But how does a tool become a master? Through dependency

The Magic of Government and the Socialist Apprentice

By Daniel Greenfield
Wednesday, January 13, 2010

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

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

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 “Weâ€