Busybody Politics
It is hard to
read a newspaper, or watch a television newscast, without encountering someone
who has come up with a new "solution" to society's
"problems." Sometimes it seems as if there are more solutions than
there are problems. On closer scrutiny, it turns out that many of today's
problems are a result of yesterday's solutions.
San Francisco
and New York are both plagued with large "homeless" populations today,
largely as a result of previous housing "reforms" that made housing
more expensive and severely limited how much housing, and of what kind, could
be built.
The solution?
Spend more of the taxpayers' money making homelessness a viable lifestyle for
more people.
Education is a
field with endless reforms, creating endless problems, requiring endless
solutions. One of the invincible fallacies among educators is that all sorts of
children can be educated in the same classroom. Not just children of different
races, but children of different abilities, languages, and values.
Isn't it nice
to think so? I suspect that even most conservatives would prefer to live in the
kind of world conjured up in the liberals' imagination, rather than in the kind
of world we are in fact stuck with.
The result is
that many very bright children are bored to the point of becoming behavior
problems, when the school work is slowed to a pace within the range of students
who are slower learners.
By federal law,
even children with severe mental or emotional problems must be
"mainstreamed" into classes for other students -- often in disregard
of how much this disrupts these classes and sacrifices the education of the
other children.
Parents who
complain about the effect of these "solutions" on their own
children's education are made to feel guilty for not being more
"understanding" about the problems of handicapped students.
Nothing is
easier for third party busybodies than being "understanding" and
"compassionate" at someone else's expense -- especially if the
busybodies have their own children in private schools, as so many public school
educators do.
Whether in
housing, education or innumerable other aspects of life, the key to busybody
politics, and its endlessly imposed "solutions," is that third
parties pay no price for being wrong.
This not only
presents opportunities for the busybodies to engage in moral preening, but also
to flatter themselves that they know better what is good for other people than
these other people know for themselves.
Right now,
there are people inside and outside of government who are proposing new
restrictions on how you may or may not visit the national parks that your taxes
support. Among their proposals is doing away with trash cans in these parks, so
that visitors have to take their trash out with them.
Just how they
would enforce this, when millions of people are visiting places like Yosemite
or Yellowstone, is something the busybodies need not bother to think through --
much less pay a price, when trash simply accumulates in these parks after trash
cans are removed.
ObamaCare is
perhaps the ultimate in busybody politics. People who have never even run a
drugstore, much less a hospital, blithely prescribe what must be done by the
entire medical system, from doctors to hospitals to producers of pharmaceutical
drugs to health insurance companies.
This includes
federal laws requiring the turning over of patients' confidential medical
records to the federal government, where these records can be looked at by politicians,
bureaucrats and whoever can hack into the government's computers. Neither you
nor your doctor has a right to keep this information confidential.
What could lead
anyone to believe that they have either the right or the omniscience to dictate
to hundreds of millions of other people? Our educational system may have
something to do with that, with their constant promotion of
"self-esteem" and especially their emphasis on developing
"leaders."
Our schools and
colleges are turning out people who cannot feel fulfilled unless they are
telling other people what to do. The price of their self-indulgence is the
sacrifice of our freedom. If we don't defend ourselves against them, who will?
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