Elizabeth Warren is Scott Brown’s worst nightmare.  She is a successful consumer advocate and think-tanker and has lurked around government for her entire life.  She is a champion debater from her school days and is passionate in her (leftist) beliefs.  And she will be running against Brown for the “Ted Kennedy seat” in Massachusetts.

She’s already campaigning, and last month made a speech in defense of the “underlying social contract”, a speech that has leftist hearts aflame from coast to coast.  Here is her relevant moment:

“There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own.  Nobody.  You built a factory out there — good for you.  But I want to be clear.  You moved your goods to markets on the roads the rest of us paid for.  You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate.  You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for.  You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory.  Now look.  You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea.  God bless!  Keep a big hunk of it.  But part of the underlying social contract is that you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”

Ms. Warren is attempting to refute an argument that nobody is making.  No Republican, no tea partier, no conservative, argues for absence of government or zero taxes or an end to public services.  It’s a straw man, easy to knock down but absurd on its face.  And it’s ironic that her opponent, Senator Brown, is one of the least likely Republicans to make arguments against any government service or existing tax.  In any case, she has left out a LOT of information, and here is my report on the Warren Omission.

“You built a factory…. you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for.”  Roads are primarily a state and county affair.  But on the level of federal funding, this applies; whenever tax money is sent to Washington, a huge chunk of it is skimmed for the expense of government (think 50%), and whatever is left is usually allocated based on politics.  It’s about favors owed, favors cultivated.  Federal funding for roads is doubtless the least efficient and most corrupt means of building them, and if that money were left in taxpayer pockets and instead collected by the states and counties for road construction, we’d have more and better roads very quickly, and at less cost to those taxpayers.   The states, after all, actually build them.  The federal government doesn’t send construction crews and truckloads of asphalt to each state.

And I remember, back in the 1970s, a dubious federal “enforcement” of the new 55 mph speed limit.  The federal government used its funding in an extortionate manner, telling states they were free to keep the speed limit at 70, but no federal highway funds would go to any state which did so.  They were Mafia tactics, used to abridge state’s rights indirectly, without confronting the states in court.

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In light of today’s worldwide anti-capitalist rumbling and renewed feverish interest in leftist redistributive systems, one wonders– just how old is the collectivist idea?

I’ve been reading “Who Murdered Chaucer?” by Terry Jones (of Monty Python fame).  It’s a wonderfully detailed, realistic, careful expansion of available data on a historical period, and yet because of the author’s lifelong passion for his topic it’s anything but DULL.  Jones has literally rewritten the history of the late 14th century English court of King Richard II, a time presumed fully known by historians for going on six hundred years.

While exploring how Richard was influenced by the thinkers of his age (including Chaucer), Mr. Jones chanced upon the writings of Philippe de Mezieres, a French clergyman, a proponent of the Crusades, an author and thinker who in his later years presented the young Richard with a book.  As an advocate of Christian crusader war, de Mezieres was an unlikely source of proto-communist thinking; nevertheless it is there, as Jones describes it:

“(de Mezieres) Proposed the abolition of all personal property, on the grounds that the King serves as the ‘father’ to the people and has complete responsibility for their welfare.”

Of course, without the context that the future Republican age would provide, de Mezieres is understandably unable to imagine a working government without a king, and so he weaves one into the fictional utopia he invented to educate the young English monarch.  There in the “Delectable Garden”, as de Mezieres himself puts it:

“All fruits were held in common by the inhabitants, to each according to his need, and the words ‘my own’ were never heard.  These people lived so happily together, they never seemed to grow old.  All tyranny and harsh rule was banished from the Garden, though there was a king, who stood for authority and the common good, and he was so loved and looked up to that he might have been the father of each and all.  And no wonder, for he had such concern for the welfare of his subjects, dwellers in the Garden, that neither he nor his children owned anything in person.”

Given what we know of prideful and competitive human nature, this is of course wishful thinking.  But did you see it?  “To each according to his need.”  Karl Marx would famously expand upon that phrase five centuries later with “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”  It is of course highly doubtful that Marx read de Mezieres, who did not remain known after his time.

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