The Secret Knowledge

David Mamet, the very leftish Pulitzer Prize winning author of "Glengarry Glen Ross," has written about the failure of ideas he held to be sacrosanct throughout his life, until now.  It is entitled "The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture," and is an expansion of an article published in the Village Voice just  before Bear Stearn's meltdown and the fateful election of '08: "Why I am No Longer A 'Brain-Dead Liberal'"  Mamet writes: "The struggle of the Left to rationalize its positions is an intolerable Sisyphean burden.  I speak as a reformed Liberal."  

He conversed with his first conservative at the age of 60, his rabbi.  One thing led to another, and eventually Hayek's "Fatal Conceit" led to the watershed insight.  He saw that every decision had opposing costs requiring a tradeoff, and realized that his left-liberal (politically correct) crusades had, by the law of unintended consequences, imposed crushing unrecognized costs and affected unwitting unanticipated devastation on society, including on the intended beneficiaries of his morally superior concerns.

Noman is enjoying Mamet and intends to share periodic snippets from the book, i.e., "The Right and the Left ... differ not about programs, but about goals--the goal of the Left is a Government-run country and that of the Right the freedom of the individual from Government.  These goals are difficult to reconcile, as the Left cannot be brought either to actually state its intentions, nor to honestly evaluate the results of its actions."

Here's another difference: the means necessary to achieve their respective goals.  The Left needs the Right's money--individual's and families' money--lots of it today, more of it tomorrow, and all of it eventually to purchase its goal.  The Right just needs the Left to pledge fealty to the country whether they like everything about it or not; behave civilly and stop protecting people who don't; consent to a legal regime ordered in principle towards equality of opportunity; stop attacking the people's religious devotion to the Juedo-Christian God they don't like; and generally, leave the Right alone without picking its pockets so that people can build lives, relations, churches, communities, careers and projects according to their own lights, and not some Washington paladin's.

The Left might hystericize about conservatives in the bedroom and Big Brother on its ovaries simply because the Right insists that people bear responsibility for their personal behavior, and doesn't morally equate bringing one's child to term with killing it, or indulging in protected recreational sex with eschewing it.  But it takes a Barack Obama, Kathleen Sebelius and their Liberal ilk to compel contrary-minded citizens to perform, fund or insure practices they consider morally repugnant, socially barbaric and politically indefensible.   The left tolerates no human imperfectability save the debilitating sexual or licentious vices that people are especially attached to, and which the Right knows people do best to control and resist, personally, publicly and socially.

Another quote from Mamet: "Consider the congruent phenomenon of the response to the inevitable failure of Government Programs.  These Good Ideas--the Great Society, the War on Poverty, etc.--as above, upon inevitable failure, spawn increased governmental programs to "complete" their "work"--their failure being, inevitable again, ascribed to underfunding."

Noman marvels that American's elected Good-Ideas-Leftists in 2006 and 2008, when so many ideas and so much evidence abounded as to open the eyes of even as trenchant a Leftist as Mamet.  The result is that we now brave the onset of twin social calamities: (1) the ultimate Good-Idea boondoggle--Obamacare, and (2) the ultimate underfunding panacea, a federal Value Added Tax, or VAT.

Can you wait for the the President's upcoming Battle Royale to impose the ultimate economic depressant--the VAT--on the people, in the names of fairness, balance and sharing of course?