David Mamet - The Secret Knowledge

How can one live on air?

One cannot. And the recurrent Liberal call for Government control, for Welfare, Government bailouts, reparations, and confiscatory taxes, is nothing other than this transparent, silly claim. All life needs to consume. And to consume we must produce. The Government cannot produce, it can merely confiscate, intrude, and allocate according to some plan pleasant to the capacity or cupidity of the current officeholders.

Just as in any totalitarian state, the Government can and will explain its depredations, and the inattentive may endorse these blunt and transparent efforts as “humanitarian,” until the appearance of actual shortages is sufficient to discommode even those sufficiently privileged to have thought themselves immune from the Good Works.

But for anyone to consider himself immune requires a studied ignorance of both history and human nature.

One may smuggle in the food, the problem is to explain the accumulation of the effluvia: shortages, unemployment, and inflation.

What is the one institution which will not suffer through confiscation and the abrogation of the rule of law? Government.

Bill Clinton out of office will wax fat upon the various charity schemes bearing his name, and President Obama, on retirement, will proceed to his own particular dukedom.

Marie Antoinette suggested that the starving populace Eat Cake. She was reviled. But at least she understood that they had to eat something.With thanks to Ricky Jay.

32

THE STREET SWEEPER AND THE SURGEON, OR MARXISM EXAMINED

What are the interests of the people? Not the interests of those who would betray them. Who is to judge of those interests? Not those who would suborn others to betray them. The government is instituted for the benefit of the governed, there can be little doubt; but the interest of the government (once it becomes absolute and independent of the people) must be at variance with those of the governed. The interests of the one are common and equal rights: of the other, exclusive and invidious privileges.

—William Hazlitt, “What Is the People?,” 1817

A privileged adolescent may see the street sweeper and wonder why he is paid less for his job than is the doctor. As the sweeper’s job is both essential and disagreeable, perhaps, this young philosopher might muse, he should be paid as much, or perhaps even more.

This is Marx’s vision: from each according to his ability, to each according to his need, 87taken through one permutation, and substituting merit for needs. For today we may view the notion of a Government determining “needs,” as naïve—who would not exaggerate his needs if simply to do so would gain him more governmental largess? Further, we may, in our enlightenment, see that everyone has different needs—one may wish more leisure, another more pay, et cetera. But “merit” is an equally subjective concept, and, like need, its acceptance as a tool for the determination of desert merely empowers the judge.

“But what about,” this adolescent wonders, trying out his new toy: “ merit. Does not the street sweeper, as he also works and sweats, merit as much as the physician? Does not the performer of an unpleasant task merit as much as or more than one who works in comfort and with status? Must government not recognize the worth of this contribution, and do away with the inequality in the treatment of the lowly applicant?”

But the problem unrecognized by the privileged adolescent, the problem is not the term , but the equation; for the true horror of the equation is the tacit presumption of a mechanism to distribute services and goods. And what would that mechanism be, but the totalitarian state?

Acceptance of the notion that there exists an equation under which the State may fairly and honestly control human exchange leads the adolescent down the road of folly—increasing taxes to increase programs to increase happiness to allow equality—which ends in dictatorship.

For in the adolescent vision the street sweeper ceases to be a citizen and becomes an applicant, presenting himself to Government and demanding compensation based upon his “merit,” or “goodness,” as a member of society who contributes as much as the physician, but is treated, on payday, as less than equal.

The adolescent, in his imagination, stands at the side of the street sweeper, reminding him of his “equality,” and urging on him the courage to press his claim.

Justice is corrupted by consideration, not of whether or not the accused committed the crime, but of supposedly mitigating factors of his childhood, race, or environment. If weight is given, in extenuation, to his supposed goodness to animals or to his mother, he is then liable to leniency based not upon the needs of the citizenry (protection), but upon the criminal’s ability to dramatize his plight. If he may entertain, and play upon the emotions of the judge and jury, if he and his defenders may flatter the ability to “be compassionate,” and call it courage, society is weakened. Laws, then, decided upon in tranquility, without reference to the individual, and based upon behaviors, are cast aside or vitiated by reference to merit, fairness, or compassion, all of which are inchoate, subjective, and nonquantifiable.

It is not the Government’s job to determine what is “fair,” but to determine what is just—the only tools granted to it derive from a clear set of guidelines, the Law, designed first and last, to limit the power of government .

Possessing such a set of laws, the individual may have a reasonable expectation of freedom from Government intervention. As long as he abides by these laws, which under our Constitution apply not to classes of people but to classes of actions, he may plan and act in peace.

It is not the Government’s job to determine merit. Even if it were, upon what criteria? For we are not all-wise; Thalidomide was hailed as a wonder drug, the airplane and automobile scorned as toys.

We may say of the Framers that they did not account for the fact that some may have had an affluent childhood, or that it is more onerous to sweep streets than to manage hedge funds. That this is an oversight on the part of the Framers is clear to privileged adolescents. Unclear to them is the plight of anyone unskilled and desperate for a job, and the monstrous capacity of Government for destruction when indulging in “feelings” (see not only Affirmative Action, but the Japanese Internment, the Dred Scott decision, the idea of “hate crimes”).

The adolescent, the Marxist, and the Liberal Left dream of “fairness,” which can be brought about by the State, forgetting that, in order to pay the street sweeper and the physician the same, one must raise the wages of one or lower the wages of the other.

How can Government raise the wages of the street sweeper? Only by taxing its citizenry, which is to say only by overriding the societal decision that the skilled worker is entitled to higher pay than the unskilled.

This decision was never pronounced by Authority, nor blessed by any authority other than the free market. It was arrived at through interaction of human beings perfectly capable of ordering their own affairs; and this group decided, through innumerable interactions known as the Free Market, that some jobs should be better paid. Why? Because of the job holder’s education, because of his skill, or for no defensible reason whatsoever (for example, the shape of their chins). 88Is this folly? Would it be greater folly to allow the Government to decide the criteria by which newscasters were appointed?

In the newscaster we see the operation of the free market. Is it “fair” to pay him tens of millions of dollars because he has a square jaw? Who is to say?