The Secret Knowledge

of people; and distribute them to Class B of people.

This, with the underlying nature of the exhortation exposed, is a parsing of Marx’s doctrine. Operationally, it seeks to give all powers to the State. Now, why would the adolescent want to substitute merit for need? (It is an equally destructive, and, finally, absurd construction.) Because he is less concerned with the magical terms than with the unstated postulate of the formula—the hidden exhortation to empower the State. Why is he less concerned? Because he imagines himself, his like, or his representatives as the State. His position, though it presents itself as a defense of “humanity” is a fantasy of power.

Absent in the contemporary Liberal worldview is the understanding that things go wrong.

Corporations grow, and (like any agglomeration—a business, a family, an industry), make choices which can prove good or bad. That which is productive today may, if persisted in, prove destructive tomorrow (for example, the New Economy, tail fins on cars, tobacco cultivation, busing, the new math). We, neither as individuals, nor as groups, are perfect. The business which makes terrible decisions will correct itself or will and must be allowed to fail. The current government and (marginally) popular sentiment to support failing enterprises are both examples of a creeping Statism—which is the surrender of individual choice to the State—Constitutionally barred by law from abrogating the rights of the individual—chief among them the right to fail.⁹⁶

The Left might say of a failed corporation “tear it down, throw the so-and-so’s out, they are corrupt and incompetent and waste our money”; but this is the system which already operates under the title “free enterprise.” The next step, that which leads toward Statism and dictatorship is “and give the operation of the thing over to the Government.”

This might seem defensible on the grounds of “compassion,” as folks will be thrown out of work. But it neglects the fact that the Government is just another organization, liable to the same misjudgments, corruptions, and incompetencies of any others. With this addition: it has the power to legislate or otherwise enforce its continued existence, a power that is, ultimately, backed up by people with guns. Replacing free enterprise with state control does not do away with failure and mismanagement, but merely removes from it the possibility of self-correction.

Why are taxes high? To fund programs proved failures decades ago, and to spawn new programs to correct the errors their predecessors proved incapable of addressing. But the fault was not the nature of those previous programs but their systemic inability not only to affect, but to name affectable goals.⁹⁷

Government is only a business. Past the roads, defense, and sewers, it sells excitement and self-satisfaction to the masses, and charges them an entertainment tax, exacted in wealth and misery. It cannot make cars, or develop medicines. How can it “abolish poverty” (at home or abroad), or Bring About an End to Greed or Exploitation? It can only sell the illusion, and put itself in a position where it is free from judgment of its efforts. It does this, first of all, by stating inchoate goals, “change, hope, fairness, peace,” and then indicting those who question them as traitors or ogres; finally, it explains its lack of success by reference to persistent if magical forces put in play by its predecessors and yet uneradicated because of insufficient funding.

Should the government support an opera singer whose performances no one attends? (Government funding of the Arts.) Allowing nature to take its course would cause his handlers, manager, coaches, and assistants to seek other employment. One might extend to them compassion, as would any of us (the majority) who have ever been out of work; but do those incommoded by the lack of success on the part of their opera singer have a claim on our tax dollars? Then why do the members of the auto industry or those who have made bad or unlucky judgments financially?

Brief consideration would suggest that the state cannot deal equally with all claims for support, that it must choose. On what basis, other than “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”? That handy slogan which, in its attractive lack of specificity, led to the death and enslavement of hundreds of millions under Communism.

Further thought would reveal that once government is the only business, the final opportunities for failure to be corrected will disappear—whatever party is in power. If the state has assumed all power to distribute funds, its apparatchiks become the one Party, which will never allow itself to be cleansed and corrected by failure. Funds will, finally, be allocated, whatever slogan is used to obscure the process, according to the need and desires of the politicians. How could it be otherwise?⁹⁸

Successful politicians look forward to their retirement plan, which healthy plan is their transmigration into the favorite daughters and sons of those businesses they may have pretended to regulate during their years in office, the most flagrant Socialist then becoming, magically, a fan of capital.

33

SELF-EVIDENT TRUTH

He ought to have determined that the existing settlement of landed property should be inviolable; and he ought to have announced that determination in such a manner effectually to quiet the anxiety of the new proprietors, and to extinguish any wild hopes which the old proprietors might entertain. Whether, in the transfer of great estates, injustice had or had not been committed, was immaterial. That transfer, just or unjust, had taken place that to reverse it would be to unfix the foundations of society. There must be a time of limitation to all rights. After thirty-five years of actual possession, after twenty-five years of possession solemnly granted by statute, after innumerable leases and releases, mortgages and devises, it was too late to search for flaws in titles.

—Macaulay, The History of England (on Ireland), 1848

The basis of American Democracy is stated as a self-evident truth, that all men are created equal. If that truth is not self-evident, which is to say, if it is not held as dearly as any other moral imperative, there is no American Democracy.

One of the great wrongs of our democracy was the Dred Scott decision. Here the highest court in the land asserted its right to contravene the Declaration of Independence, and assert, as self- evident, that there existed two classes of human beings, the Black and the White, and that the Black was not entitled to protection of the Law.

How does this differ from Affirmative Action?

The motive of Justice Taney in Dred Scott was, like those wishing “Distributive Justice,” based on an incontrovertible view of the universe. That the chief justice’s view was the upholding of Black chattel slavery, and that of the contemporary Left an “equal distribution of goods” is beside the point; each is based upon the absurdity that there are two classes of people and that they may be distinguished by the color of their skins.

Lincoln wrote that if slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.