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.
It is self-evident that a racialist view of the world must result in injustice. That that injustice may be calculated to benefit members of a group which may have been previously oppressed may stand as an explanation for immoral behavior, but it does not excuse it.
Shelby Steele was asked, by a good-willed White person, “What can we”—by which the speaker meant the Whites, and/or the American Government—“do for the Blacks?” He responded, “Leave us alone.”
Who is wise enough to model human behavior? No one.
Our country has created the most effective and beneficent, the most productive and the most just civilization in the history of the world, by forming laws based upon that shared truth: compassion no less than greed will, in the hands of the State, cause misery. It is not the job of the State to be compassionate, but to be just. Should the State provide a safety net for the needy, and the afflicted, to care, in the words of Lincoln (the words of the Torah) for the widow and the orphan? Of course, but it must not legislate upon the basis of classes of people, judging their entitlement to state benefits by gender or race. Such a view is both immoral and absurd. The Dred Scott decision (in 1857) accelerated and ensured the Civil War.
Our new Justice Sotomayor has declared that Hispanic women are more compassionate than White men. This should disqualify her from sitting on the bench. Why? Is it true? Who can say. Some Hispanic women are probably more compassionate than some White men, but who would want a justice of the Supreme Court who held this belief? Must it not indicate that she would, in a close case, credit the claims or arguments of a Hispanic woman over that of a White man? One would think so, if her belief, unfounded in anything other than her experience, is so strong that she felt, as an officer of the court, safe in proclaiming it.
Further, and more importantly, does one want a Supreme Court justice who feels it important to dispense compassion? Is not her job, rather, to dispense Justice, which is to say, to rule, blind to the attractiveness of the litigants or of their claims, upon the applicability of laws made previously and held to be fair, by legislators ignorant of the identity of litigants?
In the days of the acceptability of corporal punishment of children (well within my memory), the old parental phrase, whilst searching for the strap, was, “This is going to hurt me more than it hurts you.” The parent may have believed it, but that did not make it true, and it did not matter that the parent administered the strap in the—in his mind—cause of love; a legal and a moral test would have been for the child to respond, “Fine, then let me whip you.”
For how would the compassionate new justice respond to a White Male who asserted (with equal right or lack thereof), “I am a good judge, as White males are more compassionate, as is well-known, than Hispanic females”?