Let me start with an obvious statement here. I can not wait for these people to be gone. Our Nation was based entirely upon the concept of personal freedom. Land of the free, home of the brave springs to mind, and is repeated each and every time we sing our National Anthem. We do not have royalty in America, nor is our government supposed to be in the business of determining how we should live, what we should be eating, what jobs we choose for ourselves, what kinds of transportation we procure for ourselves, what temperatures we select for our thermostats, or anything beyond preventing fraud, or preventing us from interfering in the lives of our neighbors. One of the things that I love about being an American is that my business is my own, and my fellow citizens are none of my business per say.
Enter today’s Democrat Party. They have determined what kind of car I should drive, what kind of light bulb I should place in my home, what kind of toilet I should use, how I should go about the business of washing my clothes, what I should do to earn a living, what kind of lifestyle I am allowed to enjoy, and now it seems, what foods I should be allowed to eat. Erika Johnson is fast becoming one of my favorite bloggers on the web, but she only got this one partially right. It is more than Michelle Obama sticking her fanny into my local grocery that is upsetting here. (I do not intend to diminish that point, but just feel that there is more.) It is the fact that these people wish to strip all Americans of every little bit of freedom, and further seek to establish themselves as the masters of every aspect of life the rest of us are allowed to enjoy. I can not think of a single area of my personal business now, that some Democrat somewhere, does not seek to intrude themselves upon. Democrats reading this, if you can think of one, please let me know.
From the Hot Air article linked to above:
I don’t really have a problem with the First Lady of the United States working to combat childhood obesity, in theory. Obesity is a serious and far too rampant problem in this country, and if Michelle Obama wants to use her platform as a public figure to champion the cause, traveling around to schools to educate kids and parents about healthy lifestyles or advocating on behalf of a worthy foundation or something — great. What I most certainly do have a problem with is the federal government using public resources and policy fiat to construct the bike-path-using, salad-eating, quinoa-cookin’ society of their crunchiest daydreams because that’s how they think society should look.
Bureaucratic endeavors to instill top-down virtue almost never fail to fall spectacularly flat, and usually come with a whole mess of unintended consequences and hidden costs, or even end up achieving the opposite of their intended effect. (Example: One of the reasons corn syrup, a.k.a. the sweetener in many processed foods, is so cheap is because the federal government subsidizes the corn industry to spur ethanol production — which in turn, by the way, incentivizes the agriculture industry to bring even more marginal land area into production. The road to obesity runs through chopped-down forests and is paved with good intentions. Dizzying, isn’t it?)
Besides, it’s really just not a good idea for the government to be involved in telling us what we should and shouldn’t be eating. Food can be a tricky business, and the scientific community is always telling us new and conflicting things. The conventional wisdom à la the old USDA food pyramid used to be that bread/cereal/grains/pasta should take up the largest portion of your diet, while you should barely eat any fat at all; now there’s a bunch of data and studies corroborating that white flour and starch is just about the worst thing you can eat and that a larger helping of certain types of fat (omega-3 fatty acids, for instance) is not only desirable but necessary for a well-rounded diet. I’ve also heard about studies suggesting that adult human beings really aren’t meant to ingest dairy, and that we shouldn’t be eating so much fruit because all of the sugars. Who knows what’s next? Maybe we’ll find out that high levels of sodium are actually the best thing since sliced bread! The science is too changeable and political, so maybe these decisions are better left up to individual choice rather than the government’s oh-so-august endorsement.
In the end, the free market system is a system in which markets provide voluntarily, those goods and services individual people want for themselves, and at a price people are willing to pay for those things. Socialism is a system in which markets provide by coercion, those goods and services that self anointed elites feel the non elite class of people should desire, if they were only as smart as the self anointed elites, at a price determined by those very same elites. When our behavior does not match the desired behavior necessary to make their system resemble their theory, coercion must ultimately be used. When the morally superior behaviors become criminal, black markets are formed, criminals are born, and misery ensues. There is a reason that every former Soviet Citizen living here in the America is as conservative a right winger as you will find, and why the Cuban Community as a whole tend to vote against other Latino groups as a whole. These people have witnessed, first hand the ravages of societies which adhered to the failed tenets of Socialism.
The self anointed elites of course, they never expect themselves to experience the consequences of the lifetime decisions that they wish to inflict upon the rest of us. Michelle will never live life on the diet she chooses for us. Privileged obesity you see is not our business. In the America envisioned by the Obama’s, some people are more equal than others.
Cross Posted from Musings of a Mad Conservative.
Tags: Michelle Obama
