Posted on 09/15/2002 9:15:23 AM PDT by Pistol
YES MOMMY
A Well-Regulated State
We tell ourselves that in America we are the Free People. I wonder whether we might not better be called the Obedient People, the Passive People, or the Admonished People. I doubt that any country, anywhere, has been so regulated, controlled, and directed as we are. We are bred to obey. And obey we do.
It begins with the sheer volume of law, rules, and administrative duties. Most of the regulation makes sense in isolation, or can be made plausible. Yet there is so much of it.
Used to be if you wanted a dog, you got a dog. It wasn't really the government's business. Today you need a dog license, a shot card for the dog, a collar and tags, proof that the poor beast has been neutered, and you have to keep it on a leash and walk it only in designated places. It's all so we don't get rabies.
Or consider cars. You have to have a title, insurance, and keep it up to date; tags, country sticker, inspection sticker, emissions test. Depending where you are, you can't have chips in the windshield, and you need a zoned parking permit. You have to wear a seatbelt. And of course there are unending traffic laws. You can get a ticket for virtually anything, usually without knowing that you were doing anything wrong.
Then there's paperwork. If you have a couple of daughters with college funds in the stock market, annually you have to fill out three sets of federal taxes, three sets of state, and file four state and four federal estimated tax forms, per person, for a total of twenty-four. This doesn't include personal property taxes for the country, business licenses, tangible business-assets forms, and so on.
Now, I'm not suggesting that all these laws are bad. Stupid, frequently, but evil, no. Stopping at traffic lights is probably a good idea, and certainly is if I'm crossing the street. But the laws never end. Bring a doughnut on the subway, and you get arrested. Don't replace your windows without permission in writing from the condo association. Nothing is too trivial to be regulated. Nothing is not some government's business.
I wonder whether the habit of constant obedience to infinitely numerous rules doesn't inculcate a tendency to obey any rule at all. By having every aspect of one's life regulated in detail, does one not become accustomed to detailed regulation? That is, detailed obedience?
For many it may be hard to remember freer times. Yet they existed. In 1964, when I graduated from high school in rural Virginia, there were speed limits, but nobody much enforced them, or much obeyed them. If you wanted to fish, you needed a pole, not a license. You fished where you wanted, not in designated fishing zones. If you wanted to carry your rifle to the bean field to shoot whistle pigs, you just did it. You didn't need a license and nobody got upset.
To buy a shotgun in the country store, you needed money, not a background check, waiting period, proof of age, certificate of training, and a registration form. If your tail light burned out, then you only had one tail light. If you wanted to park on a back road with your girl friend, the cops, all both of them, didn't care. If you wanted to swim in the creek, you didn't need a Coast Guard approved life jacket.
It felt different. You lived in the world as you found it, and behaved because you were supposed to, but you didn't feel as though you were in a white-collar prison. And if anybody had asked us, we would have said that the freedom was worth more to us than any slightly greater protection against rabies, thank you. Which nobody ever got anyway.
Today, the Mommy State never leaves off protecting us from things I'd just as soon not be protected from. We must wear a helmet on a motorcycle: Kevorkian can kill us, but we cannot kill ourselves. Why is it Mommy Government's business whether I wear a helmet? In fact I do wear one, but it should be my decision.
And so it goes from administrative minutiae (emissions inspections) to gooberish Mommyknowsbestism ("Wea-a-ar your lifejacket, Johnny!") to important moral decisions. Obey in small things, obey in large things.
You must hire the correct proportion of this and that ethnic group, watch your sex balance, prove that you have the proper attitude toward homosexuals. You must let your children be politically indoctrinated in appropriate values, must let your daughter get an abortion without telling you, must accept affirmative action no matter how morally repugnant you find it.
And we do. We are the obedient people.
As the regulation of our behavior becomes more pervasive, so does the mechanism of enforcement grow more nearly omnipresent. In Washington, if you eat on the subway, they really will put you in handcuffs, as they recently did to a girl of twelve. In 1964 in King George County, the cop would have said, "Sally, stop that." Arresting a child for sucking on a sourball would never have entered a state trooper's mind.
Which brings us to an ominous observation. America is absolutely capable of totalitarianism. It won't be the jackbooted variety, but rather a peculiarly mindless, bureaucratic insistence on conformity. What we call political correctness is an American approach to political control.
Our backdoor totalitarianism has the added charm of being crazy.
Think about it. Confiscating nail clippers at security gates, arresting the eating girl on the subway, the confiscation from an aging general of his Congressional Medal of Honor because it had points, the countless ejections from school of little boys for drawing soldiers of the Trade Centers in flames, playing cowboys and Indians, for pointing a chicken finger and saying Bang. This isn't intelligent authoritarianism aimed at purposeful if disagreeable ends. It is the behavior of petty and stupid people, of minor minds over-empowered, ignorant, but angry and charmed to find that they can push others around. It is the exercise of power by people who have no business having any.
And we obey.
We are the obedient people.
Buy Fred's new reprehensible book,Nekkid In Austin! Barnes and Noble has the sucker. Another collection of Fred's collected outrages, irresponsible ravings, and curmudgeonry from Fred On Everything and some innocent magazines that foolishly published him. Put Fred Reed in the search at thingy at B&N and the book will pop like mushrooms on a decaying stump. On request, they may ship it in a plain brown wrapper marked "Sex Books" so your neighbors won't suspect.
<< No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.>>>
Since we are no longer in a 'time of peace' watch for this to fall as well.
Ah, I remember so well that afternoon when I went trekking into a field with a few friends to shoot our guns (none of us over 18). Not far from the border of an enchroaching urban sprawl, we happened upon a rabbit that took flight. Suddenly, all the 22's went off (one guy carried a 38) and we watched in amazment as the rabbit continued in his jagged escape to freedom. Clips spent, chambers emptied, nothing was left but admiration for the fleet-footed travel of an unexpected target.
By today's standards we'd all be looking at felonies. Unable to vote, unable to be in the same room with a gun, etc.
The reason we weren't cuffed back then (1970's) was that there were fewer cops/regulations and they had real criminals to contend with.IMO
Two suggestions: immediately cap the number of law schools and limit the number of students, and place a moritorium on all new laws at federal, state, county, city levels for 5 years. (Yes, Congress fund the country for longer than 12 months at a time. Dont worry we'll still pay you (you've paid farmers for not planting some crops)! We ALL need a break from more laws!!
Five years, ten years, what difference does it make when the constitution is being violated? The Soviets had a 'five year' plan and a constitution, and look where they ended up. Ash heap.
Centrally planned vs. individually planned is the answer. Bureaucrats may not want to hear this, but they are the hemmoroids on the effective elimination of wastes in any society. The pain is all theirs, though they may want to share it with the rest of us. I say no thanks.
I hear ya. "Great days" says a lot. I'm barely a grandfather (step) and yet those 'great days' seem so close while looking in the rear-view mirror.
Violations of the constitution at all levels seem to receive great applause from the majoritarians and collectivists in order to make our society 'safer' for us all. Little do these sorry bastards know that the limits placed upon government were done so to protect their inattentive asses by men who placed their 'everything' at risk in order to do so.
Sacred honor? Truth? Inalienable rights?
"Hey, where the heck is the remote?".
Oh, I get it! I get jokes! You want limits on Congress's ability to mess with your life. I'm all for it.
Every society needs rules, and to the degree that we live in society we will have rules. I can admire the woodsman or trapper who lives wholly on his own. Whether he's better than the decent family or community guy in the hat from the 1940s or 1950s is another question. You probably couldn't build a society out of the Mountain Man. And society would never give him the elbow room he demanded.
Either type is probably preferable to today's smoking-gestapo authoritarian, but both are also preferable to today's anarchic rebel without a cause. The fellow who wants ever more rules today and the fellow who wants to live with no rules, seem, from the point of view of a generation or two ago, to be opposite sides of the same coin.
Understand how we got here. We complained about the "conformism" of the 1950s and turned ourselves into individualist rebels. Now the degree of social control exercised by society comes back, vested this time in the state. I'd like to see less regulation, but some self-control will always be necessary to life in society. Perfect freedom, complete absence of external or internal constraints isn't given to man in society -- or in automobiles on public roads.
... and no, privatizing the public roads won't change that.
It already is.
bttt
There's a powerful, underappreciated lure to safety-by-decree... but only if you can bring yourself to forget that all things have their price, including increments of safety. Even when the State's safety regulations deliver the promised benefits, which is less than half the time, there's a price to pay -- and if people were willing to pay that price voluntarily, there would be no need for the State to impose it on us by force of law.
Freedom, Wealth, and Peace,
Francis W. Porretto
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