Mamet: Govt. should NOT enslave us

by CalWatchdog Staff | January 27, 2013 8:42 am

[1]Jan. 27, 2013

By John Seiler

I got some pretty good response to my article, “Brown official: You’re our slave[2].” I was attacking the statement by Gil Duran, Gov. Jerry Brown’s press secretary, “We have to look beyond our personal interests to where we are going as a society.”

I wrote, “Translation: As a taxpayer, you’re the slave of government.”

I just found an article with a similar theme to mine by David Mamet, the writer and director. He’s been moving to the right for some years. In the liberal Village Voice in 2008, he wrote, “Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal[3].'”

His latest, for Newsweek no less, “Gun Laws and the Fools of Chelm[4],” worth reading in full. He doesn’t pull any punches and at the top brings up Socialist No. 1:

“Karl Marx summed up Communism as ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.’ This is a good, pithy saying, which, in practice, has succeeded in bringing, upon those under its sway, misery, poverty, rape, torture, slavery, and death.

“For the saying implies but does not name the effective agency of its supposed utopia. The agency is called ‘The State,’ and the motto, fleshed out, for the benefit of the easily confused must read ‘The State will take from each according to his ability: the State will give to each according to his needs.’ ‘Needs and abilities’ are, of course, subjective. So the operative statement may be reduced to ‘the State shall take, the State shall give.’”

Right. That’s the operative mode of Duran-Brown. It’s also that of President Obama in his statement, “You didn’t build that[5].” And Obama’s State of the Union Address on Jan. 21[6] positively dripped with contempt for individual freedom and with the glorification of the collective.

Bureaucrats

More Mamet:

“All of us have had dealings with the State, and have found, to our chagrin, or, indeed, terror, that we were not dealing with well-meaning public servants or even with ideologues but with overworked, harried bureaucrats. These, as all bureaucrats, obtain and hold their jobs by complying with directions and suppressing the desire to employ initiative, compassion, or indeed, common sense. They are paid to follow orders.

“Rule by bureaucrats and functionaries is an example of the first part of the Marxist equation: that the Government shall determine the individual’s abilities.

“As rules by the Government are one-size-fits-all, any governmental determination of an individual’s abilities must be based on a bureaucratic assessment of the lowest possible denominator. The government, for example, has determined that black people (somehow) have fewer abilities than white people, and, so, must be given certain preferences. Anyone acquainted with both black and white people knows this assessment is not only absurd but monstrous. And yet it is the law.

“President Obama, in his reelection campaign, referred frequently to the “needs” of himself and his opponent [Mitt Romney], alleging that each has more money than he ‘needs.’

“But where in the Constitution is it written that the Government is in charge of determining ‘needs’? And note that the president did not say ‘I have more money than I need,’ but ‘You and I have more than we need.’ Who elected him to speak for another citizen?

“It is not the constitutional prerogative of the Government to determine needs. One person may need (or want) more leisure, another more work; one more adventure, another more security, and so on. It is this diversity that makes a country, indeed a state, a city, a church, or a family, healthy. ‘One-size-fits-all,’ and that size determined by the State has a name, and that name is ‘slavery.’”

[7]Slavery

Mamet gets it. About 40 percent of my money is seized by the government. And faceless government bureaucrats minutely control at least another 25 percent of my life through mindless regulations. So, about two-thirds of my life is not mine, but the government’s. I’m their slave.

Sure, I get to “vote” for which of two whip-yielding masters takes my money. But I never get to vote to set myself free. As to elections, see “Wag the Dog[8],” screenplay by Mamet.

As Walter Williams, whose ancestors were chattel slaves here in America before 1865, pointed out[9]:

“A good working description is: slavery is a set of circumstances whereby one person is forcibly used to serve the purposes of another person and has no legal claim to the fruits of his labor.

“The average American worker toils from January 1st to the end of April, and has no legal claim to the fruits of his labor for that period. Federal, state and local governments, through the tax code, take what he produces. A small portion of the fruits of his labor is used to provide for the constitutional functions of government. Most of what’s taken, up to two-thirds, is given to some other American in the forms of farm and business subsidies, Social Security, Medicare, welfare and hundreds of other government handout programs. As in slavery, one person is being forcibly used to serve the purposes of another person.”

If we followed the Constitution, government would be about 2 percent of what it is today, and wouldn’t regulate us at all. But we don’t.

A slave revolt is brewing.

Source URL: https://calwatchdog.com/2013/01/27/mamet-govt-should-not-enslave-us/

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