By John Seiler

I got some pretty good response to my article, “Brown official: You’re our slave.” 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.'”

His latest, for Newsweek no less, “Gun Laws and the Fools of Chelm,” 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.” And Obama’s State of the Union Address on Jan. 21 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.’”

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,” screenplay by Mamet.

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

“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.

By Joseph Perkins

“Climate change,” declares the home page for the Governor’s Office of Planning and Research, “poses an immediate threat to California’s economy, environment, and to public health.”

The Brown administration is “taking action” to avert the worst global disaster since the meteorite (or meteorites, the science is unclear) that wiped out the dinosaurs, but it is being obstructed, the Brownies lament, by those who dare to question the prevailing wisdom on climate change; who “oppose the move to renewable energy and clean transportation.”

Well, the guv’s Office of Planning and Research — OPR, in bureaucrat speak — just isn’t going to stand for it anymore. So it has devoted its entire Website to taking on the evil climate change “deniers.”

“Just as we reached a point where we stopped debating whether cigarette smoke caused cancer,” the site declares, “we need to end the climate change debate and focus on how to solve the problem.”

And that begins by debunking claims of climate change “deniers,” who, as the Brown administration sees it, are on a moral par with devil-worshipping tobacco executives.

The deniers share certain traits, OPR states. “Many have little or no expertise in climate science.” Also, “Many receive funding for their efforts from industries with a financial interest in ignoring climate change.”

Of course, many if not most of those who subscribe to the climate change orthodoxy — that human activity accounts for much of the global warming trend observed in recent years — also have little or no expertise in climate science.

That includes Al Gore, for instance, whose 2006 climate change documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” won two Academy Awards (one of which was for Best Original Song), and propelled the former Veep into stardom. He also won a Nobel Peace Prize for his work on “climate change.”

Your tax dollars

As to the insinuation that climate change “deniers” have been corrupted by funding from industries that couldn’t care less if Mother Earth is suffering hot flashes, that dirty industry money pales in comparison to the $2.6 billion the Obama administration proposed last year to fund research reinforcing climate change alarmism.

The reason the Brown administration has gone to such extraordinary lengths to discredit climate change “deniers” is because it blames them for polls indicating that “only about half of less than half of the American public is convinced that emissions from human activities bear responsibility.”

But it’s not because of climate change “deniers” that Americans are skeptical that global warming poses an “immediate threat” to life as they know it. It’s because they have heard similar warnings before of impending climate catastrophe that proved to be false alarms.

In 1975, Newsweek magazine published a scary jeremiad titled, “The cooling world.” It warned that “after three quarters of a century of extraordinarily mild conditions, the Earth’s climate appears to be cooling down.” Time magazine ran cover stories such as, “The Cooling of America.”

Newsweek cited scientific studies, just as Gov. Brown’s OCR does on its website. And it warned of disastrous consequence if government did nothing, same as OCR.

The scientific community was dead wrong on global cooling four decades ago. All climate change skeptics — not “deniers” — are saying is that maybe, just maybe, the threat of global warming might be similarly overstated.

Commentary

FEB. 7, 2012

By JOHN SEILER

I’m enjoying the tiff between Gov. Jerry Brown and the other tax-increase forces in the state, in particular activist lawyer Molly Munger and the California Teachers Association. As Dan Walters notes today, Brown’s $7 billion tax hike still wouldn’t prevent cuts to K-12 schools. Munger’s $10 billion would prevent the cuts.

Munger’s initiative would increase income taxes on everyone. That is, everyone who pays income taxes in the first place. About half of Californians don’t.

California already suffers the most regressive income tax in the country. The 9.3 percent current “top” rate digs in at about $55,000 of income. (Technically, there’s also a 1 percentage point additional insane tax on million-dollar incomes to fund state mental health programs.)

Munger’s tax increase would jump that middle-class tax rate up an average of 1 percentage point, for a total tax of 10.3 percent. I hope she qualifies the ballot measure and spends her entire fortune on promoting it. (Molly: Spend all your money on this. Do it for the children.)

There’s no way her tax will pass. And Brown’s tax increase will fail, too, as will the CTA’s tax increase.

Let’s put them all on the ballot. The teachers unions also should spend all their coffers trying to pass these tax increases. Indeed, they should borrow $100 million more to pass them. (Unions: Spend all your money on this. Do it for the children.)

People are starting to wake up to how crummy California’s schools really are. And pouring more money on them won’t improve anything.

Factory Schools

Some people even are realizing that the whole public school paradigm, of warehousing kids in buildings that resemble factories or even prisons, is something from the machine age of a century ago. You put raw materials (steel, plastic, children) into one end of the factory, and out of the other end off the assembly line rolls a “product” (a car, or a high-school graduate sufficiently indoctrinated).

Look at the picture at the top. It’s of Century High School in Santa Ana. And check out the aerial view at the right. It sure looks like a factory — or a prison. It’s sealed off from the surrounding neighborhood. The entrances and exits are closely controlled. It serves institutional food.

But this is the Internet Age, where everything is being dispersed into decentralized networks. As you read this, do you know where the data for CalWatchDog.com is comes from before it gets to your computer or smart phone or iPad? I sure don’t, even though I’m the managing editor. It could be in California, or another state, or another country, or all of them. The Internet is decentralized. “Packets” of information are shifted around depending on protocols that only the top nerds understand.

Now, consider the name of Munger’s tax-increase movement: “Our Children, Our Future.”

“Our” children? It’s like we’re in some 1930s Soviet collective, where everyone is making the same bolt for the same state-run factory.

No, they’re not “our” children, Molly. Children belong to their parents until the kids turn 18.

And by saying they’re “our” children, she’s still imposing the 1930s-style, top-down, factor/prison model of schooling.

What we need are decentralized, dispersed, networked schools — beginning with the ultimate decentralization, home schools.

Even the liberal Newsweek/Daily Beast magazine has figured this out. It writes, “When Tera and Eric Schreiber’s oldest child was about to start kindergarten, the couple toured the high-achieving public elementary school a block away from their home in an affluent Seattle neighborhood near the University of Washington. It was ‘a great neighborhood school,’ Tera says. They also applied to a private school, and Daisy was accepted. But in the end they chose a third path: no school at all.”

Yes! The best school is no school.

Doing Better

Newsweek listed the Top 10 cities in America that are dying. No. 1 is New Orleans, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

No. 2 is Vallejo, which has suffered more than any other city from the Schwarzenegger Decade of misgovernment. Vallejo has suffered more even than Detroit and several other Michigan cities devastated by the decline of the auto industry.

Vallejo’s government is so badly managed that in 2008 it filed for bankruptcy, a harbinger of what’s in store for scores of cities across America’s worst-managed state, and indeed for the state itself.

Newsweek:

Vallejo, like much of California, suffered an extreme housing crunch in the lead up to the recession, and even as recently as December, one in every 113 homes was foreclosed on, one of the highest rates in the country. This has made the city a less desirable place to live and unfortunately, not much may change in the near future. One recent study found that housing markets in many of the cities in the South and the Southwest that tanked may take decades to return to pre-recession levels.

Total Population (2009): 114,622
Proportion Under 18 (2009): 24.4%
Change in Total Population (2000-2009): -1.8%
Change in Residents Under 18 (2000-2009): -3.2 percentage points

Jan. 23, 2011