David Mamet: The Secret Knowledge

81

Here is an example: Family members may hurt each other; it is impossible, in the intimacy of the family, not to transgress feelings, and, indeed, not to break laws. Family members might steal from each other, and the victim might feel anger, rage, disappointment, and similarly imaginable feelings. But that a disgruntled family member might denounce another to the IRS is beyond anathema.

We all understand the difference. Yet where is it written? The written law proceeds from the unwritten law. The unwritten law is worked out over millennia, through actual human interactions. It is learned through immersion in the unit-in-question: the country, the city, the profession, and, first and most importantly, the family.

This is why the Torah, the Five Books of Moses, is the story of a family, and how the lessons learned therein extend horizontally and vertically and construct the society. All dictators work first to destroy the family; the Liberal State, in its insistence upon secularization, globalism, “diversity,” and so on, apes this operation of a dictatorship.

82

Else we, the spectators (the electorate) are paying not to see how the teams progress, but how the ref feels on that particular day (legal activism).

83

See the Nazis’ insistence on involving as many as possible in the murder of the European Jews. Those who complied had burned their boats, inextricably wedding themselves to the Nazi cause, as to be conquered meant to risk execution as murderers.

84

Is the Government capable of funding actual innovation? It is disposed to fund only that which benefits the current officeholders. I tax the readers to supply instances to the contrary, and remind them that, for years, the Government has funded only that “science” which supports the fiction that the earth is warming, that it has marginalized or debunked information to the contrary, and that it has called this process, “research.”

85

See Government Healthcase (Obamacare). on the verge of bankrupting the country, and so attractive to the individual buyer that his failure to avail himself of it will be a Federal Crime.

86

Thomas Sowell cites the severe housing shortage in wartime San Francisco. At the conclusion of the war, the government restrictions on housing were lifted, and the housing shortage disappeared immediately, in spite of the influx of the returning servicemen.

87

The terrible danger of these formulations lies in the excision of the subject—“ the Government shall take from each according to his ability,” and “ the Government shall give to each . . .” etc.

88

The newscaster.

89

As they were once widely used to pay eugenicists—those “social scientists” who advised upon which classes of citizens should be sterilized in order to ensure a healthier population.

90

Note that however Marxist one may be, he, if he possesses the funds, is going to take his severely ill loved one to the best doctor he can find, putting aside, for the moment, the question of global inequality in compensation.

91

California has, for quite some time, had the highest taxes in the nation. Yet our schools are broke, and the citizenry has put on the ballot an initiative calling for a surtax to fund education. Where did all the previous money go?

92

Is this impossible? It is inevitable. If all medicine is under Government control, the good surgeon, unable to exercise the panache, initiative, intuition, and liberty which may have led him into the profession in the first place, will have no incentive to investigate further than the bad—his desire to spend more time with or use more facilities on a patient will be thwarted by the rules which the Government—in order to control costs— must install. To work harder, longer, and, so better than the less accomplished or inspired surgeon will not only be contrary to the terms of his employment, but may, should he persist, cost him his job. Should this seem outlandish, consider the horror tales of doctors not only dismissed but blacklisted by the HMOs which employed them. It is not that the inferior surgeon will be paid as much as the accomplished, but that the wages of the accomplished will be reduced to parity with his lesser colleague—and, as the wages are reduced, so will be the quality, inevitably, of his work, for he will be told that in spending more time he is wasting the Government’s money.

But what, you might ask, of that surgeon so inspired that he, irrespective of the strictures placed upon him by that Government which has, effectively, reduced him to the status of a medical clerk or technician, what if he, in the age-old spirit of the Hippocratic oath, “bootlegs,” his own time, and expends his own resources to bring a patient to health according to his best lights? Q. Is this not the essence of the Spirit of Medicine? A. It has been down through the ages, but the tradition, for the reasons above, must cease with Government control. Q. But what if the courageous surgeon, true to his creed, insists in this traditional dedication, in excess of that which the Government prescribes? A. Well, then, shouldn’t he be paid more?

93

See the Wisconsin union teachers calling in sick (lying) and employing their stolen treasure picketing the state capital for greater “rights.” Many wore T-shirts reading PROUD TO BE AN EDUCATOR.

94

Some will doubtless cavil that the above is merely a restatement of the Victorian canard that “every man should be happy in the place to which it has pleased God to call him.” To the contrary, it is the assertion that he be allowed the freedom to improve himself, the judge of his accomplishments or “worth” to be not the State, but those individuals, his fellow citizens, whom he has pleased with his goods and services. This may or may not be “fair,” but it is the basis of a just society.

95

Note that even if all elected officials were wise, patient, and capable of all discernment—if they were not the power-mad vote-mad corrupt or corruptible individuals all human history has shown them, in the main, to be—if these officials were actually able to determine solutions to the ancient and heretofore ineradicable problems of unfairness, poverty, greed, and envy—if they were sufficiently capable to supplant the rule of law with their own intuitions, and to codify these intuitions into plans, the plans would still be administered by the same functionaries we see today in Government jobs, with whom we have to deal, pleading, begging, asking, stunned, for justice, and for fairness in the application of the laws (which is to say, for that result we desire).

96

Is it not evident that any organization believing itself “too big to fail,” will more likely, indeed, inevitably, make disastrous decisions? Why should it not—it is Too Big to Fail. But the first rule of any healthy concern is prudence.

97

Thomas Sowell replies, to the canard of the Left, “Yes, but what would you replace it with?” “When a fire is extinguished, what do you replace it with?”

98

Statism must devolve into totalitarianism, as, the state’s power growing, political antagonists will find more commonality with each other than with those not invited to the party (the voters).

99

Correspondence from a friend: “I remember, as a student at Columbia, Mark Rudd and his ilk would storm the Dean’s office and burn our transcripts. Of course he never bothered to ask whether we wanted them burned or not.” (R.T., 2010) But it was change.

100

“Things change. The world’s best rapper is white, the best golfer is black, and France is accusing Israel of Colonialism.”—Jacob Dayan, Consul General of Israel to the United States