Rotarian Socialism in action:

Google chief executive Eric Schmidt favors net neutrality, but only to a point: While the tech player wants to make sure that telecommunications giants don’t steer Internet traffic in a way that would favor some devices or services over others, he also believes that it would be a terrible idea for the government to involve itself as a regulator of the broader Internet.

The impulse is to say, “What a schmuck!” But once they’ve screwed up the internet, that will be one more once-free aspect of American life that will be enslaved forevermore.

Here’s a little rule of thumb to head off objections: If an allegedly-valuable social objective cannot be effected without force, it’s crime.

Propositions Three and Seven from The Graves of Academe by Richard Mitchell

 
In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is, as we all know, king. And across the way, in the country of the witless, the half-wit is king. And why not? It’s only natural, and considering the circumstances, not really a bad system. We do the best we can.

But it is a system with some unhappy consequences. The one-eyed man knows that he could never be king in the land of the two-eyed, and the half-wit knows that he would be small potatoes indeed in a land where most people had all or most of their wits about them. These rulers, therefore, will be inordinately selective about their social programs, which will be designed not only to protect against the rise of the witful and the sighted, but, just as important, to ensure a never-failing supply of the witless and utterly blind. Even to the half-wit and the one-eyed man, it is clear that other half-wits and one-eyed men are potential competitors and supplanters, and they invert the ancient tale in which an anxious tyrant kept watch against a one-sandaled stranger by keeping watch against wanderers with both eyes and operating minds. Uneasy lies the head.

Unfortunately, most people are born with two eyes and even the propensity to think. If nothing is done about this, chaos, obviously, threatens the land. Even worse, unemployment threatens the one-eyed man and the half-wit. However, since they do in fact rule, those potentates have not much to fear, for they can command the construction and perpetuation of a state-supported and legally enforced system for the early detection and obliteration of antisocial traits, and thus arrange that witfulness and 20-20 vision will trouble the land as little as possible. The system is called "education."

Such is our case. Nor should that surprise anyone. Like living creatures, institutions intend primarily to live and do whatever else they do only to that end. Unlike some living creatures, however, who do in fact occasionally decide that there is something even more to be prized than their own survival, institutions are never capable of altruism, heroism, or even self-denial. If you imagine that they are, if, for instance, you fancy that the welfare system or the Federal Reserve exists and labors for "the good of the people," then you can be sure that the minions of the one-eyed man and the half-wit are pleased with you.

Furthermore, any institution that still stands must, by that very fact, be successful. When we say, as we seem to more and more these days, that education in America is "failing," it is because we don’t understand the institution. It is, in fact, succeeding enormously. It grows daily, hourly, in power and wealth, and that precisely because of our accusations of failure. The more we complain against it, the more it can lay claim to our power and wealth, in the name of curing those ills of which we complain. And, in our special case, in a land ostensibly committed to individual freedom and rights, it can and does make the ultimate claim–to be, that is, the free, universal system of public education that alone can raise up to a free land citizens who will understand and love and defend individual freedom and rights. Like any politician, the institution of education claims direct descent in apostolic succession from the Founding Fathers.

Jefferson was in favor of education, indubitably, but he meant the condition, not the word. He held that there was no expectation, "in a state of civilization," that we could be both free and ignorant. The modifier is important; it is to suggest that we might indeed be "free" and ignorant in savagery. Free at least from the conventional and mutually admitted restraints to which civilized people bind themselves.

Using Jefferson’s terms, we can derive exactly eight propositions to think about:

    1. We can be ignorant and free in savagery.

    2. We can be ignorant and free in civilization.

    3. We can be ignorant and unfree in civilization.

    4. We can be ignorant and unfree in savagery.

    5. We can be educated and free in savagery.

    6. We can be educated and free in civilization.

    7. We can be educated and unfree in civilization.

    8. We can be educated and unfree in savagery.

Jefferson asserts that the second is impossible, thereby implying the possibility of the first and the sixth. The fifth and the eighth seem unlikely, for if we are indeed educated it will be both a result of civilization and a cause of civilization. The fourth is just a quibble, for the "freedom" at issue is not freedom from natural exigencies, to which all are subject, but from the devised constraints possible only in a state of civilization. The truth of the third and the seventh, unhappily, is recommended by knowledge and experience.

Omitting those propositions that seem impossible or meaningless, we are left with:

    1. We can be ignorant and free in savagery.

    3. We can be ignorant and unfree in civilization.

    6. We can be educated and free in civilization.

    7. We can be educated and unfree in civilization.

And, of those four, Propositions 1 and 6 are explicitly Jefferson’s, while 3 and 7 are implicitly Jefferson’s. They describe conditions not only perfectly possible but perfectly real. Unfreedom, the forced submission to constraints beyond those mutually admitted by knowing and willing members of a civilization, is not unheard of. Indeed, it is, in greater or less degree, the current condition of all humanity.

Civilization is itself an institution and has, like all institutions, one paramount goal, its own perpetuation. It was Jefferson’s dream that that civilization could best perpetuate itself in which the citizens were "educated," whatever he meant by that, and we do have some clue as to what he meant. He wrote of the "informed discretion" of the people as the only acceptable depository of power in a republic. He knew very well that the people might be neither informed nor discreet, that is, able to make fine distinctions, but held that the remedy for that was not to be sought in depriving the people of their proper power but in better informing their discretion.

And to what end were the people to exercise the power of their informed discretion? The answer, of course, shouldn’t be surprising, but, because we have been taught to confuse government and its institutions with civilization in general, it often is. Jefferson saw the informed discretion of the people as one of those checks and balances for which our constitutional democracy is justly famous, for it was only with such a power that the people could defend themselves against government and its institutions. "The functionaries of every government," wrote Jefferson, although the italics are mine, "have propensities to command at will the liberty and property of their constituents." Jefferson knew–isn’t this the unique genius of American constitutionalism? that government was a dangerous master and a treacherous servant and that the first concern of free people was to keep their government on a leash, a pretty short one at that.

Consider again Propositions 3 and 7: 3. We can be ignorant and unfree in civilization, and 7. We can be educated and unfree in civilization. Imagine that you are one of those functionaries of government in whom there has grown, it seems inescapable, the propensity to command, in however oblique a fashion and for whatever supposedly good purpose, the liberty and property of your constituents. Which would you prefer, educated constituents or ignorant ones? Wait. Be sure to answer the question in Jefferson’s terms. Which would you rather face, even considering your own conviction that the cause in which you want to command liberty and property is just–citizens with or without the power of informed discretion? Citizens having that power will require of you a laborious and detailed justification of your intentions and expectations and may, even having that, adduce other information and exercise further discretion to the contrary of your propensities. On the other hand, the ill-informed and undiscriminating can easily be persuaded by the recitation of popular slogans and the appeal to self-interest, however spurious. It is only informed discretion that can detect such maneuvers.

And that’s how government works. There is nothing evil about it. It’s perfectly natural. You and I would do it the same way. In fact, the chances are good that we are doing things that way, since more and more of us are in fact functionaries of government in one way or another and dependent for our daily bread on some share of the property of our constituents, and sometimes (as in the public schools) upon the restriction of their liberty.

It was the genius of Jefferson to see that free people would rarely have to defend their freedom against principalities and powers and satanic enemies of the good, but that they would have to defend it daily against the perfectly natural and inevitable propensities of functionaries. Any fool, can see, eventually, the danger to freedom in a self-confessed military dictatorship, but it takes informed discretion to see the same danger in bland bureaucracies made up entirely of decent people who are just doing their jobs. But Jefferson was optimistic. As to the liberty and property of the people, he saw that "there is no safe deposit for them but with the people themselves; nor can they be safe with them without information." And he was convinced, alas, that the people could easily come by that information: "Where the press is free, and every man able to read, all is secure."

That sounds so simple. A free press, and universal literacy. We have those things, don’t we? So all is secure, no? No.

Just as we cannot assume that what we call "education" is the same as Jefferson’s "informed discretion," we cannot assume that Jefferson meant what we mean by "press" and "able to read." In our time, the press, in spite of threats real or imagined, is in fact free. And, if we define "literacy" in a very special and limited way, almost everyone is able to read, more or less. But when Jefferson looked at "the press," what did he see? Or, more to the point, what did he not see? He did not see monthly periodicals devoted entirely to such things as hair care and motorcycling and the imagined intimate details of the lives of television stars and rock singers. He did not see a sports page, a fashion page, a household hints column, or an astrological forecast. He did not see a never-ending succession of breathless articles on low-budget decorating for the executive couple in the big city, career enhancement through creative haberdashery, and the achievement of orgasm through enlightened self-interest. He did not see a nationwide portrayal of "the important" as composed primarily of the doings and undoings of entertainers, athletes, politicians, and criminals.

He would not, I think, have been unduly dismayed by all that. Of course, he would have been dismayed, but not unduly. Such things are implicit in the freedom of the press, and if enough people want them, they’ll have them. (Jefferson would surely have wondered why so many people wanted such things, but that’s not to the point just now.) Jefferson did, naturally, see "the press" giving news and information, but, more than that, he also saw in it the very practice of informed discretion. In his time, after all, Common Sense and The Federalist Papers were simply parts of "the press." And "every man able to read" would have been, for Jefferson, every man able to read, weigh, and consider things like Common Sense and The Federalist Papers. He would have recognized at once our editorial pages and our journals of enquiry and opinion, but he would have found it ominous that hardly anyone reads those things, and positively portentous that this omission arises not so much from casual neglect as from a common and measurable inability to read such things with either comprehension or pleasure.

Thus Jefferson is cheated. The press is free and almost everyone can make out many words, but all is not secure. Wait. That’s not quite clear. Some things are secure. The agencies and institutions of government are secure. The functionaries whose propensity it is to command our liberty and property, they are secure. And, as the one-eyed man is the more secure in proportion to the number of citizens he can blind, our functionaries are the more secure in proportion to those of us who are strangers to the powers of informed discretion. It is possible, of course, to keep educated people unfree in a state of civilization, but it’s much easier to keep ignorant people unfree in a state of civilization. And it is easiest of all if you can convince the ignorant that they are educated, for you can thus make them collaborators in your disposition of their liberty and property. That is the institutionally assigned task, for all that it may be invisible to those who perform it, of American public education.

Public education does its work superbly, almost perfectly. It works in fairly strict accordance with its own implicit theory of "education," an elaborate ideology of which only some small details are generally known to the public. This is hardly surprising, for the rare citizen who actually wants to know something about educationistic theory, a dismal subject, finds that it is habitually expressed in tangled, ungrammatical jargon, penetrable, when it is at all, only to one who has nothing better to do. I hope, little by little, to dissect and elucidate that theory, for it is in fact even more frightening than it is dismal. For now, I can take only a first but essential step and urge you to consider this principle: The clouded language of educational theory is an evolved, protective adaptation that hinders thought and understanding. As such, it is no more the result of conscious intention than the markings of a moth. But it works. Thus, those who give themselves to the presumed study and the presumptuous promulgation of educational theory are usually both deceivers and deceived. The murky language

where their minds habitually dwell at once unminds them and gives them the power to unmind others.

We will, with appropriate examples, explore the evolution of that strange trait, especially in that portion of the educational establishment where it is most evident: that is, among the people to whom we have given the training of teachers and the formulation of educational theory. In the cumbersome and complicated contraption we call "public education," the trainers of teachers have special powers and privileges. Although in law they are governed by civilian boards and legislatures, they are in fact but little governed, for they have convinced the boards and legislatures that only teacher-trainers can judge the work of teacher-trainers. That wasn’t hard to do, for boards and legislatures are made up largely of people who have, in their time, already been blinded by the one-eyed man, having been given, as helpless children, what we call "education" rather than practice in informed discretion. The very language in which the teacher-trainers explain their labors will quickly discourage close scrutiny in even a thoughtful board member, perhaps especially in a thoughtful board member, who has after all, other and more important (he thinks) things to do.

It is not strictly true that the public schools are a state-supported monopoly. There are other schools. But the teacher-trainers are certainly a state-supported monopoly. There are no other teacher-trainers than the ones we have, and they are all in the business of teaching something they call "education." No one knows exactly what that is, and even among educationists there is some mild contention as to whether there actually exists some body of knowledge that can be called "education" as separate from other knowable subjects. You may want to make up your own mind as to that, for in later chapters you will see examples of what is actually done by those who teach "education." But for now we must consider the usually unnoticed effects of the monopoly they enjoy.

The laws of supply and demand work in the academic world just as they do in the marketplace, which is to say, of course, that what is natural and reasonable will not happen where government intervenes. Our schools can be usefully likened to a nationalized industrial system in which the production of goods is directed not by entrepreneurs looking to profit but by social planners intending to change the world. Thus it is the business of the schools, and the special task of the educationists who produce teachers, to generate both supply and demand, so that the nation will want exactly what it is they intend to provide.

Within the academic marketplace, there are many enterprises other than educationism, however. Historically, they have not seen themselves in competition with one another, although I’m sure that the faculties of the medieval universities were not reluctant to claim that their disciplines were more noble than the others. Individual professors, of course, must indeed have competed for students, by whom they were paid, but the students, many of whom were to become professors themselves, were free to devote themselves to whatever discipline seemed good. But between one discipline and another there seems to have been, rather than competition, sectarianism.

A similar sectarianism has been revivified by our current educational disorders. If you ask a professor of geography why we seem to be turning into a nation of ignorant rabble, he will not be able to refrain from pointing out that we don’t teach geography anymore and that high school graduates aren’t even sure of the name of the next state, never mind the climatic characteristics of the Great Plains or the rivers that drain the Ohio Valley. Professors of physics will allude to the all-too-inevitable consequences of ignorance of the laws of motion and thermodynamics. You can easily devise for yourself the comments of professors of mathematics, languages, history, literature, and indeed of any who teach those things we think of as traditional academic disciplines. Their views will be, of course, at least partly predictable expressions of self-interest; however, they will also be correct, and, if taken all together, will indeed tell us much about our present troubles.

The academic world is like any other group of related enterprises in which everybody can provide something but nobody can provide everything. For the building of houses, for instance, we need many different things, and they are not easily interchangeable. When we need copper tubing, we need copper tubing, and we can’t make do with wallboard instead. If houses are built, therefore, many people making many different things will be able to produce what is both useful and profitable. And, while the makers of copper tubing won’t have to worry about competition from the makers of wallboard, they will have to be mindful of other makers of copper tubing and also of the makers of plastic tubing. That will be good for the whole enterprise.

Suppose, though, that the copper-tubing people should, through quirk or cunning, secure for themselves some special legal privilege. First they persuade the state, which already has the power to license the building of houses, to prohibit the use of plastic tubing. That’s good, but so long as the state is willing to go that far, the copper-tubing makers seek and achieve a regulation requiring some absolute minimum quantity of copper tubing in every new house. Now you must suppose that the copper-tubing lobby has grown so rich and powerful that the law now requires that fifty percent of the mass of every new house must be made up of copper tubing.

Houses could still be built. Walls, floors, and ceilings could be made of coils and bundles of copper tubing smeared over with plaster or stucco. Copper tubing could be cleverly welded and twisted into everything from doorknobs to windowsills and produced in large sizes for heating ducts and chimneys. The houses would be dreadful, of course, and, should you ask why, you will discover that craftsmen in the building trades are more direct and outspoken than college professors. They’ll just tell you straight out that these are lousy houses because of all that damn copper tubing. If the professor of mathematics were equally frank, he’d tell you that our schools are full of supposed teachers of mathematics who have studied "education" when they should have studied mathematics.

This is, I admit, not an exact analogy. The manufacture of copper tubing actually does have some relationship to the building of houses, while the study of "education" has no relationship at all to the making of educated people. The analogy would perhaps have been better had I chosen, instead of the manufacturers of copper tubing, the manufacturers of gelatin desserts. To grasp the true nature of the place of educationism in the academic world, you have to imagine that houses are to be made mostly of Jell-O–each flavor equally represented–and that the builders must eat a bowl an hour.

(Well, that analogy fails, too. Jell-O is at least a colorful and entertaining treat with no known harmful side effects. The same cannot be said of the study of "education.")

Our public system of education, from Head Start to the graduate schools of the state universities, might also be called a government system. Those who teach in its primary and secondary schools are required by law to serve time, often as much as one half of their undergraduate program, in the classes of the teacher-trainers. Should they seek graduate degrees, which will bring them automatic raises, they will still have to spend about one half their time taking yet again courses devoted to things like interpersonal relations and the appreciation of alternative remediation enhancements. The educationistic monopoly is strong enough that in at least one state (there are probably others, but I’m afraid to find out), a high school mathematics teacher who is arrogant enough to take a master’s degree in mathematics will discover that he is no longer certified to teach that subject. If he wants to keep his job, he must take a degree in "mathematics education," which will, of course, permit him to spend some of his time studying his subject. Even where there is no such visibly monopolistic requirement, the laws and regulations of the public schools, which have been devised by educationists in the teachers’ colleges, provide an effective equivalent.

The intellectual climate of the public schools, which must inevitably become the intellectual climate of the nation, does not seem to be conducive to the spread of what Jefferson called informed discretion. The intellectual climate of the nation today came from the public schools, where almost every one of us was schooled in the work of the mind. We are a people who imagine that we are weighing important issues when we exchange generalizations and well-known opinions. We decide how to vote or what to buy according to whim or fancied self-interest, either of which is easily engendered in us by the manipulation of language, which we have neither the will nor the ability to analyze. We believe that we can reach conclusions without having the faintest idea of the difference between inferences and statements of fact, often without any suspicions that there are such things and that they are different. We are easily persuaded and repersuaded by what seems authoritative, without any notion of those attributes and abilities that characterize authority. We do not notice elementary fallacies in logic; it doesn’t even occur to us to look for them; few of us are even aware that such things exist. We make no regular distinctions between those kinds of things that can be known and objectively verified and those that can only be believed or not. Nor are we likely to examine, when we believe or not, the induced predispositions that may make us do the one or the other. We are easy prey.

That these seem to be the traits of the human condition always and everywhere is not to the point. They just won’t do for a free society. Jefferson and his friends made a revolution against ignorance and unreason, which would preclude freedom in any form of government whatsoever. If we cannot make ourselves a knowledgeable and thoughtful people–those are the requisites of informed discretion–then we cannot be free. But our revolutionists did at least provide us with that form of government which, unlike others, does grant the possibility of freedom, provided, of course, the public has the habit of informed discretion. That possibility is all we have just now.

Proposition 3 is in effect. We are largely a nation of ill-informed and casually thoughtless captives. Even when we are well-informed and thoughtful, however, we cannot be free where the character of the nation and its institutions must reflect the ignorance and unreason of the popular will. But if we are well-informed and thoughtful, we can take comfort in the fact that our form of government is carefully designed to preclude that condition described in Proposition 7. As long as we remain a constitutional republic, we cannot ever be both educated and unfree. It just won’t work, and that may be the single greatest insight of the makers of our revolution.

Therefore, whatever it is they do in the teachers’ colleges of America has had and will always have tremendous consequences. By comparison with the attitudes and intellectual habits and ideological predispositions inculcated in American teachers, the acts of Congress are trivial. Indeed, the latter proceed from the former. If, as a result of the labors of our educationists, we were obviously clear-sighted and thoughtful and thus able to enjoy the freedom promised in our constitutional system, then we would know something about those educationists. If, on the other hand, we are blind and witless, then we would know–if there are any of us who can know–something else about them. To know anything at all about those educationists, however, we must look at what they do, at what they say they do, and even at how they say what they do.

A Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie story by Greg Swann

Here’s what happened: I had to stop walking because I was sick. You may not know it, but on top of all the other scourges it entails, the state really has it in for itinerants. You may never have wanted to run off to Alabama with a banjo on your knee, but I’d bet you’re more than a bit dismayed to discover that you can’t. Got to have a fixed address, so they can inflict all their precious ‘benefits’ on you.

So I had to stop walking and I had to see a doctor, and of course I couldn’t. I’ve walked myself right out of society, and I have an inkling I may have walked myself right out of the human race. At least that’s the way Nurse Martinetti made me feel.

That’s really her name, but I think she must have married into it. She looked like American Gentry to me, which is to say John Bull white trash six generations from the last capital crime. Short, bottle-blonde with a cut that looks cute on smudged-nosed tomboys, thick through the ankle and the cortex. My guess is she became a nurse because she red-lined the psych profiles for meter-maid.

First, it’s not a doctor’s office, not anymore. It’s a ‘Health Services Cooperative’. We all know what a cooperative is: It’s a place where you go to not get whatever it is you came for. It would make too much sense to stay home, where you already don’t have it. In any case, Nurse Martinetti is charged with making sure that no one gets anything they came for, although they might get stuck (literally!) with quite a lot they’d have sooner done without. But I wasn’t even that (un)fortunate, because I don’t have a fixed address.

Nurse Martinetti gripped her clipboard and said, “What do you mean? How can you not have an address? Everyone has an address. Some people even have two!” She looked at me as if I were something a puppy accidently left on the carpet.

“…,” I said with a shrug.

“Are you homeless?”

“I wouldn’t say so. I sleep indoors as often as I want to. I pay my own way. I just don’t have an address.”

“But you must!”

“But I don’t.”

“But this can’t be!”

“Why not?,” I asked. “Why is it so hard to accept that there are people who walk from place to place. There have been people walking this continent at least since the Europeans came. Ponce de Leon. Coronado. Father Kino. Daniel Boone. Lewis and Clark. William Blake, for god’s sake!”

“He wasn’t an American!”

“You can say that again,” I mumbled.

“Are you some kind of spy sent out from Washington?!?”

I just smiled at that and sat there, giving her the time to really look at me. I expect that with a few improvements in my grooming habits, I could get a job parking cars in Washington.

“Well then, on your way!” My jaw dropped. She got up and was walking away before I managed to speak.

“But wait! I need to see a doctor.”

“You can’t.”

“…?” I said: “What?”

“You can’t see a doctor.” She said that slowly, the way American Gentry types talk to children and Hispanics.

“Well why not? I can pay.”

She scoffed. “Pay what? Five dollars?”

“I can pay whatever it takes.”

“What it takes,” she sneered, “is five dollars.”

“…?”

“Everything here costs five dollars.”

“Everything…?”

“Everything.”

“Hang nail?”

“Five dollars.”

“Ulcer?”

“Five dollars.”

“Liver transplant?”

“Do you drink?”

I said, “No.”

“Five dollars.”

“How much if I drink?”

“We won’t do a liver transplant on people who drink.”

“Kind of a retroactive social engineering, is it?”

“Exactly.”

“Sounds more like revenge,” I muttered.

She was straining to turn like a jammed drill bit. She was obviously trying to think of some slightly more polite way to dismiss me, so I said:

“Well, five dollars it is. At five bucks a pop, you must do a land-office business.”

“We did for a while,” she confessed, “so we had to institute rationing.”

“Why not just charge what things are worth? Then people will decide on their own what to buy and what to leave on the shelf.”

For the first time the expression of habitual belligerence on her face was gone. In its place was belligerence-on-the-verge-of-tears. “But what about people who can’t afford health care?!? You are an atavism!”

I’m thick-skinned, but I’m not all skin. I said, “What about someone who can afford a liver transplant, but happens to drink? Your income transfers were one thing, but now you’re talking about transferring life and death! What kind of ghoul are you, anyway?”

Well, that tripped her breakers. She stomped over to the reception desk and picked up a microphone. “Vinnie!,” she announced. “Nurse Martinetti calling Doctor Vinnie!”

I don’t believe in destiny, but certain toes were just made to be stomped on. I said, “So I do get to see a doctor.”

“You do not.” She was speaking now from the armory of pure rage, each word a bullet. “For your information, you cannot obtain health care from this cooperative. You do not have an account with our parent alliance.”

“Well, then, let’s just fill out that paperwork and open an account.”

“You do not have an account. You cannot have an account. You do not have a job. You do not receive public assistance. You have no fixed address.”

“So you’re telling me I can’t just buy what I need.”

“I am telling you, sir, that no one can buy health care! Health care is too important to be bought and sold!”

“Too important for keeping people in line…?,” I murmured.

Just then Doctor Vinnie showed up. Big, bronzed and beefy, the kind of really dim man really dim women go for. He was wearing a dark grey suit — a ridiculous cut but beautifully tailored — a black shirt and a lime green silk necktie. He swaggered and sucked his teeth, two traits that never fail to win my awe…

Nurse Martinetti said, “Doctor Vinnie used to work in the private sector.” She swallowed hard, as though to get a bad taste out of her mouth. “Now he works for us, curing people of their reluctance.” For the first time she smiled. It wasn’t pretty.

“On second thought,” I said, “I think I will be going.” I’m nobody’s coward, but — taking account that I can’t get health care — I couldn’t see adding injury to insult.

“Oh no! It is we who have reconsidered.” She smiled again, and her teeth looked a lot like fangs. “Doctor Vinnie will see you now.”

She held open a door and Doctor Vinnie pushed me in. She closed it behind us, leaving me and her rehabilitated mafioso alone.

To my shame, I cringed. I cowered. I may even have whimpered…

Doctor Vinnie picked me up by the collar and dumped me on an examining table. He spoke to me, his tone a conspiratorial whisper. “Whatever it is, I can get it taken care of.”

I said: “…?”

“Jeesh!,” he said. “Don’t you get it? She turned you down, right?”

“Yeah, so. I’ll just go somewhere else.”

He smiled, and every one of his big, beautiful, pearly-white teeth called me an idiot. “There ain’t nowhere else.”

“…!,” I said. I gulped hard.

“Not to worry,” Doctor Vinnie said. “Like I told ya, whatever it is, I can get it taken care of. But it’ll cost ya…”

“Cost me…?”

“A hundred grand. Cash.”

I gulped again. “A hundred thousand dollars…? For what?”

“Whaddaya got?” He grinned.

“Hang nail?”

“A hundred grand.”

“Ulcer?”

“A hundred grand.”

“Liver transplant?”

“A hundred grand.”

“You didn’t ask if I drink.”

“What do I care if you drink?”

“Right…” I said: “Triple-bypass?”

“A hundred grand. We take care of you and we even fix your records, so the feds don’t come after you later. A bypass is hard to hide…”

“Inoperable cancer?”

Vinnie smirked. “Don’t be an idiot. It’s a hundred grand, and we’ll give you the same lethal injection you’ll get from her for five bucks.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder.

“Got it…”

Just then Nurse Martinetti burst in, followed by two men who reeked of Fedliness: Boxy suits, boxy shoes, boxy skulls. They came in with their guns drawn and triangulated on Doctor Vinnie.

I’m nobody’s coward, but I’m nobody’s fool. I’m not shrewd like Doctor Vinnie. What I am is smart. In a flash, I could see what would happen to Vinnie and me: The Fedlies would give us a free lobotomy and they’d alter our records at no extra charge.

So I packed up my pride and I ran. One of the fedlies tried to chase me, but he gave up after a couple of blocks. I’m sure he thought they’d pick me up later at my address. Joke’s on them, of course, since I don’t have an address.

You should be so lucky…

Ah, well, you’ve got your health. And when you’ve got your health, you’ve got everything.

Right…?

 
Further notice: I wrote this story in the summer of 1993, when Nurse Martinetti was trying to ram HillaryCare down our throats. Since then, Americans have managed to become even better suckers for beguiling lies, more is the pity.

I don’t go to the doctor very often. I don’t get sick much, and, even when I do, I’m not always willing to make time to do anything about it. I work very hard, and all I want to do is work, and I don’t want to have to take time to slow down even when my body really needs to slow down.

In consequence, I am the perfect stooge for the ObamaCare scheme that Americans seem hell-bent on ramming down each other’s throats. Welfare scams only work when there are people willing to produce wealth long after it has become obvious that working hard is for suckers — when all the clued-in people have already jumped on the gravy train.

In the case of socialized medicine, the clued-in people will discover more and more things wrong with their health. Why not? It will be people like me — who don’t get sick and who refuse to let illness keep us from working — who will be footing the bill.

And that’s just the way things are in the welfare-state we have made of this once-free country. Working women defer motherhood so welfare moms can pop out kid after kid, each one endowed at birth with a tax-funded sinecure. Conscientious parents pay twice for their children’s education, once in taxes to pay for useless public schools and once again in tuition for the private schools their children actually attend. If you refuse to live on the dole, you have to save for two retirements: One that you won’t take and one that you will have to guard, night and day, so it won’t be taken from you.

That’s what we are, by now. Suckers on one side of the room, proud but tight-lipped. And blood-suckers on the other side, belligerent and bellicose, constantly demanding more and more largesse from the stoical, stolid suckers.

Fine. It is what it is, and nothing is going to change any time soon — except for the worse. But as much as I might be in this mess, as much as I might be the stooge who makes the welfare state possible, I refuse to be a part of it. I refuse to be a parasite. I’ll be a sucker if I have to, but I refuse to be a blood-sucker.

Socialized medicine must be universal. How can the voluntary victims of freelance pharmacy go to rehab again and again if they have to pay their own health insurance premiums? How can we buy aromatherapy for the addlepated when they already don’t have sense enough to buy their own scents? The clued-in people who will be consuming the lion’s share of the “free” health care are already lousy at producing wealth. How much worse are they going to be at paying their own way once they start spending all their time in the hospital?

So in order to have socialized medicine, the state is going to have to socialize me — and you, and everyone. The system can’t work without suckers. But the larger agenda is to turn all of us into blood-suckers, into parasites, into belligerent, bellicose beggars. You might plan to go along with this, but I will not.

Why? It’s not because of the confiscation of my earnings. I’m already putting up with that. But once the entire health care system is socialized, I won’t be permitted to pay my own way. I won’t just be a sucker, I’ll be a blood-sucker, living at the involuntary expense of every other hard-working sucker in America.

This I will not do. President Obama and his minions can fine me if they like. They can jail me if they choose. But I have never been a beggar, a parasite, and I never will.

So come and get me, Coppers! In a nation where self-reliance is a crime, we are all criminals now. This is what we have done to what was once the greatest country on earth.

In the meantime, I suppose I’ll have to find a way to get back-alley chest X-rays and contraband antibiotics. That’s what I get for working for a living…

 
Pass this on: If you feel the way I do, feel free to pass this on to anyone you know — and especially to your congressman and senators. But please include the link back to http://SplendorQuest.com/?p=38 so that others can find it.

When I moved to Chandler, Arizona, 16 years ago, I was informed that, not only would I be expected to participate in the community’s curbside recycling program, but that enforcement officers would come around at random to inspect the special blue trash barrels to make sure they were not being used to dispose of yard waste or other forbidden items.

This seemed funny to me at the time — so outrageously offensive as to be comical. I thought about updating Homer with a tale about Ulysses versus the Recyclops.

It’s not so funny to me now. For one thing, the idea of a government functionary trespassing on private property to pass judgement on one’s trash is the kind of intrusion that should drive any American to thoughts of armed rebellion. And for another, things have gotten quite a bit worse since then.

By now there is no outrage too comically absurd for some government functionary — as humorless a specimen of humanity as has ever existed — to attempt to ram down your throat.

Consider these as examples:

• The State of Michigan is attempting to forbid a mom from hosting neighborhood kids at her home before school. Why? Because she is providing day-care without a license.

• In Saratoga Springs, New York, children are forbidden to walk or to ride their bikes to school.
• To build a new home in Los Angeles, California — a place where virtually no one is building new homes just now — you will be required to add an anti-graffiti coating to the finish at your own expense.
• Worst of all, the federal government is straining mightily to pass legislation that will put the entire health-care industry under state control. Opposed to abortion? You’ll be paying for them anyway. Don’t want to participate? You’ll be fined or sent to prison.

How tough a job was it to come up with those four examples? Well, I found them all on the Drudge Report, an internet news portal. All of them today. All of them from the first column of the page.

When we hear about some humorless jackass ticketing a five-year-old at a lemonade stand for operating without a food service license, we are apt to think, “Why doesn’t someone fire that stupid son-of-a-bitch?” But the actual reality of our lives is that we are encysted at every pore with humorless jackasses, each one of them looking for more and more bizarre ways to inflict government upon us.

Think of it. There was a time in our lives when we all thought that the purpose of government was to fight crimes, which were committed by a very small number of people. But then we got the notion that government should supervise commerce, an activity engaged in by a far larger number of people. But by now the government clearly believes that its function is to police all of us, all the time, over the smallest minutiae of our lives. We are all criminals now.

The question to ask is not, “What the hell is wrong with those stupid sons-of-bitches?”

The question that we desperately need to ask is this one: “What the hell is wrong with us?”

We are Americans — or we were at one time. A proud and free people who defied the armed might of Britannia to win our independence, who conquered and tamed a wild and unforgiving continent, who created vast riches for even the poorest of the poor, who stood fast for the idea of human liberty at home and abroad, who proudly upheld an idea of freedom for the common man never before known anywhere on the earth at any time in human history.

Can you imagine what our grandfathers would have done if someone had tried to tell them how to dispose of their trash? Tried to tell them who they could or could not have as guests in their homes? Actually tried to forbid their children to stand up on their own two feet and walk to school?

If our grandfathers were alive today, they would be denounced on the six o’clock news as militia-mad gun nuts — but they would not have gone down without a fight.

But the state of human liberty in modern-day America is much worse than any of that.

• We all know that we have a permanent underclass of welfare clients, perpetually impoverished people who have become addicted to the free milk flowing from Big Mother’s teats, robbed thereby of any incentive to act in their own behalf.

• And we have a not-so-obvious permanent overclass of welfare clients — alleged businessmen who cannot seem to get by without subsidies or legislation relieving them of the burdens of competition.
• And, of course, we have vast hordes of humorless jackasses on the payroll at every level of government, each one doing his damnedest to destroy at least as much wealth as he consumes.
• And while those humorless jackasses will fawn and preen about how much they love you and want to help you, what they actually love in you is squalid — your poverty, your addictions, your diseases. And in order to express that love for the negative, they must tax and penalize everything that is positive in human life — your sense of purpose, your productivity, your pride in your accomplishments. Can you think of better exemplars of the idea that to get ahead you must work and study hard than doctors? And yet it is the doctors that the state’s functionaries are most avid to enslave.
• And to make everything worse, we have taken an entire generation of ordinary Americans — the Greatest Generation, we call them — and turned them into another huge cadre of sniveling welfare clients, wailing, like the paupers of ancient Rome, “Increase the dole!”
• And to top it all off, we have managed to spawn an elite class of humorless jackasses — extra-humorless, but almost-implausibly clueless — who by now presume to poke their noses into every aspect of your life — public, private, intimate or embarrassingly indelicate.

Face facts: If they can snoop in your trash, what’s to keep them from snooping in your bathroom? If they can confiscate your money to pay for someone else’s abortion, why can’t they confiscate one of your kidneys and give it to someone suffering renal failure? Can’t happen here? That’s what your grandfather would have said about the Recyclops.

O, my people! What have we done to America?

That’s the bad news, and it is really bad news.

Here’s the good news: I’m not the only person asking that question.

I’m writing this text on October 1, 2009, nine months into the administration of President Barrack Hussein Obama. Mr. Obama has proved himself to be so much a socialist — and so frighteningly brash a socialist — that people all over America are thinking seriously about politics, perhaps for the first time in their lives. They have come together at town halls and organized themselves into tea parties modeled on the historic Boston Tea Party. They’re buying books and watching populist demagogues on television. They know something is very wrong with America, and they want to do whatever it takes to fix it.

That much really is good news. The American people, in large measure, can too often be complacent and anti-intellectual. Work matters. Family and church matter. Sports matters. But the life of the mind? Not so much. It’s hard to fault them for regarding intellectual pursuits as being boring, since the people charged with guarding the work of the mind are so often such colossal bores. So when the sleeping giant that is the American public stirs itself to try to figure out what it is getting wrong, this is a cause for celebration.

But there is quite a lot of bad news among the good. For one thing, there is essentially only one political party in the United States right now. The Democrats are camouflaged Marxist socialists who are committed to the stealthy confiscation of all private wealth in the country. And the Republicans are camouflaged national socialists who are committed to the steady surrender of all control over all private wealth in the country. We lurch from one to the other looking for remedies, but all we get is the same socialist poison in superficially-different bottles.

By now, both parties are exponents of an oligarchic kind of cronyism: When their friends and allies win, they win. And when they lose, the taxpayer — that would be you, known in the corridors of power as John Q. Sucker — foots the bill. Each political party uses the taxing and regulatory power of the state to buy votes, to reward its friends and to penalize its enemies. When George Washington spoke to us of “a government of laws and not of men” — he was talking about the exact opposite of what we have now.

What’s worse, even though the American people are looking for intellectual guidance to explain to them what happened to the great American dream of individual human liberty, there is no one to whom they can turn for that leadership. The left proposes more socialism for the poor, the right more socialism for the rich, and the clowns at court rage on about random nonsense.

Take note: We are where we are as the unavoidable consequence of our errors — of one error, really, that we have made over and over again throughout all of human history. And yet even now, as we plan to enslave twenty percent or more of our economy, we as Americans are better off than most of the people now alive on earth. And we are far better off than most of the human beings who have preceded us in death.

We are as alarmed as we are right now — to our credit — because we can recall having it better, we ourselves and our parents and grandparents. We have never been so rich as we are now, but we have been far more free in the past, in the not-at-all-distant past. It is our awareness of our loss of personal freedom that goads us to try to figure out what we are getting wrong.

So: The bad news is really bad.

And the good news is very far from being wholly good.

But here is the best news of all: The error we are making, the error we have always made, is very simple to correct. All we have to do is come to understand humanity for what it really is…