Conservatism Lives!

What’s Good for the Goose is Good for the Panderer…

-By G. Norman

Near my house is a park where I regularly take my kids to play, and like many parks with small lakes in them, this park is home to a number of wild geese. As I was walking around the lake the other day with my kids, we came upon a sign that declared the following: PLEASE DO NOT FEED THE GEESE.

Now, as a conservative and an individualist, these are just the sorts of rules I often take petty pleasure in breaking, but in this instance, the sign provided me with a reason for why I should obey it. It said something like this:

“While we all love wildlife, it is a mistaken kindness to hand-feed the geese, since it trains them to rely on being fed and diminishes their natural ability to forage on their own. This leads to unsustainable populations and starvation.”

If you’ve been to a park, you’ve probably seen a sign like this. I didn’t think anything of it until later, when it hit me: how is it that we understand the psychology of how handouts would destroy bird populations, but completely fail to see how the same thing might be true in the human world?

I have long believed that most people are conservative in how they live their daily lives, regardless of how they vote, and this is an excellent example. Perhaps what we should do is erect a load of billboards all around Washington reading:

“PLEASE DO NOT FEED MONEY TO THE HUMANS! While we all love the underprivileged, it is a mistaken kindness to hand-feed them cash, since it permanently lowers their expectations of life, develops an incapacitating reliance on government, and destroys their natural ability to work for themselves. This leads to exploitation of diminishing taxpayer resources and unsustainable government debt.”

The problem, unfortunately, is that the government already knows this. That’s pretty much the point.

The same is true of increasing federal and local laws, what so many of us have come to think of as “the Nanny state”. Recently, I heard a politician on the radio claiming that we need more regulations about how people conduct their personal lives (whether it be what they eat, what they do while they are driving, or any number of other nagging details) because people have essentially abandoned their own common sense in favor of a set of external rules and laws that will tell them how they should behave.

Thus, here’s another sign to put up all around Washington, as well as around our own state capital buildings:

Again, such a sign probably wouldn’t work, since those orchestrating over-regulation are obviously aware of its effects, and approve of them. In fact, as is the case with feeding cash to the humans, creating a permanent mentality of reliance on government is exactly the goal.

The obvious truth is that, when Barack Obama has the audacity (of hope, perhaps?) to quote the Bible (incorrectly) with his claim that we should all “be our brothers’ keepers”, he does not mean that you and I are to look out for each other—our neighbors, family and friends. He is not implying that individuals should care for each other. For him, government is the brother who is keeping us. Government will provide for us (or not), grant us our medical care (or not), determine how much of our money we get to keep (or not), and generally set up all the myriad rules and regulations for how we should manage our day-to-day lives in every detail. For President Barack Obama and the Democratic political majority, we are not to be kept by our literal brothers. We are to be kept by Big Brother.

So. Maybe we should abandon any hope of reaching Washington with our warning signs.

Maybe we should turn it around and instead address our warnings to the population at large. How about this sign in front of every polling place in the United States:

This might actually work. What do you think?

Is what’s good for the goose good for the panderer?