Читать книгу A U-Turn on the Road to Serfdom - Grover Norquist Glenn - Страница 9

When Hillary Clinton was running for the Senate, back in 2000, she gave a speech saying, ‘What we progressives need is a meeting like Grover runs in Washington, DC.’ I was asked by the press what I thought of that, and I explained how our centre-right coalition meeting works. We put 160 people together every week in a room where there are wide disagreements on what is important, except that what is important to each person is that they be free in the zone that matters to them.

Progressives, the left, have tried to put together similar meetings from time to time. Who would sit at Hillary Clinton’s table, recently stolen by Barack Obama? Around the table might be trial lawyers, labour union bosses and big city political machines. Also the two wings of the dependency movement: people who are locked into welfare dependency and people who make $90,000 a year managing the dependency of people and making sure none of them get jobs and become Republicans. Then we have all the coercive utopians: the people who get government grants to push the rest of us around. The people who mandate cars too small to put your entire family into; the people who designed and required that we must all have toilets too small to flush completely; the people who insist on those light bulbs that convince you that you have glaucoma; and the people who require that on the Sabbath you must separate the green glass from the white glass from the brown glass for the recycling priests.

They have a list of things that you have to do and a list of things you are not allowed to do that is slightly longer and more tedious than Leviticus. It just goes on, and on, and on. So around the left’s table, the ‘takings coalition’ can get along with each other as long as there is enough money in the centre of the table. They can work together as long as taxes are raised and there is more money pouring into the centre of the table to share. They can then cheerfully sit together in the way that they do in the movies after the bank robbery passing out the loot: ‘One for you, one for you, one for you,’ and everybody is happy.

However, if we do our jobs correctly, and we say ‘no new taxes’ and we stop throwing cash into the centre of that table, then all our friends on the left begin to look at each other in a way that is more like the second-to-last scene in those lifeboat movies. Now they are trying to decide who they are going to eat or who they are going to throw overboard.

Our job, step one in the fight for liberty, is to ensure that we don’t make things worse; don’t throw money into the centre of the statist table; do not feed the beast. Don’t raise taxes is rule number one. If you stop the flow of tax dollars, then the other team, as they see the money pile dwindling, begin gnawing on the guy sitting next to them. If they can’t eat taxpayers they will fight each other for the limited amount of other people’s money that is available.

The left is not made up of friends and allies; it is made up of competing parasites.