‘You won’t go bankrupt. You’ll always produce’

Last time, we were analyzing the crucial rhetorical battle now joined over whether government can be allowed to expand forever, as demanded by those who tirelessly shriek: "You greedy rich people refuse to pay enough! We're not meeting the people's demand for services, their needs, their needs, their needs! We're at the bottom, at the very bottom, of all the social service rankings -- do you hear me? -- like some Third World hellhole!"

The practical argument that we can't afford to see tax rates go up every year -- that this must eventually lead to tax rates approaching 100 percent, with government controlling everything (except a black market whose freedom of contract these harpies can be expected to attack with startling vigor) -- is met with the famous response of Dr. Ferris from the novel "Atlas Shrugged," when industrialist Hank Rearden asks: "How do you expect me to produce after I go bankrupt?"

" 'You won't go bankrupt. You'll always produce,' said Dr. Ferris indifferently, neither in praise nor in blame, merely in the tone of stating a fact of nature, as he would have said to another man: You'll always be a bum. 'You can't help it. It's in your blood. Or, to be more scientific: you're conditioned that way.' ...

"Then Lawson said softly, half in reproach, half in scorn, 'Well, after all, you businessmen have kept predicting disasters for years, you've cried catastrophe at every progressive measure and told us that we'll perish -- but we haven't.' "

Point out that we're now spending more treasure on the public schools than any civilization in history, in real as well as relative terms. Point at that while 11-year-old schoolchildren a century ago could read better than most of today's college kids (I own some of their century-old schoolbooks -- you'd be amazed), while the bulk of today's high school graduates can't tell "their" from "there" or "loose" from "lose" and tend to spell their four-syllable words so poorly you have to sound them out loud. Try to point out, in short, that pouring ever more funds into the government schools has only made things worse, and you will soon find yourself in a conversation out of "Alice in Wonderland":

"Is that all you can do is complain? Won't you work with us to find a way to raise more money and make the schools better?"

"You're not listening. More money has made the schools worse. The answer is to close them down -- dynamite them -- then let small groups of parents start again, with just their own portion of all that money you've been sweeping up in school taxes, setting up little cooperative one-room schoolhouses and hiring their own schoolmarms. If, after 11 years of failure by the government schools, John Stossel could improve 18-year-old Dorian Cain's reading level by two grade levels by sending him for just 72 hours to the Sylvan Learning Center, where they start with, 'These are the 26 letters; each one has a sound ...' then having a Ph.D. in 'Pedagogy' is clearly counterproductive."

"Sarcasm and silly jokes can hardly be called constructive criticism."

"I'm not being sarcastic, and I have no interest in doing anything 'constructive' to bail out your failed youth propaganda camps. The nation was more literate before Dewey and Mann brought back the idea of compulsion schooling by age cohort from Prussia in the 1840s and '50s. It was all done on purpose to create factory workers incapable of the analytical skills necessary to ask troublesome questions.

"This is all explained in the works of New York state (government-school) Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto. Will you read his first little book, 'Dumbing Us Down,' if I give you a copy?"

"You're just being impossible! You have nothing constructive to propose at all! You clearly just hate teachers, you hate the children, you hate education!"

Actually, I'm a writer. I'll be out of work when people can no longer read and comprehend anything beyond microwave instructions, a process already well under way. It's the mandatory government youth camps that are depriving me of readers, creating wave after wave of young people schooled to hate learning so much that they vow "never to read another book again once I get out of this damned place."

The founders granted the government no power to meddle in schooling. That, along with medicine, "social work" and so many other things government now does so badly, are far better handled by families, friends, fraternal societies, religious congregations and other forms of private volunteerism and cooperation.

"Families!" the other side sneers. "Well, that would be very nice, but families are falling apart! Single parents on drugs! Kids sitting in their own feces! Private charities are too weak and underfunded. No one joins those fraternal clubs any more!"

All too true. And why?

If government sucks up all the available funds, granting itself a monopoly over all the functions once performed by these cheerful and voluntary social associations, it leaves those outfits no space in which to operate. Starved of purpose and opportunity as well as funds, they wither and die.

Go to the former Soviet Union, land of inveterate drunks and premature death where -- after 70 years of turning each other in to the secret police on the most minor charge for fear of being branded co-conspirators -- people are afraid to trust each other, to take the risk of raising private investment capital to fund any entrepreneurial vision, even to start a new club or association or Weblog for fear it will be branded "subversive."

What you see is a society still crippled (16 years after communism supposedly "collapsed") by 70 years of "too much government."

Do we really want Soviet-style medicine? Soviet-style architecture, consumer products, farm policy, "environmental protection"? Who are these weasels, teaching our children to hate Edison and Carnegie and Samuel Colt and James J. Hill, the "greedy capitalists" whose investments and innovations made us the envy of the planet, the most prosperous and (formerly) freest nation in the world?

Now ask our friends, the self-styled "progressives," one more time: "At which point will we have 'too much government'? When 65 percent of us work for the state? When they seize 70 percent of my paycheck? Eighty percent?"

Why is their only answer to shriek and call us names? What future do they have in mind for us that needs masking behind all their euphemisms and hysterical hate-speech?

Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Review-Journal and author of the novel "The Black Arrow."