Beginning around the turn of the century, though, a great many Americans began to abandon the individualistic principles that had served them so well. By the start of the 1930s, the primitive concept of statism, dominant throughout the monarchist age in Europe, began to re-emerge under the guise of "social progressivism." As a result, bureaucracy grew, life became less meaningful, peace became the exception, and that vital spirit of individualism faded in face of the burgeoning welfare state.

"The individual means less and less, mass and collectivity more and more - and so the net of servitude which hems in personal development becomes ever denser, more closely meshed, and inescapable," wrote Wilhelm Ropke, some 40 years ago in his great classic, A Humane Economy.1 He saw all too clearly the horrible changes that were sweeping over the Western world as a result of collectivism and bureaucratism.

The fundamental question we face now is: Can the philosophy of individualism survive, or is it to wither away under the ever swelling shadow of a monster government and the womb-to-tomb security its social engineers are forcing upon us? Must we passively accept being wards of the state, or do we still possess enough of the spirit that founded America to recapture our basic rights? Do we still value freedom, or is it really state regimentation that we seek down deep in some craven corner of our souls?

If a free America is to be preserved then the first and greatest enemy of freedom must be contested. And that is the notion that freedom is no longer possible in a modern world, that individualism as a philosophy of life is a relic of the past. We hear it everywhere. In fact, we're bombarded by such pronouncements from the time we first go to school.

"Individualism was a good thing in its day," we're told, "but it's no longer workable." A growing flood of socioeconomic studies pours forth from the nation's universities proclaiming to Americans that, while a free market is certainly productive, the underlying fundamentals of laissez-faire capitalism were nefariously unsound. Thus we must move toward a more "public spirited," a more "nationally planned" social structure.

Such appeals speak soothingly to us, with benign and futuristic phrases: "new social vistas," "the upcoming challenges of America's third century," "the necessity to build a modern era of co-operation between the greatness of government and the productivity of the business world." It all sounds very progressive, very necessary. The world is changing, and therefore America must change also. A laissez-faire economy is just not applicable to modern times. "We cannot afford the anarchy of the capitalist system," explain the experts.

"Individualism may have worked fine in a frontier society, but not in a modern technological society. " And we obediently clasp such fateful declarations to our bosom without so much as an afterthought.

Should it not be obvious by now, though, in light of the world's present catastrophic economic convulsions, that it is actually the other way around-that it is actually socialism and welfarism that cannot work in a modern technological society? Witness the all-encompassing collapse of socialist principles in the USSR and Eastern Europe as viable means of societal organization. Witness the "democratic socialism" that has kept India starving for decades, with its people subjected to endless turmoil, demoralizing uncertainty and ruthless power grabs. Witness the pathetic stagnancy of Sweden this past century, into a somnolent nation of collectivist poltroons, now staggering under the debilitating taxation and bureaucratic servitude that their "state welfarism" has generated.

During the past 80 years, every nation in the civilized world, that has adopted either socialism or welfarism as its form of political-economic organization, has incurred deterioration and chaos in every conceivable area of life. Inflation has plagued their economies, distorting their marketplaces and eroding the value of their currencies. A silent and sickly moroseness has settled over the lives of their young (for who can find pleasure in living when the state determines the limits of one's dreams?) Real prosperity has diminished. True freedom is gone. Joy and exuberance and the zest that life should hold for all is non-existent.

In the more primitive parts of the Third World, the record is even worse. Barbarism and tyranny, of a sort that Americans can scarcely fathom, are commonplace. Poverty lingers. Illiteracy, disease, inhumanity, and regimentation overwhelm everyone visiting such "collectivist paradises."

Why has this happened? As predicted long ago by Ludwig von Mises, socialist systems cannot calculate prices because they obliterate the entrepreneur, and thus they have no means to rationally determine supply and demand. Thus they have no power to produce either a quantity or quality of productive goods. Because they are devoid of the incentives that result from private property, socialist countries can bring forth only shabbiness and squalor - or their subjects will produce only enough to keep themselves out of trouble. So the great collectivist "ideal" of the political left, that was to transform the world into a technological Eden where all men can live in harmony without worrying about such grubby pursuits as earning a living, has not materialized. In fact precisely the opposite has come about.

With the dramatic collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the fading of Communist Party control over Eastern Europe, the ideology of socialism was dealt, in many Western eyes, a devastating death blow. But a closer look reveals that socialism is merely reforming its basic goals into a more salable ideological framework.

Incredibly the purveyors of forced collectivity in Europe and America still cling to their dream of merging Eastern socialism and Western capitalism into an authoritarian World Welfare State, where equality of conditions for everyone is implemented. Still they proclaim that mankind must continue on to build the collectivist ideal; it just has to be along more "democratic lines." Still they proclaim that free markets and coercive bureaucracies must merge, that with just a little more time, a little more taxation, a little more regulation, humanity will one day realize the collectivist paradise. What is needed is not the extreme version of Marxism, but a more moderate "middle way" in the manner of Sweden. But to consider individualist capitalism is impossible. People must relinquish the direction of their lives to oligarchic bureaucrats and professorial elites, who are so much more "qualified" to determine how we are to live. When all this has come to pass, mankind will surely have found the egalitarian kingdom.

Even in face of collectivism's squalor and despair, most pundits of the West still believe this failed ideology retains some semblance of idealism, needing only a few "theoretical adjustments."

But collectivism's ineptitude does not lie in the depravity of its rulers, or the absence of purchasing power, or lack of time to prove itself. It lies in the overwhelming irrationality of its basic conception of life. Men are not meant to live in subservience to the commands of the state. They are meant to live as the Founding Fathers of America decreed: as free and responsible beings, with obedience to neither King nor mass opinion, but to "the laws of Nature and of Nature's God."
For those who wish to prosper and find their way toward a meaningful existence, that gives back a richness of reward for one's efforts, there is only one vehicle with which to bring about such values: the philosophy of individualism and its marketplace of liberty. The whole history of the past 800 years in the West stands as testament to such a truth.