Incentivizing Irresponsibility: How the nanny state creates less responsible citizens

The Weekly Standard ^ | 09/10/2009 | Jim Prevor

[JimPrevor]

It is almost irresistible for conservatives to snicker as Democrats in Massachusetts hold hearings and seek ways to justify an attempt to change the law in Massachusetts to allow the Democratic governor of the Commonwealth to appoint a Democratic senator--presumably available to vote for President Obama's initiatives.

It was just a few years ago when Senator John Kerry was running for president and the governor was a Republican that the Democratic state legislature thought it imperative to change the law to prevent governors from appointing senators. It is just too delicious, the hypocrisy too obvious, for conservatives to ignore.

Yet there is something disturbing beyond hypocrisy in what Senator Kennedy proposed in his last letter to the Massachusetts Democratic leadership. It is something that goes across party lines and that speaks to the real problem behind the hyperactive legislative agenda President Obama has undertaken. It is that all this activity, all this legislating, even if it was in some sense to be successful, is not really addressing what makes a nation a better place to live.

The ubiquity of health insurance or the decrease in carbon output isn't the point. In fact, housing or, even, education, isn't quite the point.

As a father of two young boys, I've learned what many parents come to know ... it is easy to raise children, but it is hard to raise good children.

What makes a country good? What makes the people good? What do we want to encourage?

[JimPrevor]

In much the way public assistance programs have made low-wage earning men superfluous, Obamacare, by making the government responsible for health care, will weaken the family by depriving the adults of "credit" for taking care of this responsibility.

[Jacquerie]

“Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports . . And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion . . . Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail to the exclusion of religious principle.”

Farewell Address of George Washington