The release of “Iron Man 2” this weekend kicks off the summer blockbuster season. It’s an interesting cultural moment for conservatives. The movie version of Iron Man is one of the most unambiguously libertarian figures in popular culture, a billionaire industrialist playboy who spends much of the new movie telling the government to get bent when it tries to claim his amazing suit of high-tech armor. He’s patriotic, loves the military, and views the bad actors of the world from a Reaganite position of moral confidence. In the original movie, he did what Hollywood has been painfully reluctant to do, ever since September 11: he flew over to the Middle East and took out the trash. This Atlas doesn’t shrug… he busts out repulsor beams and micro-missiles.

Socialism always seems to have a marketing advantage over capitalism.  This is not surprising, because socialism is a deeply romantic notion: a dangerously seductive dream of prosperity as a function of justice, where the wise redistribute the profits of the wicked to care for the needy.  Socialism’s promises are so alluring that questions about its poor performance are dismissed as rude.  It is a childish philosophy, and like any errant child, it receives a limitless supply of forgiveness and second chances.

And why do we have to pay for bread at all? We need basic foods to survive, far more urgently than we need health insurance. Maybe it would be better if the government took over the bread industry. Think of all the money wasted on packaging and advertising, which could be saved if the State distributed Obama Bread in plain white wrappers that said RYE or WHEAT in simple block lettering. Our wise politicians could then decide if all those different varieties of bread are truly necessary.

If you have studied the history of socialism and communism around the world, you know what the inevitable results of a nationalized bread industry would be: hungry people staring at dusty shelves containing a few expensive loaves of low-quality bread. Humanity has invented few weapons that kill people more efficiently than collectivist agriculture.

You might have decided your fellow men are rotten to the core, and you’re weary of their company. Listen to the music of Mozart, or look upon the work of Michelangelo, and consider the argument of those who profoundly disagree. Maybe part of your problem is that you’ve been listening to the wrong music, or looking at the wrong pictures. Dark waters are easy to drown in. The judgment of the human race will not lack witnesses for the defense, and they will make their case to you, if you give them a chance.

See also:
Victory Against Despair

It’s clear that the middle class is the great enemy of collectivism. Only they have the combination of voting power, money, and economic self-interest to see the growth of government as undesirable, and provide effective resistance. They generally view their interactions with government in a negative light – they’ve all spent time in the Department of Motor Vehicles mausoleum, spent hours wrestling with tax forms, or been slapped with a traffic citation they don’t think they deserved. They understand the inefficiency and emotional instability of government, and instinctively resent its intrusion into their lives. A health-care takeover is the best chance collectivists will ever have of persuading the middle class to vote itself into chains… but for the better part of a century, they’ve been able to hear the hammers of the State ringing on the metal of those chains, in the forges of taxation and regulation.

This is no time to become faint-hearted, or fussy about silly old documents written by long-dead white slaveholders who absent-mindedly forgot to add medical insurance as an “inalienable right.”

…

The rest of America has never properly thanked the people of Massachusetts for thirty years of Ted Kennedy’s wise Senate leadership. We should be willing to dig deep, and pay any price to keep Scott Brown from blocking the Kennedy legacy of total government power over the individual… especially since he would be doing it from a Senate seat he foolishly thinks is the property of America. The core belief of progressive thought, in the age of Obama, is that nothing belongs to anyone unless the government allows it. If Coakley wins on Tuesday, we will come one step closer to extending that principle over every cell in your body.

The only logical way to maintain the integrity of a vast, complex program designed to control a trillion-dollar industry is to dispense with the “representative” part of our government model. Those who seriously believe the State must control health care, which is tied into the bulk of our economy and technological development, should stop fooling around with half-measures of tyranny. If health care is truly a “human right” that must be provided “at any cost,” then take a cold, hard look at the tortured gestation of the rough beast slouching from Harry Reid’s office to be born… and understand that liberty, democracy, and representation must be sacrificed, as part of that cost.

The good Doctor is evoking Yeats’s “The Second Coming” (a short poem, so I present it in entirety):

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

The mythic ideal of Cincinnatus, the selfless citizen-legislator who reluctantly leaves his farm to serve the Republic, is incompatible with the combination of endless incumbency and gigantic amounts of government power. We are foolish to place our trust in a system that requires an impossible level of virtue from politicians to function as designed. A limited government can better protect the economic health of its citizens by policing corruption from the private sector, under the direction of term-limited representatives who will never become worth the risk of buying off.

What about the little guy? Doesn’t he benefit under benign socialist control? Of course not. He never has, anywhere on Earth, during the many times collective governments have gained power. The common man might realize some short-term gains when the socialist government marches into power – wow, free health care! It never lasts. It can’t. Socialist control destroys the very mechanisms of prosperity it needs to pay off on its promises.

Would that Doctor Zero (or Doctor Zaius, for that matter– anyone with a greater intellectual range than Sean Hannity) had interviewed Michael Moore last night. Hannity sought, like Wolf Blitzer on CNN, to emphasize Moore’s hypocrisy for campaigning against capitalism while unashamedly indulging in its benefits. Moore is not an idiot, and he has learned to dodge and deflect these kinds of attacks, or misdirect with mock bonhomie.

The interview that I want to see is somebody confronting Moore with the mountains of evidence that a) his ideas are not new, but rather a sloppier and more Twitter-friendly iteration of a collectivist impulse that dates back to antiquity; and b) these ideas are responsible for more death, misery and brutality than any other single idea for organizing society in the history of the world.

But again, Moore is not an idiot, and he’d never agree to that interview.

Government is a terrible senior partner for any industry, because it has only one thing to bring to the partnership, and that is compulsive force. Everything government does is an expression of force: it collects taxes under the threat of imprisonment or death, blocks access to markets through licensing, and changes the rules of market competition through regulation.