The nanny-state has been gearing-up for some time now, mandating all kinds of ways to protect the citizens from themselves. The republicans will take control of the House in January but the likelihood that this circumstance will change is remote. Citizens are simply too emotionally-, mentally-, and (gasp) willfully-challenged to guard themselves from harm to be allowed to function normally, so the elitists have to govern every facet of their existence, right down to the amount and kind of calories consumed to the proper setting for their coffee-makers to their proper body-weight/mass to the proper kind of automobiles they drive.
The current Administration/Congress is, if anything, even more determined to run everyone’s life. Folks need to have their contribution of CO2 to the atmosphere monitored, though one wonders what to do if someone is found to be exhaling too much or too often; or have trees that are not extracting enough of it from the air; or avoid stirring up the waters of the streams and seas, from which most of the CO2 derives. Health-care is a problem for folks, especially for those who prefer to select their own lifestyles, doctors, hospitals, treatments, insurance. The nanny-state has enacted the proper legislation to ensure that no one is allowed to wander from the live-forever-and-be-happy plantation of the Administration.
Private enterprise must be un-privatized, the better for the state to determine what can be made and when, where, and how. The president checked recently on the American work-force in India, where many jobs have been outsourced from the USA. Apparently, the Indian government does not determine wages, levels of education and background for those workers. Outsourcing has been going on for years under the republicans, democrats, labor unions, management and Congress – driven by greed and regulations – as the nanny-state has slowly expanded until now practically nothing is made in this country and workers are walking the streets.
Banks and manufacturing have been taken over – GM, Chrysler, Freddie, Fanny, AIG, for instance. “Clunker cars” were removed from the streets as nanny helped folks buy the proper cars. Whether they like it or not, folks wear seat-belts, although those riding motorcycles, buses, or in the beds of pickups don’t have to do this. No one is allowed to take a chance on hurting himself. Parents are facing lawsuits if they discipline their children in ways the elite has determined to be wrong. Predictably, the jails/penitentiaries are filled to overflowing.
The latest example of the nanny-state gone amok is found in (where else?) San Francisco. The city fathers/mothers/cross-dressers/trans-genders have decided that McDonald’s is evil in that it entices children to eat “happy meals” by including toys in the packages, something that has been going on for decades. In this writer’s experience in the 1930s, the going thing was the “Guess What” that included a trinket with two pieces of chewy candy (not even to mention Crackerjacks) that was certain to cause unlimited tooth decay with unlimited ecstasy.
Of course, the toys can still be included if McDonald’s accepts the elite’s abridged menu mandating how much salt, calories, and fat (the good stuff) are utilized along with a side item of fruit or vegetable. One can just imagine a “Little Mac” garnished with broccoli or spinach. Parents are incapable in the nanny-state of handling something as important as food…naw, those crazies might even like “happy meals” themselves. One wonders when San Francisco will come down on the pizza-makers, with all that cheese and those little sausages. Can anyone imagine a pizza with a topping of pineapple or kiwis?
Okay…McDonald’s will just leave out the toys but probably not lower the prices so there’s management happiness all around and the food-giant doesn’t have to take any of the blame for being party-poopers. Of course, there’s an ominous development in New York, where Mayor Bloomberg has declared war on salt, or at least salt-intake. The word has gone out that New Yorkers pose a health-risk (and terrible health-costs) by eating too much salt. This writer remembers that on U.S. Navy ships back in the 1940s there were salt-tablet-dispensers by the scuttlebutts (water-fountains), but that was in the Dark Ages when people walked occasionally or even picked up heavy objects.
The mayor worries about salt when the traffic on just one block in Times Square emits enough CO2 and whatever else is designed to kill people to keep raising the life-span of folks – folks simply killing themselves by invading the sidewalk and living longer. In the writer’s (non-smoker’s) town of Lexington, Ky. (300,000 or so souls), smokers are banished to the sidewalks (to stand by semis roaring by and filling the air with tons of whatever is killing everybody) to take a few virtually imperceptible drags, although they may still do so on some properties, though standing on vulnerable grass is bad. This is no brief for smoking…but disallowed in the open air?
Admittedly, obesity, smoking, jay-walking, driving too fast, are all bad but shouldn’t folks be allowed to notice all the information that’s out there (there’s plenty of it) and then decide how they want to live? The elitists don’t think so. They don’t trust the hoi polloi to take care of themselves, another way of saying – DUMBELLS! Never has this been more evident than now, with an administration that seems hell-bent upon configuring every facet of a citizen’s life. Stinks!
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
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