparably connected with the fervent crusade to abolish slavery. By December of 1865, chattel slavery had been forever abolished from American society. Many since then have been pointing out that other kinds of racial injustice were continuing long after the Civil War. Obviously, there is truth in this claim. Much still needed to be done in these promising (but still disappointing) years of Reconstruction. Indeed, pointing out the faults of the United States has become fashionable in some leftist circles today. Some faults seem to be manufactured, while others are exaggerated beyond their true proportions. From these faults (both real and imagined), it is sometimes concluded that the United States is “fundamentally corrupt.” Because this country seems not to measure up to their lofty standards, its heritage and values apparently need to be “discarded.”

Chief Sitting Bull

What are the minimum conditions for satisfaction? (For many, it seems to be “utopia”)

I sometimes wonder how these people would answer, if you asked them for their minimum conditions for satisfaction. Some of them seem to believe that nothing short of “utopia” would ever be acceptable. They want a society with no war, no racism, and no poverty. Only when these evils are “completely” eradicated will these people ever consider America to be successful. But utopias, if they have ever existed, seem to be a little elusive. Many societies have fervently searched for “utopia” – but, still, they’ve utterly failed to find it. Ancient Sparta was an attempt to find utopia, which ended in a hellish dystopia. Nazi Germany tried to eradicate those whom it deemed “weak” or “racially inferior” (as they put it), and we all know what totalitarian nightmares happened there. In the twentieth century, many communist regimes (like Soviet Russia or Maoist China) fervently sought for a “utopia,” declaring that they would bring a “final end” to poverty. Instead, they got totalitarian misery to rival that of their more unpopular rivals in Nazi Germany. Some today are apologists for these communist regimes, but even many Marxists have admitted that they failed to bring any real progress.

Sir Thomas More, the author of the satirical book “Utopia”

Marxists claim that utopia can actually be realized, if we just give them absolute power

Nonetheless, the Marxist faith in “utopia” remains undiminished, as does their stubborn belief that Marxist policies are the best way of getting there. If that were true, it seems that poverty would have been eradicated decades ago in Russia, China, and a host of other places. West Germany economically outperformed East Germany (as I show here), and South Korea continues to economically outperform North Korea (as I show in this same post). That is, in both places, the free-market part outperformed the communist part, by every relevant measure. Some object that what these places tried was not “real” communism, or even a “real” attempt at such. I deal with the problems of these arguments in another post, which is available here. Suffice it to say here that communism was indeed tried, time and time again, in both the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (as I show here). In every one of these experiments, the result was abject failure – completely opposite to the “utopia” predicted by Marxist theories. True, it wasn’t “utopian,” some Marxists thus acknowledge – but it would have been, apparently, if people had just “tried” harder. If we fail to transmute common elements into gold, then we must not have really “tried” hard enough. Moreover, we need to do increasingly dangerous things, to realize the said results. After all, trusting government with absolute power is such a “harmless” thing (it’s not like it ever gave us fascism or Nazism after all) – or so the unstated assumptions seem to go. The trouble is not merely that the desired utopia cannot be realized (by mortals, at least) – the trouble is that the usual methods of pursuing utopia will create more problems, rather than less. Giving absolute power to government seems instead to produce dystopia – a reality that seems to be conveniently ignored (if ever acknowledged to begin with), each time that a new utopian scheme is proposed.

Karl Marx

The Founding Fathers were much more realistic, putting limits upon government power

By contrast, the vision of our Founding Fathers was much more realistic. They knew perfectly well that it’s impossible to design a system that eradicates all poverty, or all war, or all possible abuses of power. They knew perfectly well that such abuses were just going to happen anyway. In the Federalist Papers, James Madison acknowledged that “factions” are inevitable – saying that it’s actually better to have a diversity of such factions. Thus, he said, we can make it harder for any one of them to gain too much power over the others. (See the details of his arguments about factions here.) In another part of the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton was a little skeptical of “Utopian speculations” (as he called them). See the footnote to this blog post for the details of this quotation. Thus, it seems quite clear that both Hamilton and Madison had a much darker (and, thus, more realistic) view of human nature. Thus, our Founding Fathers separated out the powers, so that no one branch of government would have too much of this power. By so doing, they limited the damage that such abuses of power would entail when they inevitably happened anyway. They instituted checks and balances, so that the branches themselves would be the means of keeping each other in their proper places. This system has worked far better than anything else has in practice. And, in practice, its poverty rate is far less than that suffered under Marxist regimes, whose failures are admitted even by many of their fellow Marxists. The United States Constitution isn’t perfect, but its beneficial results are quite real and tangible. The utopian promises of communism (by contrast) are intangible, hypothetical, elusive, and contradicted by a massive mountain of empirical evidence. Its promised results have never been realized even once. Yet the search for “utopia” continues. I’m all for pursuing improvements to our society, but I confess myself deeply suspicious of all utopian schemes. They seem always to move our society backwards, rather than forwards. They seem always to involve granting massive power to someone or other, in the hopes that they will “improve” things for everyone else. True, this whole “absolute power” thing sometimes gives nations a Mussolini or a Hitler (they admit) – but this time, they say, it’ll be different. This time, we’ll have someone who’s so superior in their intelligence (not to mention knowledge and wisdom) … that they’ll become the first people who have ever actually succeeded, even minimally, in doing this. The fact that every other attempt has failed miserably “doesn’t really matter” – it just matters that their intentions are pure, and that they have the wisdom (apparently divine in nature) to get bureaucracies to deliver a “flawless” performance.

James Madison

Conclusion: To put it bluntly, fairy tales like this are for children, not for grownups

I have a hard time swallowing these fairy tales, or any other promises of a “perfect” society. To put it bluntly, fairy tales like this are for children, not for grownups. If a reform program is realistic, then it might be worth adopting. But, if someone promises “perfection” in eradicating poverty, or war, or racism … then I know that they have failed to learn how the world really works. Thus, I have a hard time taking their proposals seriously, and will continue to vote against these proposals whenever they may appear on my ballot. I’m all for reforms that will actually work. But I get tired of bloated nonsense about a vision of “utopia,” where the laws of supply and demand will magically be “repealed” – perhaps along with the law of gravity, or the Second Law of Thermodynamics. If I want to experience something of this kind, then I’ll pick up a science fiction novel. As far as the real world goes, I want policies that work, rather than more utopian pipe dreams.

Footnote to this blog post:

During the American Revolution, the thirteen American colonies would win their independence from Great Britain. But after the war, there was a real danger that their union would fall apart. For various reasons, the current system of government was not working out. Thus, the country wrote a new constitution, but it was not accepted by all. While some supported a stronger union, others seem to have supported its dissolution.

One Founding Father who was then arguing for union was Alexander Hamilton. At this time, he wrote in the Federalist Papers that “A man must be far gone in Utopian speculations who can seriously doubt that, if these States should either be wholly disunited, or only united in partial confederacies, the subdivisions into which they might be thrown would have frequent and violent contests with each other. To presume a want of motives for such contests as an argument against their existence, would be to forget that men are ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious. To look for a continuation of harmony between a number of independent, unconnected sovereignties in the same neighborhood, would be to disregard the uniform course of human events, and to set at defiance the accumulated experience of ages.” (Source: Federalist No. 6)

Thus, when this Founding Father was saying that “A man must be far gone in Utopian speculations” to say things like this, he seems to be suggesting that these “Utopian speculations” are hopelessly unrealistic. Like other Founding Fathers, he seems to have been suspicious of even the concept of “Utopianism,” and of all proposed schemes to create it.

If you liked this post, you might also like:

A few problems with Plato’s “Republic” (and his ideal state)

The Founding Fathers strongly criticized Plato’s “Republic” (and for good reason)

Some thoughts on Thomas More’s “Utopia” (a great satire)

Rousseau’s “Discourse on Inequality” is long on detail, but short on evidence …

A few problems with Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “The Social Contract”

Actually, Rousseau did not influence the Founding Fathers (sorry Wikipedia)

A few problems with “The Communist Manifesto”

Does communism cause poverty? (The two experiments that prove it does)

Actually, communism has been tried (and it doesn’t work)

Struggle over the Marxist heritage: The battle for the ivory tower

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