By David Mamet
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.
‘In announcing his gun control proposals, President Obama said
that he was not restricting Second Amendment rights, but allowing other
constitutional rights to flourish.’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.”
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, 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.”
The
Founding Fathers, far from being ideologues, were not even politicians.
They were an assortment of businessmen, writers, teachers, planters;
men, in short, who knew something of the world, which is to say, of
Human Nature. Their struggle to draft a set of rules acceptable to each
other was based on the assumption that we human beings, in the mass, are
no damned good—that we are biddable, easily confused, and that we may
easily be motivated by a Politician, which is to say, a huckster,
mounting a soapbox and inflaming our passions.
The
Constitution’s drafters did not require a wag to teach them that power
corrupts: they had experienced it in the person of King George. The
American secession was announced by reference to his abuses of power:
“He has obstructed the administration of Justice … he has made Judges
dependant on his will alone … He has combined with others to subject us
to a jurisdiction foreign to our Constitution, and unacknowledged by our
Laws … He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither
swarms of officers to harass out people and to eat out their substance …
imposed taxes upon us without our consent… [He has] fundamentally
altered the forms of our government.”
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| Who threatens American society most: law-abiding citizens or criminals? (Matt Rourke/AP) |
This is a chillingly familiar set of grievances; and its recrudescence was foreseen by the Founders. They realized that King George was not an individual case, but the inevitable outcome of unfettered power; that any person or group with the power to tax, to form laws, and to enforce them by arms will default to dictatorship, absent the constant unflagging scrutiny of the governed, and their severe untempered insistence upon compliance with law.
The
Founders recognized that Government is quite literally a necessary
evil, that there must be opposition, between its various branches, and
between political parties, for these are the only ways to temper the
individual’s greed for power and the electorates’ desires for peace by
submission to coercion or blandishment.
Healthy
government, as that based upon our Constitution, is strife. It awakens
anxiety, passion, fervor, and, indeed, hatred and chicanery, both in
pursuit of private gain and of public good. Those who promise to relieve
us of the burden through their personal or ideological excellence,
those who claim to hold the Magic Beans, are simply confidence men.
Their emergence is inevitable, and our individual opposition to and
rejection of them, as they emerge, must be blunt and sure; if they are
arrogant, willful, duplicitous, or simply wrong, they must be replaced,
else they will consolidate power, and use the treasury to buy votes, and
deprive us of our liberties. It was to guard us against this inevitable
decay of government that the Constitution was written. Its purpose was
and is not to enthrone a Government superior to an imperfect and
confused electorate, but to protect us from such a government.
Many
are opposed to private ownership of firearms, and their opposition
comes under several heads. Their specific objections are answerable
retail, but a wholesale response is that the Second Amendment guarantees
the right of the citizens to keep and bear arms. On a lower level of
abstraction, there are more than 2 million instances a year of the armed
citizen deterring or stopping armed criminals; a number four times that
of all crimes involving firearms.
The
Left loves a phantom statistic that a firearm in the hands of a citizen
is X times more likely to cause accidental damage than to be used in
the prevention of crime, but what is there about criminals that ensures
that their gun use is accident-free? If, indeed, a firearm were more
dangerous to its possessors than to potential aggressors, would it not
make sense for the government to arm all criminals, and let them
accidentally shoot themselves? Is this absurd? Yes, and yet the
government, of course, is arming criminals.
Violence
by firearms is most prevalent in big cities with the strictest gun
laws. In Chicago and Washington, D.C., for example, it is only the
criminals who have guns, the law-abiding populace having been disarmed,
and so crime runs riot.
Cities
of similar size in Texas, Florida, Arizona, and elsewhere, which leave
the citizen the right to keep and bear arms, guaranteed in the
Constitution, typically are much safer. More legal guns equal less
crime. What criminal would be foolish enough to rob a gun store? But the
government alleges that the citizen does not need this or that gun,
number of guns, or amount of ammunition.
The Daily Beast
The Daily Beast
