Townhall
"Forward" to the Past?
By Thomas Sowell
Dec 19, 2012 

The political slogan "Forward" served Barack Obama well during this year's election campaign. It said that he was for going forward, while Republicans were for "going back to the failed policies that got us into this mess in the first place." 

It was great political rhetoric and great political theater. Moreover, the Republicans did virtually nothing to challenge its shaky assumptions with a few hard facts that could have made those assumptions collapse like a house of cards. 

More is involved than this year's political battles. The word "forward" has been a political battle cry on the left for more than a century. It has been almost as widely used as the left's other favorite word, "equality," which goes back more than two centuries. 

The seductive notion of economic equality has appealed to many people. The pilgrims started out with the idea of equal sharing. The colony of Georgia began with very similar ideas. In the midwest, Britain's Robert Owen-- who coined the term "socialism"-- set up colonies based on communal living and economic equality. 

What these idealistic experiments all had in common was that they failed. 

They learned the hard way that people would not do as much for the common good as they would do for their own good. The pilgrims nearly starved learning that lesson. But they learned it. Land that had been common property was turned into private property, which produced a lot more food. 

Similar experiments were tried on a larger scale in other countries around the world. In the biggest of these experiments-- the Soviet Union under Stalin and Communist China under Mao-- people literally starved to death by the millions. 

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