The Secret Knowledge

It is not that the Superstate will return one to the campfire, but that the fantasy of the Superstate seems more elegant than the simple arithmetic of the Free Market.

The Free Market is not a fantasy. We see its efficiency when the power goes out, when we are stranded in an airport, when we throng to the new exciting business down the block—the desire to exchange goods and services in order to increase individual happiness also increases group and societal happiness. The curtailment of that freedom leads to shortages, famine, and oppression. But its operation, and the demonstrability of its superiority to top-down control, cannot be embraced without forgoing the fantasy of the Return to Nature and the Campfire.

Friedrich Hayek, in The Road to Serfdom, called the view of the Free Market the Tragic View: that man is limited; that government is limited in its power to, justly, do more than take care of the infrastructure and adjudicate between conflicting claims according to a mutually agreed upon set of laws; that any may and many do misuse both the goodwill of their fellows and the laws themselves to gain immoral advantage; that elected officials are only human, and must be responsible first for their own election, with all that entails; that once elected they will look first to their reelection, which is to say to their own self- interest; that with residual time and energy and wisdom, they may address the social problems before them, but that even in so doing they are, being human, limited in wisdom and foresight. Laws, therefore, cannot be perfect, and all laws will of necessity discommode, anger, or in fact injure someone—that is what a law does. It takes two human behaviors, or wishes—two human approaches to the same problem—and chooses one.

Government is limited, as human foresight, wisdom, energy, time, and knowledge are limited. The Left holds as a path to Eden a large unfettered Government, a World Government, in fact. That any democracy is made of warring factions, each plumping for its own vision, does not escape the Left, but that any opposing faction may be a legitimate attempt to bring about the greater good, is, to them, a simple untruth. The Left insists on unity and indicts the Republicans, not one of whom in either house voted for the health care bill. How could they have increased this supposed good, “unity”—by ratifying a plan they found monstrous and destructive? The Left longs for the one-party state or dictatorship—this is of course not unity but slavery.

Does Man, then, desire slavery? This is the question Moses asked the Jews—the tragic answer being, time and again, “yes.” Can this desire be resisted? It can and it must. That’s why this country was founded.

Intelligent people may look at the excess of big corporations and be appalled by the lack of connection between the will of the shareholders and the operations of the business. They may be shocked by the out of control executive compensation. Why, they may ask, do the shareholders not take the control which is theirs? But these questioners, on the Left, will not ask the same question of that largest and most bloated of all corporations, the American Government. And well they might.

For our chief executive has just used his prerogatives to empty the treasury, and take on what may prove to be a level of debt lethal to the corporation he was hired to run.

What’s the difference?

There is no difference. We all know that though we may be unfit to manufacture a car, or plan a pharmaceutical campaign, we each feel capable of demanding an explanation of those in charge of businesses in which we have invested. But the Left does not feel this of our Government.

Why is the government different, in this regard? It is not magic, it cannot be other than an amalgamation of human beings just like you and me, some good, some bad, some smart, some not, and all liable to corruption or confusion by prerogative and power.

19

ADVENTURE SLUMMING

For Abbie Hoffman, as for the Mailer and Sartre, Castro’s appeal had much to do with the macho image, the condottiere on the white horse—or tank: “Fidel sits on the side of a tank rumbling into Havana on New Year’s Day . . . girls throw flowers at the tank and rush to tug playfully at his black beard. He laughs joyously and pinches a few rumps. . . . The tank stops in the city square. Fidel lets the gun drop to the ground, slaps his thigh and stands erect. He is like a mighty penis coming to life, and when he is tall and straight the crowd is immediately transformed.”

—Paul Hollander, Political Pilgrims: Travels of Western Intellectuals to

the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba, 1981

Let us squint for a moment, to see if we may blur the particulars and perceive a familiar outline in an unfamiliar act. A young wealthy woman puts on vaguely military garb and travels to a far-off, less-developed land to participate in adventure. She meets there the more primitive indigenous people, admires their hunting abilities, and, in fact, poses with one of their large guns, famous for having bagged many trophies.

Q. What is she doing? A. Going on Safari.

Essentially, yes. The woman, however, would be appalled had the big gun been used to kill an elephant. But it has not. It has been used to kill American fliers.

Jane Fonda’s Adventure Tourism is, then, incorrectly, identified not as a safari but as “Ending the War.”

This was a no-cost, exhilarating adventure, all the more attractive because it took place in the purlieus of danger, but contained no danger; and it could be described as “humanitarianism,” which is an edifying title, rather than “slumming,” which is perhaps less so.

Ms. Fonda did not choose to take her wish for adventure into the veldt, where, after all, the beasts might strike back, but to Hanoi in 1969. At the height of the Vietnam War—to pose with the enemy, secure in the knowledge that her (largely inherited) position would protect her from prosecution for what was, arguably, an act of treason.

In her reliance upon this protection she was, of course, availing herself of that same privilege and culture whose destruction she was endorsing in posing by the gun.

Her pilgrimage, as Mr. Hollander points out, was not unique. Intellectuals through the twentieth century have traveled to see the Potemkin Villages of Stalin’s “Workers Miracle,” the happy children of China, and the grinning, sun-drenched Campesinos of the Island Paradise. They have believed what they were shown.⁴⁵

From the Webbs, and Bertrand Russell, to Susan Sontag, Jane Fonda, Vanessa Redgrave, and various movie stars of our day, these happy dupes reward themselves for feeling superior to their own country, from which country they were free to travel, and to which they were free to return, while the smiling folk they visited were locked in slave states.

See also the brave actors who endeavored to boycott, and so close, the 2009 Toronto Film Festival because it offended by showing films from Israel.

This “visiting” and political pilgrimage differs from safari in that one does not here toy with danger. It more closely resembles the Victorian practice of “going among the poor.”