The Nanny State Marches Forward
Tuesday, December 21st, 2010 3:03 pm by Neal“We could give it all back to you and hope you spend it right… But … if you don’t spend it right, here’s what’s going to happen.” — Bill Clinton, 1999
“We can’t just leave it up to the parents.” — Michelle Obama, 2010, referring to decisions on feeding children while talking about the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids law.
The Socialist-Democrat Party has a long tradition of treating adults like children and respecting only a select few personal choices: the choice to have an abortion being one.
David Catron at The American Spectator has a great piece today on how this shameful tradition continues unabated among our current rulers. Check out Obamacare and the Broccoli Mandate:
If Gershengorn had been permitted to provide a candid response to the judge’s observation, he would probably have said something like, “What’s your point?” He, like everyone else in the Obama administration, presumably believes that the commerce clause gives the federal government the authority to regulate virtually every decision we make in our day-to-day lives. Indeed, the belief that Washington can — and should — supervise us as if we were a nation of children is the core tenet of their nanny-state political philosophy. This is the belief system that prompted First Lady Michelle Obama to say, as her husband signed a law that will regulate what children eat during summer vacations and what can be sold in school vending machines, that child nutrition is something “We can’t just leave…up to the parents.” Without the “help” of the federal government, some mother might fail to force broccoli on her kids.
Likewise, we “can’t just leave it up” to the patients to decide for themselves if they should buy health insurance. Indeed, according to the Obama administration, there is something sinister in the very suggestion that we must allow them to do so. In a recent editorial published in the Washington Post under the names of Secretary of Health & Human Services Kathleen Sebelius and Attorney General Eric Holder, we are told that the twenty odd lawsuits challenging the right of Congress to impose the individual mandate are “troubling.” Why are they so troubling? “We saw similar challenges to laws that created Social Security and established new civil rights protections. Those challenges ultimately failed, and so will this one.” In other words, the officials of twenty states, including the old Confederate bastions of Michigan, Colorado, Washington, and Nebraska, are actually modern equivalents of Bull Connor and Orval Faubus.