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August 10th, 2009 A CHICKEN IN EVERY POT The nanny state is alive and well, from sea to shining sea. Politicians, those elected officials deemed to be so much smarter and wiser than you could ever dream of being, are on the march and they are offering up even more pervasive ways to interfere in your life and control your behavior, while masking it as being “good for you and good for the country.” Now more than ever America is ripe for the furtherance of the nanny state. We live in a nation of wimps and cowards who continue to rely more and more on someone else to take care of them, protect them and tell them how to behave. We are afraid of failure, we don’t want to feel bad and we would love someone to swoop in and make everything bad just go away…and who better than the almighty government? We haven’t blinked an eye as government has infringed on the rights of smokers for four decades; we have allowed the behavior and the person to be demonized despite the fact that adults in a free nation are making a legal choice of their own volition to engage in risky behavior. Nor have we loudly objected to invasions of our constitutional rights to privacy as government officials have told us they were “making us safer,” with DUI checkpoints, red light cameras, DNA samples taken from people convicted of no crimes and restrictions on gun ownership. If I were a hand-wringer who wanted everyone to make the exact same choices in life that I make, now would be the time I would pounce on America even harder. Enter your politicians. A lot of you walk around believing the nation is tired of being told they can’t give their kids soda or order a super sized meal or spank their children as a means of discipline or have a donut every morning for breakfast. If that’s true, however, we sure aren’t expressing it very loudly. Law after law after law is being passed and we are idly allowing politicians to tell us we’re too stupid to drive with a cell phone and too irresponsible to know how much salt to put on our food. Supporters use the age old cowardly cry of “it’s in the name of the greater good,” but we all know that’s a lie. If people truly wanted to prevent people from getting hurt or sick or making dangerous decisions then we would never allow anyone to drive anywhere ever and we’d stop going to war. If you really want to cut out injuries and fatalities let’s eliminate driving and the military, shall we? That’s not what this is about, of course; this is about telling you, in a free society, how to behave. The brilliance of it is that the nanny state supporters use the most effective means possible to get you to buy into it; they scare you while simultaneously playing on your desire to be told that “everything will be okay.” This is not a new tactic, although it has evolved greatly in the last 100 years. In 1928, President Herbert Hoover, one of the worst in our nation’s history, proclaimed that in his America, the country would be so prosperous that every home would have a “chicken in every pot and a car in every garage.” By early 20th century standards that would have placed every citizen of the country in middle to upper middle class stature. The idea then was that the Industrial revolution had boomed America into such prosperity that we would become successful enough to end poverty entirely. This, of course, is impossible in a nation built on Capitalism where, by definition, there must be winners and losers, achievers and failures. Even in 1928, the truth of life didn’t sound good during a political campaign so Hoover promised things he couldn’t deliver. Sure enough, one year later we spiraled into the Great Depression and the worst 10 years in economic history of America. So much for a chicken in every pot, Americans were just trying to maintain ownership of a pot to piss in. Fast forward to today; San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom (a likely future governor of the state) wants to tell you what to eat, how to eat, and how much of it to eat and justifies all of it under the guise of doing what’s best for the nation’s greater good health-wise. The wise mayor has ordered all city employees to cease from bringing donuts to workplace meetings and instead bring bagels and vegetables (which, by the way, must be halved so that people control their portions). Additionally, the new executive order demands that city lands be turned into farms, that farmer’s markets accept food stamps (as if poor people will waste them on fruits and vegetables…that’s a laugh!) and that anyone doing business with the city offer “healthy alternatives,” even though no one wants them. This is the same playbook as the war on smoking; in the 1960s we began warning people of the dangers of smoking (as if they didn’t know) by placing obnoxious labels on the packs…when people still chose to smoke, the behavior control police couldn’t handle it and began their march to an all out ban on smoking. As the Chronicle story noted at the end of my column cites, a hot dog vendor on the city streets has been offering tofu dogs for months…no one ever buys them. The mayor wants to believe that offering healthy choices will compel people to be healthier; it won’t, and when it doesn’t, he will extend the reach of big brother far further into your home, your kitchen and your choices. Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, New York Senator and certifiable nut-job Chuck Schumer has introduced legislation mandating that with every birth of a new baby in America, the child will be given $500 by the government. How delightful; the U.S. government will now open a savings account for every baby born in America; all of course, under the guise of the greater good as we will now “encourage,” (read: coerce) Americans to save more. Sounds great doesn’t it? Sounds so appealing and generous and caring and supportive and wonderful right? Where to begin; The idea furthers the reliance on government via financial indoctrination at birth. It also propagates behavior control by only allowing people to withdraw the money (once they reach 18 years of age) for certain things that the government approves of. Most sickening though, is, of course, the advancement of wealth distribution as this nation rumbles bumbles and stumbles at an ever quickening pace towards full on socialism. There is no such thing as “the government,” when it comes to money; WE are the government’s source of income and we now live in a nation where fewer than 50% of the people eligible to pay income taxes actually do so. In truth, more than 75% of all taxes are paid by the top 10% of all earners in the nation; the job creators, the risk takers, the investors…the bad guys. Class warfare has been the greatest PR campaign waged in the history of the nation and it has effectively told people that successful folks in America are evil and are the cause of others not being successful. Committing money to every newborn is nothing more than taking the money the successful people in America pay to the government and redistributing it to those who will never thrive, take risks or create jobs. It’s Robin Hood disguised as government and it’s beyond sickening, it’s criminal. It’s America, 2009. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/07/09/MN5C18L6RG.DTL
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