The Socialist Apprentice
By Daniel Greenfield
SultanKnish.Blogspot.com
The fundamental question that a people must ask
is whether they want to be independent of their
government, or dependent on it?. Is government to be
a tool that we use when we need it and put away when
we don't, or a master that oversees our affairs and
uses us as its tools.
The question is not a new one though it continues
to be asked over and over again, as each generation
comes into its own, and examines what it is they
want of government. Most people want there to be
limitations on government, but at the same time they
want government to carry out certain functions for
them. The tipping point between tool and master
kicks in when government gains the ability to expand
its own parameters independently of the people. It's
that moment when Mickey Mouse realizes the brooms
aren't going to stop and Dr. Frankenstein realizes
the monster isn't going to sit down and have tea
with him after all. It's that moment when the thing
you've created takes on a life of its own.
Most of our parables along those lines deal with
people who wanted convenience, a shortcut, only to
invoke magical powers that they cannot control. The
sorcerer's apprentice wanted to get his chores done
without all the hard work. We want the same thing,
except we don't use enchanted brooms, we use
government on the understanding that since
government works for us anyway, why not put it to
use?
But how does a tool become a master? Through
dependency. Dependency shifts the source of power
turning the user into the used. The more dependent
you are on something, the more power it has over
you. Addicts use drugs as a tool to feel good, until
the power shifts and the only way they can feel good
is through the drug, and then finally they need the
drug not as an means to feeling good, but as an end
in and of itself.
That is how dependency locks in its users, by
turning the means into the end. So too socialism may
begin by promising to be a means to achieve certain
ends on behalf of the users, only to turn itself
into the end. And when a socialist system fails to
get any of the ends done, the nationalized health
care system is broken, poverty is on the rise,
violent crime is out of control, the economy is
stagnant and unemployment is climbing-- it's much
too late to protest that this isn't what you wanted.
Because government itself has become the end. The
end of everything.
Like all tools, socialism seems like a tempting
solution. A shortcut to solving problems by loading
them on the backs of elected officials and giving
them a generous budget to handle the whole thing.
And then we go away and do something else and let
them take care of it. Why not? Isn't that what we
pay them for.
But like all shortcuts, socialism depends on
creating a new thing. Primitive man was afraid of
magic, because magic was said to take a part of him
and place it into a thing. A thing which then takes
on a life of its own. Which moves about and acts
under our orders... until we lose control of it.
Government is a kind of magic too. By determining
our own institutions, we invest a part of ourselves
into creating collective corporate entities that are
not human, but have rights, responsibilities and
powers. We give them a piece of our life and a piece
of our soul. But what happens when we lose control
of government?
Like any good magicians, we try to bind the powers
of government by deriving them from a text, such as
the United States Constitution. When read this text
is said to have power over the government created
through it, binding it to perform its obligations
and charging it not to go beyond them. But such
precautions wear down over time, particularly once
the people charged to keep them also become the same
people limited by them.
In the United States, the division between the
states and the federal government created an
incentive for government at the state level to limit
Federal power. As slavery demonstrated however, this
was an extremely imperfect solution, but once it was
gone, there was no longer any check on the expansion
of the Federal government, except from the last
remaining idealists and a few business interests.
And when the only real check on the Federal
government came from within itself, the entire
business was doomed. The brooms had begun to move on
their own.
When organizations are given the ability to set
their own parameters, they tend to increase in size
and authority rather than decrease. Which is only
natural. If you let an animal loose in a paddock
full of food, it will eat until it bursts.
Individually people are smarter than that,
collectively they're not. Which is why we don't
practice democracy because it leads to superior
results, but because it's a check on tyranny. But it
is possible to combine democracy and tyranny,
because there is more to a free country than a
popular vote scheme. It is not the freedom to vote
that defines a free nation, but the freedom not to
vote and still be left alone that does.
Collective stupidity is the product of a lack of
individual responsibility and accountability. That
is why a mob will do things that the individuals in
that mob would not do. It is why a committee will
produce results so ridiculous that no individual in
that committee alone would have produced. It is why
legislatures during an economic crisis will vote
themselves raises. Because there is no individual
point of accountability. A collective group in that
way can be less human than an individual, a thing
given life that can't be stopped or reasoned with.
As government becomes a master rather than a tool,
in turn individual accountability and responsibility
begins to wither. Because we are no longer living in
the conventional flesh and blood universe in which
actions have consequences, and wanting a thing means
having to go out and get it done. We are a community
now. We are "We". It takes a village to raise us, an
idiot's village of bureaucrats, academics,
politicians, assorted officials and union members.
We are a collective and have only one remaining
right, the right to be collectively stupid.
A dollar is no longer a dollar anymore, it's a
counter in a great international game of monopoly in
which if everyone passes around the play money fast
enough, no one will realize it's worthless. A
paycheck is no longer a paycheck, it's an investment
in the government's social system, which is
overdrawn, but if more of the paycheck keeps being
taken every week, hopefully somehow no one will
notice that there's no actual money in the bank.
People no longer buy, they "shop" now. They are
consumers who are encouraged to run up credit card
debt, and then not pay it off. Encouraged to take
out mortgages they can't afford. Encouraged to buy
cars on credit by car companies that are themselves
running on credit. And when someone notices that
there's no actual money behind any of this, the
banks and the car companies are bailed out by a
government that itself is running on credit, with
money lent to it by a country whose chief source of
income is exporting cheap products to Western
consumers which they pay for with credit cards.
With all that can you really say you don't believe
in magic?
That's what it looks like when the brooms are going
full tilt, and no one can stop them because no one
wants to actually get down on their knees and scrub
the floor anymore. Sure we know the magic brooms
don't work. They make more of a mess than they clean
up. And no matter how fast they clean, they make
their messes even bigger and faster. Because the
product is the problem, and no one wants to admit
that anymore.
Because the thing about magic is that it doesn't
work. Yes we can turn lead into gold, but the gold
we would get that way is more expensive than mining
actual gold would be. Sure we can set government to
solve our problems for us, but government has a way
of becoming the problem. And its solutions are more
expensive than the problems themselves.
We've become too used, to addicted to the power of
government to think of it as a means to an end. It's
become the end. The end of autonomy. The end of
freedom. The end of everything but the promise of a
shortcut to security held dangling in front of us on
a ragged rope.
You want universal health care, don't you? What are
you a fan of diseases or expensive medicine, a fan
of death? As if government were magic. As if it
could stop death. But we believe in the magic of
government precisely because it's impossible,
because it's so big and so inhuman, so complex that
we assume that it can do anything. All we need is
the right man to get it in gear.
And that is how tyranny begins. When we forget that
government isn't magic, that it's a tool we made and
set to work. A tool that forgot its purpose and its
masters. A tool that became too complex and unwieldy
to fulfill the tasks we designed it for. We made
government. It's ours. And it is only as human as we
make it.
Government stops being human when we forget that we
made it and that only we can shut it off. But when
we let it go, when we watch dazed while it spins out
of control, and the buckets fly, and we accept the
messes in the hope that eventually the room will
somehow be clean, then we ourselves have let the
monster loose. Power has shifted, and the users
become the used.
Socialism is the promise that the tool we made can
be a better master for us, than we could be for
ourselves. But to believe that we first have to
believe in magic. We have to believe that the things
we make are better at running our lives than we are.
We have to accept that the collective is better than
the individual, that the corporate is wiser than the
lone man or woman. And when we come to believe that,
and bow before the icon of socialism that we
ourselves have made, then we have chosen to
irrationally believe in magic. A magic that is all
inside our heads, the sweet siren song of the
shortcut promising us that we don't have to work,
that we don't have to think, that we don't have to
plan... someone else will be doing those things for
us.