Maybe it’s not just the loony, right-wing Tea Partiers (unfair characterization courtesy of MSNBC and the NYT) who have the feeling that creepy, heavy-handed government interference isn’t serving them or their communities. Health-care workers, many of whom are unionized and not generally renowned for their conservative bent, are objecting to mandatory swine-flu vaccinations:
Unions themselves, including nurses’ associations and the SEIU, are speaking out against the mandatory vaccines on the grounds of workers’ rights, as nurses and other health-care workers take to New York’s capital in protest. Also in New York, an environmentalist mom who likes her son to bike to school for the earth and his health, is running afoul of the nanny state:
Check out the creep factor, here:
A state trooper to compel a seventh-grader to stop riding his Huffy? In response, the community put together a group of protest riders to accompany the Marinos. If you take the time to read to the end of the article, you’ll find that in true nanny-state fashion, the school had banned biking for safety reasons despite the fact that there have been no bike accidents on the road to the school in three years. The school system is thinking of rescinding the policy, probably more on the strength of the argument that the Marinos want to save the earth than the stronger argument that parents have the right to send their children to school exactly as they please, but nonetheless. (Perhaps all arguments against big government should be made in the service of politically correct crusades.) Meanwhile in Michigan, the state’s investigation of a woman who babysits her neighbors’ kids while they wait for the bus each morning, is making clear how big government can undermine a community’s efforts to act like, well, a community.
As Instapundit put it: “If people are neighborly, they need the state less. This cannot be permitted.” All the victims of government interference in these stories, union-members and environmentalists among them, are just running into timely examples of perennial conservative complaints about big government. A) That it will inevitably get uncomfortably creepy and abusive when it’s in charge of your health-care decisions, and B) that it undermines the personal responsibility and ability of citizens to improve their lives and their communities as they see fit. Of course, if Obama gets his way, the Marinos and Snyder won’t have to worry their heads about improving the environment and the lives of their kids and friends for much longer, at least not of their own accord. They’ll be freed from those pesky personal obligations by cap-and-trade legislation and universal public-school babysitting on weekends. After all, as they say, it takes a
village
