To the editor:

One need not search far to understand the ruinous rise in appeal of socialist ideas in our nation. The causes lie plainly in view for those with the courage to name them.

We have permitted an intellectual seduction within our own institutions. In countless classrooms, the principles that built our unparalleled prosperity are recast as instruments of oppression. The spectacularly tragic failures of the various flavours of Marxist collectivism — and there are many — are whitewashed, presented as well-intentioned experiments striving towards an altruistic utopia, while the engine of American enterprise, albeit imperfect, is caricatured as inherently selfish and cruel. Is it any wonder our youth, fed this steady diet of distortion, grow curious about the very poison they are sold as a remedy?

We also witness a stark irony. Many of us who have endured the bleak reality of socialist states — who have felt the boot heel of centralized control — arrive on the shores of this nation and, in a stunning act of forgetfulness, champion the very policies that impoverished our homelands. We seek the benefits without the brutal cost, blind to the fact that one man’s free lunch is always paid for with another man’s freedom. Thankfully, many others remember, and they stand as valuable witnesses against this dangerous amnesia.

Most critically, we suffer from a deep and widespread ignorance of how wealth is actually created. We have raised a cohort of armchair intellectuals, experts in theory but amateurs in life. People who have never met a payroll, never manifested the stupendous entrepreneurial courage to risk their own capital, and never set foot in a socialist country, feel perfectly qualified to dismantle the system that allows them the luxury of their critiques. It is the arrogance of abstract thinking over the wisdom of experience.

Finally, we must not ignore the deepest, darkest driver: envy. For all the talk of greed, it is often the quieter sin of envy that truly moves the world. It is the resentful desire not necessarily to build oneself up, but to tear another down. It is the mentality of the toddler that demands that if he cannot have a thing, then no one should. This bitter impulse of human nature provides the fertile emotional soil for socialist redistribution, dressing up personal resentment in the garb of public virtue.

The solution is not complicated, though it demands resolve. We must cleanse our educational system of this ideological rot. We must teach American civics and economic principles with unvarnished truth and patriotic temper. We must listen to those who have truly suffered under the alternative, and we must demand that our citizens understand that every gift from the government requires taking something from someone else.

The choice remains, as it always has, between the hard responsibility of liberty and the easy yoke of provision. As Milton said, “For indeed none can love freedom heartily, but good men: the rest love not freedom, but license.”

Nandan Pai

Plattsburgh