Daniel Greenfield article: A
Manageable People

Posted: 12 Apr 2010 07:34 PM PDT

Obama's stated logic behind compelling all Americans to buy
health insurance was that the system wouldn't work, unless everyone was
compelled to be part of it. Conformity is of course is a major requirement
for big government solutions, they don't work unless everyone is forced to
take part in them. And they don't work unless everyone lives mostly the
same. Without individual choices that might take them off the graph. (They
still don't work even then, but the numbers look better up front.) And
this is how big government solutions lead to the pursuit of a "More
Manageable People".

What enlightened Europeans used to admire about America was its
world of possibilities, free from the old burdens of feudalism, of people
who were expected to knuckle to their betters and know their place.
Americans instead made their own place. The open "New World" gave birth to
a staggering explosion of wealth, technology and culture, precisely
because it was much less regimented. If you wanted to live in a tightly
managed society with repressive laws where your options were limited and
your social mobility minuscule, you could just stay home. On the other
hand if you wanted a decent life or a shot at being the urchin who becomes
a Carnegie, you could go to America instead.

Or at least that's the
way it used to be. Until with the best of intentions, we began replacing a
government of the people, with a government that saw the people as ants
who needed to be brought into line. The late 19th and 20th century saw the
rise of a new idea of American government, no longer representative, but
transformative. Government no longer existed to listen to the people, but
to take them by the hand and reform them. Teach them to wash behind the
ears, save money or spend it (as the situation called for), drink less and
be obedient. All in order to make their lives better and teach them to be
a better people.

Soon everything from stopping alcoholism to
disease prevention to ending poverty and fighting racism became the
purview of government. And the results were not only disastrous over and
over again, but also grimly totalitarian. We sterilized people we
considered inferior in order to fight poverty. A view upheld, promoted and
enforced by luminaries such as Oliver Wendell Holmes and Margaret Sanger.
We created a national crime syndicate in order to fight alcoholism. We
caused massive social disruption, first through aggressive segregation
efforts and then aggressive desegregation efforts, both led by Democrats.
We bankrupted the economy to save the economy. We created an entire
culture of poverty in order to fight poverty.

The
progressive idea of government was broken. Badly broken. And in the
process Americans had traded their birthright of freedom, for the promise
of government solutions that made the social problems they were trying to
solve that much worse. But rather than admit defeat and pull back, the big
government reformers decided that there was nothing wrong with their
ideas-- there was something wrong with the American people.

Their
grand failures inspired them not to an attitude of humility, but
hostility. Their analysis of their own failures blamed not so much their
policy, as the people. The American people were willful. They behaved and
thought in ways the social scientists did not expect. They did not do what
was "good for them". They needed nannies and regimentation. They had to be
made more manageable and brought into line.

But since "manageable"
is not a terribly democratic or appealing world, "equality" was instead
repurposed to mean the same thing. Where equality had once meant equal
right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, it instead became the
euphemism for creating an average society, one in which people would be
forced to live like everyone else, to think like everyone else, to have
the same jobs, the same wages and the same lives. Only then would the big
government plans finally work, because the people they were meant to work
on would be interchangeable, cogs in a machine, even numbers without
fractions that add up very nicely.

Where the Old America had been based
around the revolutionary notion that people should define their own lives
by their own decisions, the New America had reverted to the medieval
notion that everything would run best if people lived the way they were
supposed to, did what they were told, and shut up when their betters (with
the appropriate degrees and government positions) were talking. The Town
Halls and the Tea Party movement represented an explosive clash between
the Old America, that actually took the Constitution seriously, and the
New America, that viewed it as a framework for imposing their solutions on
an ignorant public.

Where the Old American was a random variable,
the New American had to be a known and fixed quantity. After all how do
you plan big government solutions that affect hundreds of millions of
people, unless you reduce those people to a handful of numbers. You cannot
cover the health care of 400 million different and unique people. Only
individual providers and doctors can do that. What you can do is cover the
health care of what you define as a typical American family and a typical
American single individual, and then force everyone into that category.
Compulsory insurance, Death panels, heavy taxes on large coverage-- and
all the assorted totalitarian ugliness of ObamaCare is the logical outcome
of that philosophy. Everyone must fall into the same category, or the
system can't work. And if you don't conform, you will be made to conform.
Good bye Constitution. Hello Flow Chart.

Wealth Redistribution
eliminates classes and pushes everyone further into the average column. By
eliminating classes, it also eliminates social mobility, which creates a
more controllable static society in which everyone is just getting by,
except the people with government connections or engaged in illegal
activity (the two are often interchangeable in a tightly regulated
system). Forget about the urchin becoming a Carnegie. That's off the
graph. Forget about the middle class too. Making everyone average means
pushing everyone down, not up-- because it requires less resources to
deprive people of wealth, than to give them wealth, and it helps pay for
the redistribution process too.

Capitalism smashed feudalism once,
by shaking up the nobility and creating power based on economic success,
rather than inherited titles or brutality. Now feudalism is back, except
it's being called socialism, but the endgame is the same. A static society
with a massive lower class tethered to specific highly regulated
occupations, and a tiny upper class that has been put in charge of running
their lives. The new "Protectors of the People" may be armed with PhD's,
rather than banners and cavalry, but the end result is the
same.

Lenin promised the peasants, land. Under Communism, not only
did the peasants lose what little land they had, they also lost their
livestock and even the right to leave the farm without permission. Now
consider how many rights American farmers have lost since the 19th
century. Consider how many rights Americans have lost, period. How many
forms do you have to fill out to do even the simplest things. How much
permission do you need from the authorities to do what you want. How well
do you even know the laws you're governed by. All for your own good. To be
a more manageable people.

The reformers could never accept the
reality of human nature. That people would drink more than is good for
them. That people will eat more than is good for them. That some will earn
more and some will earn less. That some will be bigoted and others
ignorant. That people will make good choices and bad choices. But rather
than understanding that American government was created not to impose
solutions, but to protect that ability to choose-- the reformers instead
decided that government could be a moral force by taking away those
choices, and allowing only those choices they approved of.

But turning people into slaves does not improve society, it
worsens it. And the bad choices will still continue to be made. Communism
deprived the Russian people of economic freedom, and so they found it
instead through crime and the black market. Socialism deprived Canadians
of health care freedom, and so they found it across the border instead.
Prohibitions deprived Americans of legal liquor, and they embraced illegal
liquor instead. Each attempt at imposing control, creates an opposite
reaction, because people naturally strive to be free, to make the choices
that they want to make. And they will make them, no matter how oppressive
the tyranny becomes.

To create a more Manageable People is the
objective of all tyrannies. But in 1776, Americans demonstrated how
unmanageable a people they were. The Tea Party movement is demonstrating
that again today. And those who would manage Americans into a state of
absolute conformity should remember that as well.