March 07, 2004

Suppose humanity had a fairy godmother that could, with one stroke of her wand, make all people economically equal. She'd take from the rich and give to the poor, take from the fortunate to give to the unfortunate, take from the thrifty to give to the thriftless as well. The moment every person was provided the same amount of money to begin with, inequality would naturally set in all over again since each person would choose to use his or her allowance differently. It would not take long before humanity's fairy godmother found the results of her initial experiment unsatisfactory - in order to arrive at economic uniformity for all she might progressively restrict an infinite number of choices. She might stress the importance of public health, welfare, and security, and treat individual pursuit of life, liberty and happiness as a threat to the public or a form of mental illness.

She might start by strictly regulating gambling, drugs, tobacco, alcohol, and firearms - and by requiring mandatory contributions on the other hand toward publicly funded schools, agencies, police, parks and highways. She might gradually superimpose subtle controls on financial transactions and require obsessive record keeping so she'd have at-a-glance summaries of individuals' accounts and spending habits. She might rap knuckles gently or not so gently with rules, and mete out fines and punishments for unacceptable behavior. She'd shoehorn every person into mandatory schooling, health insurance, and retirement savings schemes so everyone can be as cozy as the too many children in old Mother Hubbard's shoe because fairy godmother knows best, and she has the wand.

Until individual choices are so effectively restricted as to render the concept of "choice" meaningless, some people will make choices that leave them wealthier and others will make choices that leave them poorer - what's a fairy godmother to do except keep on brandishing her magic wand? Perhaps she'll make us all the same size so nobody has an unfair advantage that comes from being large or small. Perhaps she'll want to make sure her charges each read well enough to follow instructions but make sure no one reads well enough to gain an unfair intellectual advantage from reading - therefore, she may want to restrict reading material. Some books she'll declare "required reading," and other books she'll prohibit. She'll insist on licensing for professionals, and regulating practices to hold trouble-making entrepreneurs and alternative practitioners at bay so everyone receives the same bland services regardless of what an individual might prefer for him or herself.

This fairy godmother will naturally wish to thwart inclinations toward discrimination on the basis of color preference. She may take the wonderfully diverse pigments on Mother Nature's politically incorrect palette and blend them all together - black, brown, yellow, red and white - and paint everyone the same indeterminate shade. Perhaps those little gray green aliens in spaceships are benign visitors from the future on a quest to recreate humanity's naturally ordained diversity? Their alleged breeding experiments seem like a logical end result to the any-outrageous-thing-for-the-children attitude that perversely prevails these days in politics: Save the children by dehumanizing parents into mere reproductive machines so kids have a healthy and productive future to look forward to.

If a mother's body is the environment that a fetus requires to survive, never fear - fairy godmother can deploy environmental storm-troopers and right-to-life war-hawks to fight an uncivil war on the mother and baby battlefield. One camp may throw out the baby's rights and the other may throw out mom's, true - that's everyone's-a-loser politics. What real difference does it make whose rights get tossed out first with the bloody bathwater if it's okay to surrender mother, father, and/or baby rights to the iron will of a marshmallow majority? Who does one vote for if one detests the crowd-pleasing "cock fight" spectacle of electing "one fool to rule us all and in service to darkness bind us" every four years?

The old saying about "No rest for the wicked" may have truth to it, but a fairy godmother government bent on preserving economic equality - or equality of any kind - apparently might never rest either. If there's no rest for the wicked or for the good-doer, and the two camps appear so busy battling it out for control that it's often impossible for an observer to distinguish between sides, no wonder there seems to be little rest for little people going about their peaceful business in the midst of centrally planned, badly managed chaos.

It seems strange to suppose that those who presume to govern might sincerely cultivate the attitude that they're truly the equals of people they're desirous of governing. Instead of fairy godmother government using a magic wand to create self-destructing illusions, it seems nice to dream of government as a compliant genie happy to stay in her bottle until her services are genuinely needed. The problem with government-as-genie is that every voter can think of wishes to make and has reasons to rub the bottle - so the genie gets out and stays out, granting enough careless and conflicting wishes to destroy any chances of lasting individual peace or happiness, growing into the fairy godmother government menace so many free thinking individuals know and loathe today.

Anyone care to visualize with me a house falling out of the clear blue sky and squishing fairy godmother government? The image of government in a sparkly gown and jackboots with white gloves to conceal her brass knuckles seems like a frightful drag, and the only people this skeptic might trust with a magic wand wouldn't want it - more power to them.

Catfarmer has her own website too! Lots of interesting things to see.

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Day of the Bad Guy Do-Gooders

Politics Causes Brain Damage, Scientists Claim

Imagine There's No Healing

The Horrors of Government

Love and Libertarians

Home Cooking Outlawed for Child Safety (with Bob Wallace)

It Takes a Grinch to Ban Christmas

Laws Create Criminals

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