Chapter 8: Present-Day Collectivist Trends — Europe, Canada, and the United States
While the twentieth century’s most extreme collectivist regimes have largely collapsed, collectivist tendencies — in attenuated, democratic forms — continue to grow in the world’s most prosperous liberal democracies. This chapter does not equate today’s policies with Stalinist terror; the differences are profound. However, the philosophical thread — the subordination of individual rights and market freedom to collective goals defined and enforced by expanding state authority — deserves careful examination.
8.1 The European Union — Regulatory Collectivism
The European Union represents the most ambitious supranational governance project in history — a political and economic union of 27 nations in which an unelected bureaucracy in Brussels exercises increasing authority over member states’ economies, laws, and speech. The EU’s institutional structure raises genuine concerns about democratic accountability and individual freedom.
8.1.1 Economic Regulation
The EU regulatory apparatus produces approximately 2,000 new regulations annually. The European Commission, whose members are not directly elected by EU citizens, initiates all EU legislation. This ‘democratic deficit’ — the gap between regulatory authority and democratic accountability — mirrors, in a mild form, the collectivist pattern of expert-directed planning displacing market choice and individual preference.
VAT rates across EU nations average 21%. Combined with income taxes, social security contributions, and other levies, total tax burdens in many EU nations exceed 40–50% of GDP. France’s total tax burden reached 45.4% of GDP in 2022. High taxation redistributes wealth but also suppresses the investment, risk-taking, and entrepreneurship that generate wealth. Europe’s share of global technology companies — the primary wealth-generating sector of the modern economy — has declined dramatically relative to the United States and increasingly China.
8.1.2 Speech Regulation
The EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) and Digital Markets Act (DMA) require large online platforms to moderate content according to EU-defined standards, with fines of up to 6% of global annual turnover for non-compliance. Member state hate speech laws criminalize speech that would be fully protected under the U.S. First Amendment. Critics argue these laws represent a form of soft collectivism: state authority defining the boundaries of permissible thought and expression in the public square.
8.1.3 Energy Policy
The EU’s Green Deal aims to make Europe climate-neutral by 2050. While environmentally motivated, the implementation has involved banning internal combustion engine vehicles by 2035, restricting agricultural practices, and imposing energy costs that have contributed to deindustrialization. Germany’s Energiewende (energy transition), which shut down nuclear plants and increased dependence on Russian gas, led to an energy crisis following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and exposed the dangers of centralized energy planning disconnected from market realities.
8.2 Canada — Creeping Collectivism in the Commonwealth
Canada presents a troubling case study of collectivist governance accelerating under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (2015–2025). Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms is less robust than the U.S. Constitution’s protections — it allows rights to be limited by government when ‘justified in a free and democratic society,’ a broad escape clause.
8.2.1 The Emergencies Act (2022)
The most dramatic example of Canadian government overreach in recent decades was the Trudeau government’s invocation of the Emergencies Act during the Freedom Convoy trucker protests of February 2022. Protesters blockaded the Ambassador Bridge in Ottawa to protest COVID-19 vaccine mandates. The government’s response — freezing the bank accounts of protesters and donors without court orders, invoking powers never previously used in Canadian history and designed for wartime emergencies — alarmed civil libertarians across the political spectrum. The Parliamentary Review Committee later found the invocation unjustified.
| The Canadian government froze approximately 206 bank accounts holding C$7.8 million during the Freedom Convoy protests — doing so without judicial oversight and targeting individuals based on their political activities. The Bank of Canada Governor later acknowledged the action damaged trust in the financial system. |
8.2.2 Online Speech Regulation
Canada’s Bill C-11 (Online Streaming Act) and Bill C-18 (Online News Act) impose government authority over online content discovery and require news payment to media outlets. Bill C-63 proposed creating a new Digital Safety Commission with authority to compel content removal and impose significant fines. Critics from across the political spectrum noted that these bills granted government-aligned bodies unprecedented power over online expression.
8.2.3 Healthcare and Individual Choice
Canada’s single-payer healthcare system, while providing universal coverage, has produced significant problems: wait times for specialist care and surgical procedures are among the longest in the developed world. The Commonwealth Fund (2023) ranked Canada last among 11 high-income countries in timeliness of care. Prohibitions on private healthcare purchasing — which exist in most provinces — prevent individuals from spending their own money to escape the queue, a restriction that has no parallel in other wealthy democracies.
8.3 The United States — Domestic Collectivist Trends
The United States, founded on the most explicitly individualist constitutional principles in history, has seen significant collectivist drift, particularly since the early 2000s. This drift manifests in expanding federal regulatory authority, growing national debt (reflecting collective consumption financed through individual obligation), and increasingly collectivist rhetoric in elite institutional culture.
8.3.1 Federal Debt and Fiscal Collectivism
The U.S. national debt surpassed $35 trillion in 2024 — approximately $107,000 for every American citizen. Deficit spending represents an implicit tax on future individuals (and their productivity) to finance present collective consumption. The Federal Reserve’s monetary expansion following the 2008 financial crisis and the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic produced the most significant inflation since the 1970s, which functioned as a regressive tax disproportionately harming lower-income Americans.
| U.S. NATIONAL DEBT (2024) | Over $35 trillion | Interest payments: $1 trillion/year | Debt-to-GDP ratio: ~123% |
8.3.2 Regulatory Expansion
The Federal Register — the daily journal of U.S. government regulations — published 97,110 pages in 2023. The regulatory state encompasses thousands of agencies whose rules have the force of law despite never being passed by elected legislatures. Regulatory capture — where industries effectively control the agencies meant to regulate them — compounds the problem by entrenching incumbent interests at the expense of market competition and consumer welfare.
8.3.3 Identity Collectivism in Institutional Culture
A notable form of collectivism emerging in American institutions — universities, corporations, media, and government — is the increasing primacy of group identity over individual merit. Policies that make employment, educational admission, or government contracting depend on racial, gender, or other group membership reflect collectivist reasoning: the group’s statistical representation is the measure of justice, not the treatment of individuals on their own merits. This echoes, in a milder register, the logic of racial and class collectivism that historically preceded more destructive manifestations.
8.3.4 Historical Parallels and Important Distinctions
It is essential to state clearly: current American policy debates bear no resemblance to Stalinist terror or Nazi genocide in their severity. The parallels are philosophical, not behavioral. The same collectivist premise — that individual rights are subordinate to group needs as defined by state authority — appears in both mild democratic redistribution and violent totalitarianism. The premise does not lead inevitably to the totalitarian conclusion; constitutional safeguards, democratic institutions, civil society, and cultural norms intervene. But vigilance requires recognizing the premise wherever it appears.
About the Author
