While American politicians and intellectuals have not reached the depths of tyrants such as Stalin, Hitler, and Mao Zedong, they share a common vision.

Tyrants denounce free markets and voluntary exchange. They are the chief supporters of reduced private property rights and reduced rights to profits, and they are anti-competition and pro-monopoly; they favor control and coercion by the state.

Those Americans now running Washington, along with their intellectual fellow travelers, believe they have superior wisdom and greater intelligence than the masses. They believe they have been ordained, forcibly if necessary, to impose that wisdom on the rest of us.

A tyrant’s primary agenda calls for the elimination or attenuation of the market. Why? Markets imply voluntary exchange, and tyrants do not trust that people behaving voluntarily will do what the tyrant thinks they should do. Therefore, they seek to replace the market with economic planning and regulation, à la those many failed Soviet fiveyear plans.

We Americans have evidently forgotten Thomas Paine’s warning that “Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.”

Although, as the late Norman Mailer once so eloquently said: “Left-wingers are incapable of conspiring because they are all egomaniacs,” left unchecked by the rest of us, those egos will be the ruin of us all yet.