Liberal-progressives are enthralled with imposing collectivist regulation to satisfy their religion’s “feel-good” agendas.

But the cost of liberal-progressive worship of collectivist abstractions is great. Diverting limited economic resources into less important or less effective uses, inherent in the straitjacket of government regulation, impoverishes the world with lower output. It also results in the loss of innovation inherent in the liberty of millions of individuals to experiment and discover the most effective and least costly ways to solve problems. Liberal-progressive-socialism’s claim that government bureaucrats are better at administering the economy than “greedy” individual workers and private businessmen is repeatedly belied by experience.

A front-page article in today’s Wall Street Journal highlights the latest fiasco engendered by liberal-progressivism. Under the headline Food Inflation, Riots Spark Worries for World Leaders, the Journal reports:

Diverting agricultural production into growing corn for ethanol has reduced other food supplies, with the inevitability of higher prices for lesser amounts of foods grown on the reduced acreage not devoted to ethanol production. In addition, every gallon of ethanol produced requires the use of almost two gallons of gasoline. Rather than reducing our dependence upon oil, ethanol production sharply increases the use of petroleum, adding upward pressure on the price of the world’s major energy source, increasing food prices still more.

This counterproductive effect is typical of liberal-progressivism, which inherently is limited to a one-dimensional view of political and economic society. Liberal-progressivism is prone to the quick, grand, symbolic gesture, without careful consideration of the manifold effects of imposed policies. Liberal-progressivism is a religion that finds its trade-mark expression in mindlessness mob demonstrations in the streets, calculated to rush legislative bodies into quick-fix enactments.

Above all, liberal-progressivism is a religion that abhors the idea of individual responsibility and the vastly greater wisdom inherent in the independent actions of tens of millions of individuals planning and reacting to events where the rubber meets the road.

As former liberal-progressive Senator Bill Bradley said, liberals always prefer the bureaucrat whom they know to the individual whom they can’t control.

In the case of world food prices, ivory-tower liberal-progressive intellectuals and politicians have, in smug satisfaction, starved the world’s poor to gratify their own self-importance. Worshipping their philosophically materialist goddess of Reason, they are delighted to behold in self-admiration their own images each day in the mirror, believing themselves to be the saviors of abstract intellectual conceits called “humanity” and “the planet.”

Thomas E. Brewton is a staff writer for the New Media Alliance, Inc. The New Media Alliance is a non-profit (501c3) national coalition of writers, journalists and grass-roots media outlets.