Posted on 08/05/2013 8:30:44 PM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
Rush Limbaugh says Obama's “Nudge Squad” is designed to promote certain behavior. I'm sure he just misspoke. The Nudgers themselves admit they are attempting to do much more than just promote. Government can and already does produce commercials that merely promote an agenda. No, the “Nudge Squad” is not a promotional group. These “behavioral scientists” are charged with steering us into making the “correct” decisions.
And who gets to determine what’s the correct decision? Why, the administration. They are the arbiters of right and wrong, good and bad behavior.
Do you recall the statement by Bill Clinton, circa 1999? Thanks to the reforms forced on him by the Republican Congress and the tech bubble, the government had a surplus. Regarding that surplus Clinton said: “We could give it all back to you [the taxpayers] and hope you spend it right… Do you really want to run the risk of squandering the surplus?”
Just like the Nudgers of today, he didn't really give us a choice. It's what the academics, the behavioral scientists call “mandated choice.” The choice he gave us was between squandering the surplus on one government program or another. Some choice.
“Mandated choice” — where one has to choose between one thing or another — is not a true choice. How would you like to go? Stabbed or shot? It’s your choice. Again, some choice. No, “mandated choice” is used to accomplish one thing — to modify people's behavior. To progressive, collectivist academics that have infested our government for over a century, only they know best. Only they know what is good for us.
In the late 1980s the popular slogan was “Bo Knows.” It was the brainchild of Nike and featured the two-sport athlete Bo Jackson. It was changed in 2008 to “Barack Knows,” the brainchild of who the heck knows but stated by wife Michelle.
She assured us: “Barack knows that we’re going to have to make sacrifices. We are going to have to change our conversation. We are going to have to change our traditions, our history. We’re going to have to move into a different place as a nation.”
She continued: “Truly, the choice we make will determine nothing less than who we are as a country, but more important, it will determine who we will be.”
But what if we don’t want to move or change? Then enter the Cass Sunsteins of the world. Glenn Beck called Sunstein the most dangerous man in America. He’s certainly one of them.
Cass joined the Obama administration early on. He headed up the OIRA (Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs). He was Obama’s regulatory czar, a Chicago egghead academic that believes he has all the answers and couldn’t wait to foist them on the American people. Working behind the scene he tasked himself with weighing the interests of the greedy individual to that of the utopian collective or society.
He was a huge fan of FDR and his second “Bill of Rights.” If you know nothing else of Cass Sunstein, that is sufficient.
Sunstein is the father of the modern day Nudge Squad.
But now the baton has been passed to Maya Shankar, a twenty-something, no nothing, Yale leftist. She is a White House “senior” policy analyst charged with influencing Americans’ behavior. One could only guess who she has been aligned with. If you guessed Soros’s Marxist “Center for American Progress” and “Open society,” you'd be correct.
So our government has assembled a “Nudge Squad.” complete with far left ideologues to control our behavior and shove us back into line lest we step out.
Glenn Beck had it right when he said: “First they nudge, then they shove, then they shoot.” It’s the way of the oppressor, and if we don't fight it now, we will find out just how bad it can get. They won’t stop unless we stop them.
5.56mm
Add to the nudging the brain research that created “neuromarketing,” which actually targets certain areas of the brain. Successfully.
Neuromarketers actually created a preference for a certain flavor in babies in utero. That’s how devious it is. And effective.
- CASS SUNSTEIN : http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2422
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