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Ralph Peters
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Wars of Blood and Faith
Ralph Peters

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Conservatives Are From Mars, Liberals Are From San Francisco
by Burt Prelutsky
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FROM THE PHONE BOOTH: The Smallest Space in  Hollywood

	FINEFROCK

This IS The Garden of Eden
Or, The Closest We’ve Ever Known
by Steve Finefrock - Hollywood Forum [scriptwriter] 10/26/07

Lie back, take a snooze, reach out and there is an apple, or pear, or peach, at the ready, for your pleasure and ease.  No work.  All play, all day, every day.  Run naked, fornicate and osculate and just have fun. That was the Garden of Eden, we think. No work, all play — no pain, and of course no gain since it was all done for us. We’d like to get back there.
 
All politics in human history is about the Garden of Eden — getting back to it, finding a way to laze about and let someone else do the driving. Sort of a Greyhound world! Along for the ride, look out the window, see the scenery, enjoy passive passions thru the environment-controlled world with all pains eliminated, all worries avoided, all responsibility vacated.
 
That would be such a bummer.

Imagine a ‘Star Trek’ transporter/time-machine taking us there, right now — like Tudor Turtle in "Fractured Fairy Tales" going to fantasy locales in the Way-Back Machine: we would soon be crying "Mister Wizard, HELP..." and be happy beyond measure to re-join the modern economy wrought by man’s own labor. In the Garden there are low-hanging fruits, true enough — but not much else. Want some veal parmigiana? Sorry, ain’t hanging on no stinkin’ tree in the Garden — that would require work, and also pain to the animal. This would be a PETA pleasure palace, except since all the ‘compassion work’ is a fait accompli, there would be none for PETA. So for PETA, this would be hell itself, with no preaching and prattling required in a fully in-place paradise.
 
In the Garden, there would be no all-night diners, no bowling alleys, no video games, not a single thing wrought by man’s labor and genius and application of wit to the earth’s offerings.  Want a nice house?  In the Garden one presumably sleeps under the trees, but if you want a house — to show off? Is pride allowed in the Garden? — you have to build it, or find builders who will accept something of value that arises from your labor.

Want to get from here to there, over some distance? Okay, start walking: there ain’t no wagons for horses to pull [and horses would be suffering under burden; not allowed in the Garden of PETA], unless someone builds them, with sweaty, callused hands using tools which also have been fashioned by smelters, who use coke or charcoal which itself is the product of someone else’s hard labor.
 
And maybe a few pathways in the Garden are rough-surfaced, so you’d want some shoes, or sandals if you’re a hippie type. Who makes ‘em? Where did the leather come from, or the polyurethane carbonate synthetic? Who did the work to fashion this foot protection? What do you have to trade for this "Made in the Garden of Eden" product? Even in the Garden of Eden there has to be economics, unless all you do is run around naked, fornicating, sunbathing and grabbing for the odd fruit on the low-hanging trees. But even there, what if you suspect the fruit in the higher branches is riper, tastier, sweeter? Who gets that fruit? You might climb the tree, but what if you’re rather clumsy?
 
Someone else might be more skilled, braver, quicker, surer-footed, and would agree to take that risk on your behalf, bringing down a basket filled with juicy plums. But where did the basket come from? Without it, your intrepid volunteer would have to throw them down, one by one, to a willing catcher below. Those two entrepreneurs might give you all your appetite desires. But maybe not. Whatcha got to trade, feller?
 
Someone did the work, took the risk, to climb that tree. Or someone built a ladder, for a safer ascent — but who made the ladder? Who conceived the idea, drafted the plans, found the proper wood, cut it and shaped it and joined it tightly to form that ladder? Did he do it for FREE?
 
This pair of Gardens forms a metaphor for the core difference between lefties and conservatives. The Left believes fervently that government can "create" a Garden without pain, work, dedication, sweat – or even inconvenience and embarrassment of using a welfare foodstamp booklet. Conservatives know, in their gut if not in their carefully-formed intellect, that the bottom-line truth of economics is as summarized by Milton Friedman: THERE IS NO FREE LUNCH.
 
On every tree in a modern, and honest [i.e., non-liberal] Garden of Eden would hang a placard with that bold-faced, all-caps declaration. Someone has to pay. Someone has to do the work. Someone pays the check at the end of the meal. Just because you convince some rich uncle [Uncle Sam] to subsidize your yummy veal parmigiana doesn’t make it "free" — some cook had to sweat in the kitchen, a waiter had to struggle with the tray brought to your table, and so on forward and backward along the line of production, so you can eat your "free" meal that seems free because the money didn’t come out of your pocket.
 
But there HAS TO BE A POCKET SOMEWHERE. Liberals want to take it from one pocket, with government being the pickpocket, The Artful Dodger with an IRS tag, and then give free stuff to their chosen constituencies, and declare, like little Jack Horner eating his Christmas pie, "look what a good boy we are" for all this stuff we did for you.
 
Liberals believe their pickpocket methods, on behalf of "deserving" constituencies, will give us a Garden of Eden. Conservatives know that a pocket too-frequently picked soon goes empty — producers slow down, the ladder isn’t built or goes unrepaired, for their labor is exploited by "do good" liberals who themselves rarely have any idea to actually produce a damned thing. They only see dollar signs tattooed on the foreheads of producers, and see themselves as conveyor belts of goodies from producers to slackers, or sometimes from highly-productive successes to somewhat-less-successful workers whose value by society is beneath what liberals think is "fair".
 
Notice this: rarely do liberals give forth their own money. Rare is the Ralph Nader type, who gives all his income above a meager living allowance, to a noble and worthy fight for justice. Most who can afford SUVs and big houses and summer homes and private school for their kids spend their money on SUVs, houses, homes and school — they do not do a "Nader" and live cheap, giving their own money in large amounts to the more-deserving. Their guilt at success is spread around, so as to tax all successful people a good deal more, and though the liberal will thus pay some of those taxes, he is "leveraging" his money [to gain control of many, many others’ money], on behalf of good works, which he has chosen to serve his own psychic income deficiencies.
 
That’s how they use the income-tax: tax your income to provide them with psychic income of superiority and worth, which is of course a way to bash conservatives who disagree. All in pursuit of a Garden of Eden that never was, at least for any more than a mere two ‘prototypes’ and never for a full society of widely varied [diverse?] humans, bashing and clashing over who gets what, who pays, and who decides.
 
The politics of the Garden can go two ways: down the Stalinist path — consistently proven economically wrong, and wrong-headed, and morally wrong — or the conservative path. One believes in a government-managed, government-mandated paradise that expects everyone who is productive to work endlessly without regard to taxes, regulation, litigation and aggravation. The other recognizes we are considerably selfish, figgerin’ we want our money to spend on our kids, our home, our powerboat, our SUV, and expect those who want plums, pears, veal parmigiana or lobster thermidor should WORK FOR IT.
 
Because even in the Garden of Eden, those who build the ladders and climb to the higher branches have the audacious view that they are entitled to the fruit of their labor, their sweat, their creativity, their risk-taking [what if, suddenly, no one wants top-branch fruit? All that woodwork is for naught! The law of supply and demand can be unforgiving, and inconvenient].

Economics, and politics, began in the Garden, and both are motivated by two visions of the Garden. One was rather primitive, and boring. The version which mankind has wrought is much more elevating, since we have elevators, microwave ovens, trans-Atlantic passenger planes and a potful of things Adam and Eve never imagined. Including pots!
 
But we worked for it — much improvement over the prototype, don’t ya think? ExileStreet

copyright 2007 Steve Finefrock

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