Nanny-state-ism: where the government takes care of us because we are incapable of taking care of ourselves.
If you have ever watched television a month or two before a major election, you would have noticed that almost every ad was a muckraking ad about how bad the other candidate was. What this means is that every candidate on the ballot is a lying, cheating, stealing, back stabbing, kick-granny-when-she's-not-looking, jerk. So when you go in to pull that lever (or create that dangling chad, or complete the ACT, or whatever) you are going in to choose the lesser of two evils.
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| Muckraking . . . mudslinging . . . it's all better in a Jeep! |
Got it?
In other words, the next time a government "official" wants to ban something like trans-fats because he doesn't believe people have enough brains to decide on their own to stay out of the restaurant (or order something healthy), he needs to be reminded that the only reason he is even IN a position of authority to make such a cockamamie proclamation in the first place is that the very people he feels that can't take care of themselves voted his sorry ass INTO office.
(Note: I've ignored many a grammar rule in order to give the above more "punch". I ain't that bad an administrative assistant. Honest!)
For me, the question is where we draw the line between anarchy and totalitarianism.
ReplyDeleteOne guiding principle has it that the less government, the better. Taken to its logical end, the absence of government is best, a philosophy I reject.
The other extreme posits that the individual is incapable of making the best decisions for him/her self and for society at large and that therefor the government must assume this role, a position I find equally objectionable.
We are slowly but surely sliding into totalitarianism by exchanging our liberties for the promise of protection from the burden of making decisions for ourselves, the burden of responsibility for our decisions.
It's a bad trade, in my opinion, one that future generations will surely regret because it's always harder to wrest liberty from tyrants than to refuse ceding those liberties in the first place.
As just one example of the liberties I speak of; While I would never encourage smoking tobacco, to criminalize smoking (consuming a legal product!) in one's own home is itself criminal. Yet, that is actually being considered, right here in the Land of the Free - http://bit.ly/cbAAOD.
Rather than do the hard work and take the honorable approach by banning tobacco outright (and lose that precious tax revenue) the Nanny-Staters want us to trade another liberty in exchange for protection - protection from ourselves.
My fear is that once we discover that we have received nothing more for our liberties than the false sense of security a police state offers, it will be too late to do anything about it.