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Daniel Greenfield - The Golden Apple

Originally Published on the Sultan Knish blog

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Once upon a time there was a street fair. Then the government created a Ministry of Street Fairs funded by taxing the produce sold at the street fair. At first the Ministry brought some some order to the street fair. But to justify its expansion, it would periodically launch new "street fair initiatives" paid for by higher taxes on the produce. The higher taxes are passed on to customers as higher produce prices and people stop shopping at the street fair.

After some consultation the Ministry of Street Fairs launches an "Emergency Street Fair Stimulus Plan" to promote shopping at the street fair. The stimulus plan offers people credit for shopping at the street fair. But the credit has to be paid for by doubling the price of all the produce. That and the welter of new hidden regulations embedded in the stimulus plan raises expenses for the sellers, who in turn have to raise prices. There is a short term burst of shoppers excited by the credit, which quickly fades away. The credit goes away soon enough too, but the prices stay just as high.

The Ministry of Street Fairs realizes that people are shopping for their produce at supermarkets instead. And it demands that supermarkets also be classified as street fairs, and put under the jurisdiction and tax authority of the Ministry. A Bill is introduced, "The Supermarkets are now Street Fairs" bill, to put supermarkets under the Ministry's authority, and tax them at twice the rate of street fairs. Supporters of the bill denounce the evil "Supermarket Lobby" for profiteering at the expense of the starving children who need fresh fruit and the poor street fair sellers, who wish the Ministry would just go away. The bill passes. The Ministry is congratulated for its commitment to fighting for the right of everyone to buy fruit at vastly inflated prices.

Very few people shop for produce anymore because it has become far too expensive. Falling sales mean that merchants have to raise their prices even more to compensate for decreased sales volume. Many supermarkets and sellers go out of business, creating more unemployment and even fewer people who can afford fruit. Fruit growers and importers in turn go out of business or turn to other products. Fresh fruit becomes a luxury that only the very rich can afford.

The Ministry of Street Fairs responds by creating a "Fruit Dole" which entitles every child to one apple and pear a week. This dole comes once again at the expense of the fruit sellers, which raises the general price of fruit once again. Charismatic young politicians speak out demanding "Fruit for the People" and denouncing those who prevent the people from having access to fruit. The blames falls on the fruit sellers. A radical "Fruit People's Party" is created with a call to equal fruit for everyone.

The Ministry decides to regulate the price of fruit, setting an exact price at which fruit may be sold. The taxes on fruit sellers however remain just as high. Most of the fruit sellers go out of business. The few who remain in business, sell bad fruit at the mandated price to the public, while selling good fresh fruit under the table at much higher prices. Now everyone can afford fruit, but the only fruit they can buy is rotten and moldy.

Naturally the young politicians and the "Fruit People's Party" are unsatisfied. They demand to know why the only fruit available to the people is bad fruit. An investigation is launched and several of the sellers are arrested for covertly selling good fruit at much higher prices. The sellers are sentenced to jail, and a new Fruit Inspection Squad is launched to patrol the street fair and insure that no one sells fruit at higher prices. The Fruit Inspection Squad's salary is paid for by higher taxes on the fruit sellers. This forces the fruit sellers to begin covertly selling fruit that they would have once considered bad under the table. The remaining fruit that they sell to the public at the mandated low price is so rotten that it is completely inedible.

Within a few days, the Fruit Inspection Squad members have made arrangements with the fruit sellers to pocket fresh fruit for themselves and their families in exchange for looking the other way at their covert fruit sales. The same situation continues. Once again an outcry is launched, and more fruit sellers are arrested, along with members of the Fruit Inspection Squad. Lengthy jail sentences are handed out to everyone. A new Fruit Inspection Squad is appointed, with twice as many members. And additionally, a Fruit Secret Police is created composed of undercover agents who are tasked with rooting out corruption in the Fruit Inspection Squad.

All this new manpower comes with new taxes on the fruit sellers. The fruit sellers are no longer able to meet the demands of the taxes, and the bribes expected by both the Fruit Inspection Squad and the Fruit Secret Police to allow them to stay in business. Instead they go over their heads and suborn a few key members of the Ministry of Street Fairs with fresh fruit. The fruit sold at the street fair and in the supermarkets is now more rotten than ever and draws flies from miles around.

Politicians rise to denounce corruption in the Ministry of Street Fairs, and its Fruit Inspection Squad and Secret Fruit Police. A third round of investigations leads to the imprisonment of members of the Ministry. New Ministry members pledge their absolute devotion to the highest standards of ethics. Instead they collude with members of the Secret Fruit Police to create a secret fruit cartel which sells fresh fruit to the very rich at high prices. The Fruit Cartel extends its way up into the highest levels of the government.

The fruit at the street fair grows more rotten than ever. But the Fruit Dole is doubled to two apples and two pears a week. Which are worse than ever, as employees at the Ministry resell the fruit intended for the fruit dole. The cartel creates a thriving underground fruit market. Young boys throughout the city earn a few coins by whispering to passerby, "Hey Mister, would you like to buy some fruit."

The fruit cartel quickly transformsinto organized crime. Rival fruit sellers engage in knife fights. A number of children are killed selling fruit. The public demands that the government do something. The government increases jail terms for illegal fruit sales and doubles the size of the Ministry's budget by doubling taxes on the fruit sellers. The fruit quality sold at the fair grows worse. No one shops there at all anymore. The fruit trade has moved into the back alleys.

The Ministry nationalizes the remaining fruit sellers and supermarkets, promising absolute control over all fruit sales. The government encourages people to grow fruit in their own backyards and cellars, for their own use-- which can be sold only after an expensive licensing and approvals process. This only increases the illegal fruit market, as many citizens begin growing fruit and reselling it on the black fruit market. The Fruit Cartel, enforced by the Secret Fruit Police attempts to control this market. Daily radio broadcasts denounce "Fruit Hoarders" and declare a "War on Backyard Fruit." Home fruit growing is banned, but nevertheless thrives.

The public outrage against crime, the high prices of illegal fruit and the low quality of legal fruit, combined with the Ministry's blatant corruption, motivate the people to support the Fruit People's Party's revolution. The entire government is shot. The Ministry of Street Fairs becomes the People's Ministry of Street Fairs, and promises an end to all corruption and "Fruit for Everyone".

As its first act, the People's Ministry turns to the fruit growers and importers and demands that they provide "Fruit for Everyone." The few fruit growers and importers who have not gone out of business, have gotten used to selling their fruit illegally and do not comply. The People's Ministry has them tried and executed. Their orchards and businesses are nationalized "In the Name of the People." The government sends out of work people who know nothing about growing fruit to work the orchards. A new "Golden Age of Fruit for Everyone" is declared.

The fruit orchards go mostly untended. The new workers know nothing about growing fruit. Their salaries are minimal. Their motivation is entirely absent. At the beginning of each growing season, the "People's Ministry of Street Fairs" proclaims a target number for the crop that they expect them to grow. The workers fail to meet that quota. The People's Secret Fruit Police accuses them of economic sabotage and has them executed. A new collection of workers takes their place.

After a few seasons of this, there is still no fruit. In fact there is less fruit than there ever was. The People's Ministry compensates for this by importing fruit from abroad which it distributes through the "Fruit Dole". What fresh fruit is grown, goes to the Ministry and the members of the Fruit People's Party, as well as the numerous members of the Fruit Inspection Bureaucracy that evaluates and weighs the produce for weight equality.

At the end of every harvest, the People's Fruit Propaganda Corps declares that under the wise leadership of the Fruit People's Party, with the insightful guidance of the members of the People's Ministry of Street Fairs, with the tireless efforts of the Fruit Inspection Bureaucracy, and through the hard dedicated labor of the Fruit Growers (those who hadn't been shot yet), the target for the fruit harvest has been both met and exceeded. Posters, television broadcasts and the radio constantly talk about the great number of ripe shining fruit that has been grown. Children are interviewed about how pleased they are to be living in the greatest country in the world where fruit is available to everyone on the Fruit Dole, whether or not they can pay for it.

Meanwhile the street fairs are neglected and the only fruit there will kill you as soon as you take a bite of it. The only reason anyone goes to them is because they are a good place to make a connection with illegal fruit sellers, who resell fruit stolen by members of the Fruit Inspection Bureaucracy. At private parties, the members of the People's Ministry and the People's Party dine lavishly on pears and apples, and decadently spoon handfuls of grapes into their mouths... little aware that in the outside world any working family could afford what has become a delicacy in the People's Republic of Fruitania.

As families go out for a night at the movies, the only film playing is the impassioned epic FRUIT HARVESTERS OF THE NORTHERN SLOPES, which depicts the struggle of brave fruit growers who battle the elements and greedy corrupt Fruit Gangsters. It took 2 years to film, and it is the first new movie to be released in six months. And the people are happy to have it. They don't remember that before the Ministry of Film-making was formed, several movies used to be released each week.

After the Newsreels which show the brave People's Army preparing to invade local fruit producing nations, whose "fruit hoarding aggression" threatens them, and members of the Fruit Inspection Squad rounding up seedy looking Fruit Gangsters, usually belonging to a minority ethnic group-- the main feature begins.

Even as the film tells the story of Peter, the brave fruit grower, who romances the beautiful daughter of Lovak, the fruit hoarder, who insists on growing and selling his own fruit, rather than working for the benefit of the people-- the audience pays little attention, focusing mainly on the shot after shot of gorgeous fruit orchards, their mouths salivating furiously at the sight.

At the end of movie, an official from the People's Fruit Party rises to proclaim that this year's fruit harvest has been the biggest and most tremendous harvest ever. Unfortunately, he says, the first priority of the People's Fruit Party must be to provide fruit to the starving children who go without fruit all the time. Which is why 90 percent of the harvest will go to a special Children's Fruit Dole, to be distributed to starving children, somewhere else. Somewhere they've never heard of.

The remaining fruit must be sold to the filthy Fruit Hoarders abroad in order to buy the weapons with which to equip the Fruit People's Army to protect the fruit orchards of Fruitania from those who seek to steal their fruit. He congratulates them for their dedication to the principles of Fruitism, and promises that with their continued hard work and effort, a day will come when everyone in the nation and around the world will have as much fruit as they want, when the World Fruitian Revolution comes.

The audience joins him in signing the revolutionary hymn, "Fruit of My Homeland", their voices rising with impassioned fervor on the verse, "The fruit of my homeland is the sweetest fruit of all. I will die for your orchards and perish for your pears. The fruit of my homeland is dearest to me." This is followed by a chorus of "Soldiers of Fruitania", "Workers of the Fruit Orchards" and "Death to the Fruit Hoarders".

They go home. The People's Party member to what he considers a lavish repast of a fresh pear. If he moves up in the party, he can expect to dine on many pieces of fruit a day. A few lucky audience members return to suppers of moldy fruit baked into pies that are mostly crust. Others have rice clumped into the shapes of pears, apples and grapes, covered in food coloring and glazed with sugar-- as a delicacy that they claim is almost as good as the real thing. Not that any of them have ever tasted a piece of fresh fruit in their lives. And never expect to.

The radio comes on automatically with a stirring broadcast from the Chairman of the People's Fruit Party who announces that the world revolution is now closer than ever. "The decadent Fruit Hoarders abroad are part of a decaying social and economic system that cannot last much longer. Their fruit hoarding has made them weak," he declares, "and ripe for takeover. They cannot conceive of sacrificing their fruits for others as we can. All they care about is their own personal profits. Soon their fruit orchards will be ours. And then they too will live just as we do."

The broadcast heard by millions of people who have never tasted a fresh piece of fruit closes with the revolutionary anthem, "Fruit for Everyone".

(Fortunately this is only a fairy tale that could never ever happen in real life. Still it might be worth remembering that when you kill the golden apple of the free market, all that's left is moldy pears. And that "Fruit for Everyone" usually means "Fruit for No One")

Daniel Greenfield

Visit Daniel's Blog Sultan Knish by clicking HERE

Daniel Greenfield is a blogger and columnist born in Israel and living in New York City. Daniel is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and a contributing editor at Family Security Matters.

Daniel's original biweekly column appears at Front Page Magazine and his blog articles regularly appear at Family Security Matters, the Jewish Press, Times of Israel, Act for America and Right Side News, as well as daily at the Canada Free Press and a number of other outlets. Daniel has a column titled Western Front at Israel National News and his op eds have also appeared in the New York Sun, the Jewish Press and at FOX Nation.

Daniel was named one of the Jewish Press' Most Worthwhile Blogs from 2006-2011 and his writing has been cited by Rush Limbaugh, Melanie Philips, Robert Spencer, Daniel Pipes, Judith Klinghoffer, John Podhoretz, Jeff Jacoby and Michelle Malkin, among others.

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Daniel Greenfield - Gun Control, Thought Control and People Control

Originally Published on the Sultan Knish blog

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The gun control debate, like all debates with the left, is reducible to the question of whether we are individuals who make our own decisions or a great squishy social mass that helplessly responds to stimuli. Do people kill with guns or does the availability of guns kill people? Do bad eating habits kill people or does the availability of junk food kill people?

To the left these are distinctions without a difference. If a thing is available then it is the cause of the problem. The individual cannot be held accountable for shooting someone if there are guns for sale. Individuals have no role to play because they are not moral actors, only members of a mob responding to stimuli.

You wouldn't blame a dog for overeating; you blame the owners for overfeeding him. Nor do you blame a dog for biting a neighbor. You might punish him, but the punishment is training, not a recognition of authentic responsibility on the part of the canine. And the way that you think of a dog, is the way that the left thinks of you. When you misbehave, the left looks around for your owner.

The cult of the left believes that it is engaged in a great apocalyptic battle with corporations and industrialists for the ownership of the unthinking masses. Its acolytes see themselves as the individuals who have been "liberated" to think for themselves. They make choices. You however are just a member of the unthinking masses. You are not really a person, but only respond to the agendas of your corporate overlords. If you eat too much, it's because corporations make you eat. If you kill, it's because corporations encourage you to buy guns. You are not an individual. You are a social problem.

Individual behavior is a symptom of a social problem. Identify the social problem and you fix the behavior. The individual is nothing, the crowd is everything. Control the mass and you control the individual.

That is how the left approached this election. Instead of appealing to individual interests, they went after identity groups. They targeted low information voters and used behavioral science to find ways to manipulate people. The right treated voters like human beings. The left treated them like lab monkeys. And the lab monkey approach is triumphantly toted by progressives as proof that the left is more intelligent than the right. And what better proof of intelligence can there be than treating half the country like buttons of unthinking responses that you can push to get them to do what you want.

Would you let a lab monkey own a gun? Hell no. Would you let it choose what to eat? Only as an experiment. Would you let it vote for laws in a referendum? Not unless it's trained to push the right button. Would you let it drive a car? Nope. Maybe a bicycle. And if it has to travel a long way, you'll encourage it to use mass transit. Does a monkey have freedom of speech? Only until it annoys you.

You'll take away most of the monkey's bananas, which you're too lazy to go and find for yourself because you have more important things to do than fetch bananas. You train monkeys to fetch bananas for you. That is how the enlightened elites of the left see the workers whose taxes they harvest; as monkeys that they taught in their schools and created jobs for with their stimulus plans for. And the least that the monkeys could do is pay their taxes, because the monkeys didn’t build that. You did.

You do plan to take care of monkey's medical expenses, at least until they get too high, and spay and neuter it with free birth control. You will train it to be the smartest and most well-behaved monkey it can be. And when it gets too sick, you plan to have it mercifully put down so it doesn't hang around spreading diseases and depressing you with its misery.

And what's wrong with any of that? Human beings are just evolved monkeys. It's not as if you're being cruel to the monkey. You're engaged in what you might charitably think of as a symbiotic relationship with the monkey. If the monkey were smart, it might think of you as a parasite. But you have a whole lot of rounds of ammunition stockpiled in case of a Planet of the Apes scenario.

If you assume that there is as much of a substantive difference between the elite and the common man as there is between a man and a monkey, there is nothing particularly inappropriate about such behavior. We herd animals. Liberals herd people. The human being is the livestock of the liberal animal farm.

The Nazis believed that they were the master race because they were genetically superior. Liberals believe that they are the master race on account of their superior empathy and intelligence. There's an obvious paradox in believing that you have the right to enslave and kill people because you care more, but that didn't stop millions of people from joining in with revolutions that led to a century of bloodshed in the name of movements that cared more.

The defining American code is freedom. The defining liberal code is compassion. Conservatives have attempted to counter that by defining freedom as compassionate, as George W. Bush did. Liberals counter by attempting to define compassion as liberating, the way that FDR did by classing freedoms with entitlements in his Four Freedoms.

On one side stands the individual with his rights and responsibilities. On the other side is the remorseless state machinery of supreme compassion. And there is no bridging this gap.

Liberal compassion is not the compassion of equals. It is a revolutionary pity that uses empathy only as fuel for outrage. It is the sort of compassion practiced by people who like to be angry and who like to pretend that their anger makes them better people. It is the sort of compassion that eats like poison into the bones of a man or a society, even while swelling their egos with their own wonderfulness.

Compassion of this sort is outrage fuel. It is hatred toward people masquerading as love. And that hatred is a desire for power masquerading as outrage which in turn is dressed up as a deep love for others and empathy for all living creatures. Peel away the mask of compassion and all that is underneath is a terrible lust for power. And the only way to truly justify the kind of total power summoned by such lusts is by reducing the people you would rule over to the status of non-persons.

The clash that will define the future of America is this collision between the individual and the state, between disorganized freedom and organized compassion, between a self-directed experiment in self-government and an experiment conducted by trained experts on a lab monkey population. And the defining idea of this conflict is accountability.

To understand the left's position on nearly any issue, imagine a 20th Century American and then take away accountability. Assume that the individual is helpless and stupid, has little to no control over his own behavior and is only responding to stimuli and functions in a purely reactive capacity. Then use that data to come up with a response to anything from kids getting fat to a football player shooting his wife to terrorists firing rockets at Israel. The only possible answer to reactive behavior is to find the thing being reacted to and condemn it.

If you want to fake being a member of the left on any topic and in any setting, master this simple phrase. "But we have to look at the root causes to see who is really responsible." Congratulations, you can now get by anywhere from Caracas to Brussels to Berkeley.

The root cause is a perpetual search for an accountability vested in systems rather than people. That search always ends up with systems and ideologies, rather than mere people, because it justifies the destruction of those systems and ideologies. And destroying systems and ideologies allows them to be replaced by their progressive replacements.

The final failure of accountability for the left is a failure of moral organization, while for the right it is a failure of personal character. The right asks, "Why did you kill?" The left asks, "Who let him have a gun?", "Who didn't provide him with a job" and "Who neglected his self-esteem?"

Freedom goes hand in hand with personal moral organization of the individual by the individual. Organized compassion however requires the moral organization of the society as a whole. A shooting is not a failure of the character of one man alone, or even his family and social circle, it is the total failure of our entire society and perhaps even the world, for not leveraging a sufficient level of moral organization that would have made such a crime impossible. No man is an island. Every man is a traffic jam.

Social accountability on this scale requires the nullification of the personhood and accountability of the individual, just as the moral organization that it mandates requires removing the freedom of choice of the individual, to assure a truly moral society. When compassion and morality are collective, then everyone and no one is moral and compassionate at the same time. And that is the society of the welfare state where compassion is administered by a salaried bureaucracy.

Choice is what makes us moral creatures and collective compassion leaves us less than human. The collective society of mass movements and mass decisions leaves us little better than lab monkeys trying to compose Shakespeare without understanding language, meaning or ideas, or anything more than the rote feel of our fingers hitting the keyboard.

This is the society that the left is creating, a place filled with as many social problems as there are people, where everyone is a lab monkey except the experts running the experiments, and where no one has any rights because freedom is the enemy of a system whose moral code derives from creating a perfect society by replacing the individual with the mass. It is a society where there is no accountability, only constant compulsion. It is a society where you are a social problem and there are highly paid experts working day and night to figure out how to solve you.

Daniel Greenfield

Visit Daniel's Blog Sultan Knish by clicking HERE

Daniel Greenfield is a blogger and columnist born in Israel and living in New York City. Daniel is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and a contributing editor at Family Security Matters.

Daniel's original biweekly column appears at Front Page Magazine and his blog articles regularly appear at Family Security Matters, the Jewish Press, Times of Israel, Act for America and Right Side News, as well as daily at the Canada Free Press and a number of other outlets. Daniel has a column titled Western Front at Israel National News and his op eds have also appeared in the New York Sun, the Jewish Press and at FOX Nation.

Daniel was named one of the Jewish Press' Most Worthwhile Blogs from 2006-2011 and his writing has been cited by Rush Limbaugh, Melanie Philips, Robert Spencer, Daniel Pipes, Judith Klinghoffer, John Podhoretz, Jeff Jacoby and Michelle Malkin, among others.

NOTE: To share or email this 'Specific' article, you must click on the Title of the article.