How Socialism Erodes Liberty When Common Sense Is Forgotten

Many of mankind’s miseries are self-inflicted, resulting from forgotten lessons and repeated mistakes. We start blaming others, indulge passion, admire a problem, and only fix it at the last minute. National and Maine politics illustrate the point. Only in deep trouble do we use common sense.

I am reminded of the logging truck that, some years ago, got stuck under a Maine truss bridge and would not budge. Clearance was 14 feet, six inches. The overloaded truck smacked the steel webbing, wedging the big truck under the bridge tighter than a door shim with a hammer.

In political terms, we are that stuck – not knowing we would be. We are at an impasse, forgetting common sense, hard work, accountability, and faith, indulging “utopia,” endless spending, concentrated power for Nirvana, reckless freebies, and class warfare, in a word, “socialism.”

If humans lived for hundreds of years, we might never suffer socialist regress. But we forget. We would not fall into old errors, allow liberties to be stripped by socialism. We would remember the National Socialist Workers’ Party (Nazis), Marxist-Leninist Socialism (Soviet), Maoist Socialism (China), Collectivism (Cuba), Islamist Socialism (Iran), and Eco-Socialism (trees over people). These are all excuses for elevating centralized control, with proportionally less liberty.

Unfortunately, Mankind’s attention span shrinks faster than our lifespan grows, so universal forgetting is now dangerously common, and common sense dangerously uncommon.

Socialism – promoted in soft words, with soft faces – is overtaking the nation.

The result will be universal regret, the death of distilled common sense, capitalism, hard work, accountability, millennia of Christian and Jewish principles. In place of reason, work, honesty, and faith will be centralized power, control by ruthless, intolerant, self-assured elites.

That is where we are headed; look around. This is why – in places like Maine – hundreds of leftist mandates on towns and schools force property taxes to intolerable levels; income taxes are repeatedly raised for class warfare, redistribution of wealth, the tax base is fleeing; energy costs driven higher y eco-socialism (forced solar and wind subsidies); illegal immigration mandated together with free housing, medical care, no law enforcement; thousands of corrupt state contracts with zero accountability. That is why education is becoming public indoctrination.

Socialism is a failed experiment, always mandating that life be controlled by government, until you no longer have the freedoms you once had. It eventually punishes free speech, worship, and self-defense; comes to regulate your frog pond; persecutes non-conformity (as with a lobsterman-legislator recently); and attacks whistleblowers (e.g., foster care, child care, home care fraud).

To be clear, socialism is rising, intending to ratchet up control, inflicting enough chaos to justify the hammer fall, permitting concentrated power to oppress dissident (freedom-loving) views for class warfare – the opposite of our American Dream, upward mobility, due process, free markets.

If you doubt me, hear Winston Churchill. “Socialism is the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy.”

“The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.” In a socialist country, equality of outcome is it. If one person gets a cow, the cow must be killed, so all are equal.

Wrote Churchill: “Socialism is inseparably interwoven with totalitarianism…abject worship of the State…and no socialist system can be established without a political police.” Non-conformity is not tolerated; control over the individual is key.

After defeating one form of socialism (Nazis), he warned of a second (Soviets). “Socialism wants to pull down wealth…socialism seeks to kill enterprise.”

Ironically, ten years before the Soviet Union came to be and 32 years before WWII, young Churchill gave a warning speech: “Socialism is like a dream…sooner or later you wake up to reality…Socialism is an attack on the right to breathe freely.”

Bottom line: In 2026, in America and Maine, a critical decision lies before voters – allow the misery of expanding government control – socialism – or reject it in favor of personal freedom, responsibility, and the equal opportunity to succeed.

Many of mankind’s miseries are self-inflicted, resulting from forgotten lessons and repeated mistakes. We need to stop making the mistake of thinking socialism is benign. It is not. It represents misery.

Remember that logging truck? Wedged in the steel webbing of a truss bridge? A little Maine boy suggested letting air out of the tires. It worked - common sense.