Something similar can be said about the whole fiasco that congregates under the name of “cap-and-trade.” It’s an anti-growth, anti-business strategy whose chief effect for most people will be less energy at a significantly higher cost. A large collateral effect, however, will be to further extend government control over your life: over the sorts of light bulbs you can use, for example, or what sorts of fuel you will have to use to heat your house and at what cost.
The hypertrophy of government has two main effects.
On the one hand, as Tocqueville famously point out lo these many years ago, it tends to enervate the citizenry, discouraging initiative, independence, and self-reliance. It achieves mastery not by tyrannizing the populace but by infantilizing it.
On the other hand, increased government control has a countervailing effect on those exercising the control. If it encourages dependence among the people, it encourages arrogance, arbitrariness, and unaccountability among the our rulers. The fact that more and more offices seem to come with life tenure only exacerbates these dangerous and deeply undemocratic tendencies. When a Congressman or Senator occupies his office decade after decade, he comes to view it less as his duty than as his right, his prerogative.
Tocqueville discussed the effect of increasing government control under the heading of Democratic Despotism. We cannot remind ourselves too often of his wise words about the evils encroaching government control.
But we need also to remind ourselves of the other side of that transaction, what the cancerous growth of government means for the character of those governing. Among other things, it encourages a high-handedness that, in practice, is indistinguishable from tyranny, whose hallmark is not cruelty so much as arbitrariness and caprice. This is a large subject, worth much more than a short column. Senator Kerry’s little haut-en-bas public-relations stunt may win him kudos from the credulous. The rest of us will be less admiring. For us, Senator Kerry’s condescending gesture is like having a scab torn from a festering wound. His traveling commercial is presented as an act of solidarity with the virtuous minions concerned about “the environment.” Really, it is a cynical gesture that underscores his distance from the people whose interests he is supposed to be serving.
Roger, the answer concerning why nanny statism is making a comeback, is axiomatic.
Baby Boomers.
In the 60′s, they were young, vibrant and fighting for independence. They wanted freedom from sexual mores, glass ceilings…ceilings of any type, the right to party hearty and live on the edge of hedonism’s doorstep. They didn’t want to wear underwear and they wanted sex, drugs and rock and roll.
Now, some forty years later…they are looking at needing a nanny. If they wear underwear…Depends.
They are no longer worried about a ceiling, but they are concerned about having a floor.
The drugs they want now are Viagra, Ambien and Xanax.
No longer seeking independence, but rather, state sponsored dependence. Socialism is the vehicle, the “clapper” of political systems, for those whose will to achieve has fallen and can’t get up.
Toothless, hairless, chubby, dependent, helpless and wrinkled describes babies and baby boomers. And socialism is mother’s milk.
National health care is a several trillion dollar binky. And, by whining, mewling and puking…they can have their bottles, after first being given a little global warming.
Baby boomers. A generation of bad gas…that can’t pass through fast enough.
I hope when Kerry gets to Dopenhagen he asks “where can I get me a huntin’ license” just to fill in a few more strokes of his pathetic populist painting. Could there be a man, even an avowed Francophile, more out of touch with his fellow Americans. Or a party more deeply commited to blind ideology than the Dims for proposing such a preposterous human as their pres candidate. We should have seen through these frauds long before the era of the O. “Reporting for duty” indeed.
Please, quickly change their to there before the troll has the chance to be right about something!
Who is paying for the 1st class ticket? I’ll bet Kerry is not. Could it be “we”?
What would you have him do, go fly a kite?
What would you have him do, go fly a kite?
He should take a leaf from Falcon Heene and go by hot-air balloon.
An interesting excursus in that Tocqueville’s stage-coach travels were subsidized courtesy of Congress via the budding mail service. It’s doubtful that he would have been able—or at least so inclined—to venture “among [the] savage woods” without them.
Ah, yeah, and lo but we have largely felled the trees since his day and still no clearer in our sight. Such is ever the way with ‘myopia’…