As this is my last column of this century and this millennium, I thought that I would do a little looking back over the century. Before I look back though, I thought that I would start with a few definitions of the word "millennium." Of course, we know that millennium means a period of a thousand years, but it also refers to the thousand years that Christ’s Kingdom on Earth or Heaven on Earth will last. My dictionary states that it also refers to any period of happiness or beneficial government. The thesaurus with Microsoft’s Word gives the word "utopia" as a replacement for millennium.

Utopia. That is just what Karl Marx and his followers were hoping to establish. This past century saw the establishment of Marxist governments and societies in all parts of the world. First was Russia in 1917. The Russians, with the certainty of their moral superiority, knowing that they had God, no, make that "History" on their side, killed millions upon millions of their own citizens.

Not content to enjoy their Heaven on Earth in their own part of the world and convinced that their Utopia would not be obtained until the whole world submitted to Marxism, the Russians began to export Marxism. With the division of Europe at the end of World War II, the eastern Europeans were the next to come under Marxist control. China, North Korea, North Vietnam and others followed. Only ninety miles from the U.S. coast, Cuba succumbed to the Marxist vision of Heaven on Earth when Castro overthrew Batista in 1959.

Utopia. Leon Trotsky, one of the leaders of the Soviet Revolution, and later murdered by Stalin’s thugs, wrote that when the world was ridded of private property, the deserts would bloom and become productive farmland and there would be no hunger. Sounds like a place one would like to get to, that the only locks would be to keep people out, not to keep them in. But those were just the sort of locks these Utopias have had. People were shot fleeing eastern Europe. People are still fleeing Cuba. We have all watched and read the story of the boy who spent days in the Gulf in a life vest and whose mother and stepfather lost their lives trying to escape Castro’s piece of heaven.

Utopia. A beneficial government. A long period of happiness. It was the end of that long period of happiness, that beneficial government, that had all of those East Germans wailing with sorrow when the East German rulers lost their resolve to keep their people enslaved to the state—excuse me—happy.

The problem, of course, is that humans cannot create Utopia, cannot create Heaven on Earth. Humans cannot make that happen. Humans certainly cannot do it by evangelizing the world, converting others to Utopia by the sword.

The Marxist’s Utopia was destined to fail. Marxism has two fatal flaws that keep it from working. First, by destroying private property and people receiving based on their "needs," Marxists destroyed incentives for anyone to produce the things that others want. People would have to be saints to produce for the good of others in need, alone.

Second, even if people were such saints, in a Marxist society, there is no mechanism for finding out what others want. At this time of year, we know how hard it is to get something for someone that will make them happy, and this is for people that we know well. Think how hard it would be for Bill Clinton or Trent Lott or some faceless bureaucrat in Washington to figure out what you really value besides money.

Just as fences make for good neighbors, private property and private markets help us live together. Markets and private property are not about creating Utopia, but about getting along with one another and leaving each other to pursue our separate dreams. They are about peace, not hurting one another.

And I don’t know about you, but I would rather chase my own dreams than live in a hellish Utopia fashioned by the some professor at Harvard or Yale or Oxford. I’d rather wait for the Real Thing.