Every Sunday, Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro sits down with a different person for a long-form conversation. On this week’s “Sunday Special,” Shapiro’s guest was acclaimed writer and director David Mamet.
During one exchange, Mamet stated that the progressive term “economic justice” essentially means “communism.”
SHAPIRO: It’s really interesting because when you watch your movies, there are…some lines that have become just part of the American parlance. Obviously, there’s the whole “Chicago way” speech from “The Untouchables,” or the speech that, in the movie version, Alec Baldwin gives in “Glengarry Glen Ross” – the “always be closing” speech.
A lot of folks on the Left tend to use these particular lines actually a fair bit. So, Barack Obama famously suggested that you don’t bring a knife to a gunfight in his sort of political heyday, and people on the Left are constantly suggesting that capitalism is this dog-eat-dog business where people are attempting to tear each other down, and they use that as an excuse for government interventionism. But it sounds like your basic view of human beings [is] that all human beings are basically at each other, and that’s why we have to come to these basic agreements to leave each other alone.
MAMET: Well, yeah. I was watching yesterday the great Tucker Carlson – I’m crazy about him. He had some cockamamie, I think Democrat something or other congressmen or something, and he says to the guy, the Democrat, he says, “Wait a second,” he says, “you guys got nothing left in the golf bag. What in the world are you gonna run on in the midterms?” And the guy says, “Economic justice and social justice.”
So I said, okay, you know, let’s break it down to the English language, right? What does economic justice mean at the end? How is that different than justice, right? It’s communism. It’s statism. It means that someone is going to stand above whatever rules we have for commerce, and decide what’s just to whom, right?
As Thomas Sowell said, whenever anybody says, “It’s gonna help A,” you say, well, who’s it gonna hurt?
So, economic justice is, at the end of the day, it’s communism. And communism is: Someone’s gonna be in charge of saying what you have to give to me, and I’ll keep what I think I want and give it back to you. Which brings me back to when I realized that the whole Marxian idea [of] “from each according to his ability; to each according to his need” really begs the question because the term which is missing is, “the state shall take” from each according to his ability – which means the state’s gonna determine what your ability is. “The state shall give” to each according to his need. I am the state; I’m gonna determine what you need. You don’t determine it anymore. You don’t determine what your ability is; the state does.