Yes, Mommy: A Well-Regulated State

We tell ourselves that in America we are the Free People. I wonder whether we might not better be called the Obedient People, the Passive People, or the Admonished People. I doubt that any country, anywhere, has been so regulated, controlled, and directed as we are. We are bred to obey. And obey we do.

It begins with the sheer volume of law, rules, and administrative duties. Most of the regulation makes sense in isolation, or can be made plausible. Yet there is so much of it.

Used to be if you wanted a dog, you got a dog. It wasn’t really the government’s business. Today you need a dog license, a shot card for the dog, a collar and tags, proof that the poor beast has been neutered, and you have to keep it on a leash and walk it only in designated places. It’s all so we don’t get rabies.

Or consider cars. You have to have a title, insurance, and keep it up to date; tags, country sticker, inspection sticker, emissions test. Depending where you are, you can’t have chips in the windshield, and you need a zoned parking permit. You have to wear a seatbelt. And of course there are unending traffic laws. You can get a ticket for virtually anything, usually without knowing that you were doing anything wrong.

Then there’s paperwork. If you have a couple of daughters with college funds in the stock market, annually you have to fill out three sets of federal taxes, three sets of state, and file four state and four federal estimated tax forms, per person, for a total of twenty-four. This doesn’t include personal property taxes for the country, business licenses, tangible business-assets forms, and so on.

Now, I’m not suggesting that all these laws are bad. Stupid, frequently, but evil, no. Stopping at traffic lights is probably a good idea, and certainly is if I’m crossing the street. But the laws never end. Bring a doughnut on the subway, and you get arrested. Don’t replace your windows without permission in writing from the condo association. Nothing is too trivial to be regulated. Nothing is not some government’s business.

I wonder whether the habit of constant obedience to infinitely numerous rules doesn’t inculcate a tendency to obey any rule at all. By having every aspect of one’s life regulated in detail, does one not become accustomed to detailed regulation? That is, detailed obedience?

For many it may be hard to remember freer times. Yet they existed. In 1964, when I graduated from high school in rural Virginia, there were speed limits, but nobody much enforced them, or much obeyed them. If you wanted to fish, you needed a pole, not a license. You fished where you wanted, not in designated fishing zones. If you wanted to carry your rifle to the bean field to shoot whistle pigs, you just did it. You didn’t need a license and nobody got upset.

To buy a shotgun in the country store, you needed money, not a background check, waiting period, proof of age, certificate of training, and a registration form. If your tail light burned out, then you only had one tail light. If you wanted to park on a back road with your girl friend, the cops, all both of them, didn’t care. If you wanted to swim in the creek, you didn’t need a Coast Guard approved life jacket.

It felt different. You lived in the world as you found it, and behaved because you were supposed to, but you didn’t feel as though you were in a white-collar prison. And if anybody had asked us, we would have said that the freedom was worth more to us than any slightly greater protection against rabies, thank you. Which nobody ever got anyway.

Today, the Mommy State never leaves off protecting us from things I’d just as soon not be protected from. We must wear a helmet on a motorcycle: Kevorkian can kill us, but we cannot kill ourselves. Why is it Mommy Government’s business whether I wear a helmet? In fact I do wear one, but it should be my decision.

And so it goes from administrative minutiae (emissions inspections) to gooberish Mommyknowsbestism (“Wea-a-ar your lifejacket, Johnny!”) to important moral decisions. Obey in small things, obey in large things.

You must hire the correct proportion of this and that ethnic group, watch your sex balance, prove that you have the proper attitude toward homosexuals. You must let your children be politically indoctrinated in appropriate values, must let your daughter get an abortion without telling you, must accept affirmative action no matter how morally repugnant you find it.

As the regulation of our behavior becomes more pervasive, so does the mechanism of enforcement grow more nearly omnipresent. In Washington, if you eat on the subway, they really will put you in handcuffs, as they recently did to a girl of twelve. In 1964 in King George County, the cop would have said, “Sally, stop that.” Arresting a child for sucking on a sourball would never have entered a state trooper’s mind.

Which brings us to an ominous observation. America is absolutely capable of totalitarianism. It won’t be the jackbooted variety, but rather a peculiarly mindless, bureaucratic insistence on conformity. What we call political correctness is an American approach to political control.

Think about it. Confiscating nail clippers at security gates, arresting the eating girl on the subway, the confiscation from an aging general of his Congressional Medal of Honor because it had points, the countless ejections from school of little boys for drawing soldiers of the Trade Centers in flames, playing cowboys and Indians, for pointing a chicken finger and saying Bang.

This isn’t intelligent authoritarianism aimed at purposeful if disagreeable ends. It is the behavior of petty and stupid people, of minor minds over-empowered, ignorant, but angry and charmed to find that they can push others around. It is the exercise of power by people who have no business having any.

Revolutionary change occurs when people are desperate

I absolutely agree with this statement, however I feel quite strongly that change resulting from a revolution born of starvation does not decrease the power or scope of the State, it just makes that power change hands. Historical revolutions changed government from a monarchy (because for all intents and purposes that's all there was) to something else, right? Which revolutions that occurred during times of hardship resulted in a government based in the liberties of the individual? The American Revolution was not born of starvarion, but of oppression. But how about others?

It seems to my unqualified eye that most result in some form of collective- what appears to be the "safest" form at the time. To each according to his need puts bread on the plate, but it's getting from each his ability that proves to be the tricky part. In the end, the State becomes even bigger and more powerful than the pre-revolutionary one.

I would suggest that it doesn't matter how focused you are because of the stupidity of the populace.

You have addressed the very root of the problem. The vast majority of the world population are sheep, that is true. The focus of which I spoke is the focus of talented, like-minded individuals to affect change. This is the hard part.

But what changes do you suggest? What method of governance are you suggesting is free of beaurocracy, and above all the petty crap that results from the human ego? As soon as someone has power, one of their first acts is to abuse it. What will change that?

I'd suggest that's the nature of government. It always grows.

Of course it does. That is the nature government, and I think it ultimately comes down to a matter of weighing advantages. We here in the US of A have a huge, plodding, inefficient beaurocracy that has for the past 226 some-odd years been churning out what has proven to be the best system of government of its size in the world. Could it be better? Hell, yes! Could it be worse? Hell, yes!

Which revolutions that occurred during times of hardship resulted in a government based in the liberties of the individual? The American Revolution was not born of starvarion, but of oppression. But how about others?

Of the big four (British, American, French, and Russian), I'd say 3 at least in theory eventually resulted in a government based on the liberties of the individual. But each was precipitated by one or more of the following forms of oppression or dischord:

- The inability of government to raise money or collect taxes
- An inept government making stupid mistakes---too much administration, favoring one economic course over another
- A shift of allegiance by the intellectuals
- A loss of self-confidence by the "ruling" elites (sympathy for the rebels, convinced system is bad/improper/converted to rebellious causes)
- A separation of political and economic power
- A rift in a system of meritocracy
- Social antagonism

The Davies J-Curve theory of revolutions descibed so that it sounds like a Public Image Ltd. song goes like this: people will accept a modest gap between "what they want" and "what they get." When the gap gest too out of whack, that's when stuff goes down. You could argue--and I certainly could---that we're approaching the Davies J-Curve point of no return in the United States today.
Also, historically most revolutions start from the left, go to the right, and then swing back to the "center." I believe an American revolution would come from the right this time.

You have addressed the very root of the problem. The vast majority of the world population are sheep, that is true. The focus of which I spoke is the focus of talented, like-minded individuals to affect change. This is the hard part.

It's a fact of life that the people who have it worst are generally the ones who won't revolt: they're too busy trying to survive. Revolutionaries come from the social elite.

We are the obedient people.
Pavlovian dogs seems as appropriate and applicable as obedient people.
Some hear the bells and whistles and immediately start to drool, knowing the meal is ready for the feasting.
What feasts and what famines? Control feasts and liberty famines.

Yeah, Fred did it up right. What a dish.

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