SACRAMENTO, CA - Confessions are rare in public life, particularly from those fond of advancing grand designs. But utopian types can sometimes confess without knowing it, as in a recent piece from the editor of In These Times, America’s leading socialist publication.

Senior Editor David Moberg hailed the 30th birthday of the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA) by producing a worshipful piece. Moberg portrays OSHA as the embattled savior of the American worker, busy saving thousands of lives while fending off attacks from evil corporations. We should be thankful for OSHA, he says, and strengthen it.

Actually, we shouldn’t do either. As anyone who has ever had to deal with this outfit knows, OSHA is one of the more arrogant and intrusive bureaucracies. It is staffed not by those with experience in running a productive workplace but by professional enforcers, anti-business ideologues, and the usual assortment of government employees, all with a vested interest in expanding the regulatory regime.

Unelected by the people and unaccountable to the taxpayers, OSHA bosses can virtually shut down a business on the slightest trifle. Be assured that if they show up at your operation, they will find some violation, if only on the grounds of job security. Now they want to come into your home, to make sure your technique for clicking a mouse does not leave you crippled for life. A good case can be made that OSHA’s ongoing inquisition should be shut down entirely. The praise of OSHA, meanwhile, should be seen in context.

The quest of the American Left has been to create a better world in which poverty, hunger, disease, and crime are eliminated, and all anxieties tranquilized. Their means for this transformation is the continual expansion of the state, rule by Wise Government Planners, who Know Better Than You, and with the power to make their will prevail.

That vision caused the American Left to see the former USSR as an essentially politically-correct system, whose difficulties could be blamed on a few misguided leaders and bad weather. As Paul Hollander documented in Political Pilgrims, the American Left showered praise on every Third World socialist regime, from Cuba and Nicaragua to Vietnam, Ethiopia, and Tanzania, hailing them as lessons for America, and their leaders as a combination of Gandhi, Einstein, and Martin Luther King. On virtually every point, they were wrong.

The USSR turned out to be planned poverty, unable to feed itself. Third world socialism inflicted poverty, misery, and death on a massive scale. As Hayek noted, no individual or group of people has the wisdom and foresight to run an entire society. As Hayek also noted, under socialism the worst rise to the top. From Fidel Castro to Col. Mengistu, history has revealed the leaders hailed by the American Left are actually a tawdry squad of buffoons, crooks, sadists, and murderers.

Since no foreign regime or leader has taken their place, the American Left is now without a utopia. That is why its publications are now reduced to praising bureaucracies such as OSHA, calling for yet more costly government intrusion into private life, and still retaining the arrogant notion that this constitutes progress. Their time has come and gone, and in a new millennium there is not the slightest reason for any policymaker to give them credence.

-K. Lloyd Billingsley