David Mamet - The Secret Knowledge

What are we purchasing with our taxes?

What is Big Government but the Executive’s cocaine dream, an activity devoted solely to jockeying for position, in which he may find license for malversation, and may take the company treasury and direct it toward those people who will support his continued incumbency—it is within the law. Its street name is “earmarks,” but it is theft. Of your money and mine.

The problem is, as with the movie business, not with the identity of placeholders, but with the jobs themselves.

The San Fernando Valley is littered with office campuses housing the executives who supposedly “make” the movies. Many of these buildings occupy space which was, formerly, the lot on which actual movies were once made.

Mismanagement (by labor, capital, and our benevolent government) has driven the actual movie business out of California, and, to the largest extent, out of the country.

What would happen to the movie business if these office campuses and their inhabitants were all to disappear tomorrow?

Nothing.

It is not just that a movie studio could be run by one person with a cell phone, in the back of a limo—that is how they are run. The accreted bureaucracy serves the Executive as a Royal Court, 37but, like the Big Government it strives to emulate, it makes nothing but waste. It just exists and grows and grows.

Government is the ultimate bureaucracy, from which has been abstracted not only responsibility for the product, but the product itself.

The price is paid not by the consumer (of what? there is no product) but by Government’s victims —those taxed—and many taxed literally out of existence—by the bureaucrat’s unchecked ability to rape the treasury in buying support for his position, his good ideas, or his reelection.

The difference between the Liberal and the Conservative lies, in the main, in the level of abstraction of thought. The Liberal assumes he differs from his opponent on the identity of the person holding the job, and on the content of that person’s proposals. The Conservative cannot persuade him to see the problem differently: that it is the job itself which must be eliminated. The difference is one not of doctrine, but of philosophy.

The worker on the assembly line, on the movie set, and you and I have the same reaction when the Bureaucrats come slumming by: “If the goddamn Suits would finish their tour, stop nodding wisely, and go away, perhaps I might be able to get the job done.”

I received, from an auction house, a notice of the auction of a Glenn Curtiss 1915 seaplane. It is, I think, one of the most beautiful objects I have ever seen. Its hull is mahogany in a series of gentle steps, allowing it to plane on the water. It is a pusher biplane—its engine mounted behind the pilot and pushing backward. Its wings and tail structure are aluminum. It seats two. It looks as if it were designed by Brancusi; indeed, it was designed by his equal.

The aircraft business, around this time, a mere decade after Kitty Hawk, was largely the domain of producers and designers not far removed (if removed at all) from the workshop garage.

Planes were made (as Nevil Shute observes in Slide Rule ) largely from wood, with canvas-covered wings; and it cost little to retool. A fellow with a saw could design and build his own plane, buying or modifying a cheap gasoline engine to power it. 38

This early aircraft business resembled that of the shade-tree mechanics who, in building hot rods, gave rise, then as now, to true advances in automobile design. See also the chopper shops of California, and their influence on the world of motorcycling.

A list of these shade-tree mechanics includes the Wrights, Cyrus McCormick, Henry Ford, Tesla, Tom Edison, Meg Whitman, Bill Gates, Burt Rutan, and Steve Jobs. How would they and American Industry have fared had Government gotten its hands upon them at the outset—if it had taxed away the capital necessary to provide a market for their wares; if it had taxed away the wealth , which, existing as gambling money, had taken a chance on these various visionaries? One need not wonder, but merely look around at the various businesses Government has aided. And now it has taken over health care.

15

THE INTELLIGENT PERSON’S GUIDE TO SOCIALISM AND ANTI-SEMITISM

Socialism and “Social Justice” are a sort of Sunday religion, professed one day a week for many good and bad reasons, but suspended during and due to the pressures of the workweek. One may bemoan the plight of the Palestinians, who have elected a government of terrorists and daily bomb their neighbor to the West, but we realize that any support past the sentimental is elective: we do not want to live there, nor to go there, and we blink at the knowledge that monies spent in their support may be diverted to the support of terror, and of organizations pledged not only to kill all the Jews, but to kill Americans and Westerners of all faiths.

Where does sympathy stop, and where may it not become sanctimony and hypocrisy?

Our American plane has been forced to land at some foreign airport, by the outbreak of World War III. It will not be allowed to depart. Two planes are leaving the airport; we must choose which we want to board. One plane is flying to Israel and one to Syria, and we must choose.

That’s where sympathy stops.

No one reading this book would get on the plane to Syria. Why? It is a despotism, opposed to the West, to women, to gays, to Jews, to free speech. It is a heinous Arab version of National Socialism, dedicated to the murder of every person in Israel. And yet one may gain status or a feeling of solidarity by embracing the “Arab cause.” 39

But we embrace it only as an entertainment. In the free market, which is to say, when something is at stake, we will vote otherwise.

My interest in politics began when I noticed that I acted differently than I spoke, that I had seen “the government” commit sixty years of fairly unrelieved and catastrophic errors nationally and internationally, that I not only hated every wasted hard-earned cent I spent in taxes, but the trauma and misery they produced; and yet, I thought “the government” was good. What case could I point to to support my feelings? The Emancipation Proclamation and the Voting Rights Act. Then I would have to stop and think.

It was, of course, easier to worship my own capacity for “good thinking” than actually to think, which is to say to compare my actions with their results. But I tired of it. I tired of hearing Israel condemned by Americans, and hearing Americans condemned by Europeans.

I prefer the company of those who are proud of their country, and proud of their religion—the African Americans have it right, the American Liberal Jews are wrong; there is neither beauty, utility nor safety in identification with one’s oppressors.

Liberalism is a religion. Its tenets cannot be proved, its capacity for waste and destruction demonstrated. But it affords a feeling of spiritual rectitude at little or no cost. Central to this religion is the assertion that evil does not exist, all conflict being attributed to a lack of understanding between the opposed.

Well and good, but this does not accord with the experience of anyone.

People have differing needs. The notion that an honest exchange of views will solve all problems is an article of faith ; which, like many another, is suspended in our daily lives.