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Jewish World Review
April 16, 2012/ 24 Nissan, 5772
Overregulation strikes again: The nanny state threatens to turn us into children
By
Jay Ambrose
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
We're becoming a nation of creeping, crawling minions, and more might notice it except for the cheering. It's loud because the responsible regulations are always presented as acts of salvation, and that's the case with the approaching Labor Department edict on hiring the disabled.
The yapping bureaucrats would have you believe they are singing angels as they try to justify a new quota for the 200,000 entities doing business with the federal government. If those small firms, big corporations and universities want to keep their $700 billion worth of contracts, 7 percent of their hires will have to be disabled applicants, and isn't that kind-hearted?
Actually, it is not. For starters, it is a phony interpretation of the 1970s disabilities law that was never intended to be an affirmative action measure. The Labor Department replies that the quota isn't affirmative action, which is akin to saying a punch in the nose is not a punch in the nose, just cosmetic surgery.
Writings on the issue show that businesses are hiring the disabled at about the same rate as government, that Social Security's disability program is taking many of the disabled out of the workplace and that those available for jobs total less than the 7 percent figure.
It does get confusing because the government has lately been counting alcoholics, drug addicts and the depressed as among the disabled. Companies cannot legally ask applicants whether they are disabled, which complicates the whole process.
By the way, it has been argued that there is a cheap rescue for companies that can't live up to the new hiring requirement: Get to a more satisfactory representation of the disabled in the workplace by firing appropriate numbers of the able-bodied.
Most of us do want the least fortunate among us to have more fortune, but what we have here is one more artificial, arbitrary piece of unworkable regulatory overreach that is nearly at the tipping point in America.
The Heritage Foundation has noted that the federal government regulates just about everything, mentioning "toilets, showerheads, light bulbs, mattresses, washing machines, dryers, cars, ovens, refrigerators, television sets and bicycles" by way of introducing a list that goes on with details for 73,000 pages in the Federal Register.
The cost in economic output has been put at $1.3 trillion, and the hurt is huge, even to the extent of preventable fatalities. Especially when you consider how state and local governments also play this game with just as many unintended consequences, you begin to understand just how right the prescient Alexis de Tocqueville was when he wrote about the barest beginnings of the phenomenon in his 1835 book, "Democracy in America."
In a widely quoted passage, this visiting Frenchman said those in authority in American government thought they had to watch over the citizenry. Their use of power was "absolute, attentive to detail, regular, provident and gentle. It would resemble the paternal power if, like that power, it had as its object to prepare men for manhood, but it seeks, to the contrary, to keep them irrevocably fixed in childhood."
The "sovereign," he continued, puts its arms around us through "petty regulations" too complicated for anyone to figure out. He added that it "does not tyrannize; it gets in the way; it curtails, it enervates, it extinguishes, it stupefies," ultimately reducing the people to timid animals "of which the government is the shepherd."
One day, said Tocqueville, the despotism will grow nastier and harder, though some of us figure there are ways to fight back: elect enemies of despotism and start rescinding the bad old regulations while more closely reviewing new ones.
The question is whether large numbers of us have already become what Tocqueville feared: too little imbued with individualistic spirit to act purposefully. I hope not.
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Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.
Comment by clicking here.
Jay Ambrose, formerly Washington director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers and the editor of dailies in El Paso, Texas, and Denver, is a columnist living in Colorado.
Previously:
• 04/11/12: Obama is not bonkers
• 04/04/12: Will America vote against authoritarianism?
• 04/02/12: 'Tipping point' on federal restraint approaches
• 03/28/12: Obama truth from an open mike
• 03/21/12: The progressive campaign for voter fraud
• 03/19/12: Public pensions will get us if we don't watch out
• 03/14/12: Politics needs reporting, not speculation
• 03/12/12: Home of the free, the brave, the endangered
• 03/07/12: Obama used Limbaugh as scapegoat
• 03/05/12: Campaign substance lost in media melodrama
• 03/01/12: When Big Brother drowns
• 02/24/12: Obama goes gaseous on gas
• 02/22/12: Political tears for trust in personal empowerment --- except in the bedroom
• 02/17/12: Of cut-off ears and silenced mouths
• 02/15/12: Obama is a joke whose antics aren't funny
• 02/10/12: An energy boom looms, despite Obama
• 02/08/12: Obama's assault on faith
• 02/03/12: Can Romney get serious?
• 01/27/12: Obama is like an Italian ship captain
• 01/25/12: Newt Gingrich's first 100 days
• 01/20/12: Obama's Keystone pipeline lies
• 01/18/12: Critics worse than urinating Marines
• 01/13/12: Ron Paul is a cartoonish character
• 01/11/12: Newt Gingrich upset by Mitt Romney's brilliance
• 01/09/12: How about regulating presidents, too?
• 01/04/12: How America smothers itself
• 12/30/11: A tax break that helps break the nation
• 12/28/11: Watch out for the banana peel, Newt
• 12/21/11: A tale of two men
• 12/16/11: Strange happenings in Russia
• 12/14/11: Tim Tebow is a man of character
• 12/09/11: A populist, envy-mongering fraud divisively exacerbating resentment among different groups of Americans
• 12/07/11: Tax games threaten nation
• 12/05/11: Why Wal-Mart serves us better than Barney Frank
• 11/30/11: Not writing off Newt
• 11/28/11: Answers to the Iranian threat
• 11/23/11: Failure of the incumbency investment
• 11/18/11: Occupiers: Chop off their heads!
• 11/16/11: Obama asks jobless to sacrifice
• 11/09/11: Michael Moore's insufferable occupation
• 11/04/11: Political tipping point is coming
• 11/02/11: Idealogues versus 7 billion
• 10/28/11: Obama games on student loans
• 10/26/11: Wit and quick moves v. humanity and thoroughgoing honesty? It's no contest —- or at least shouldn't be
• 10/07/11: Baptists, bootleggers and Wall Street protesters
• 10/05/11: Federal law will get you even if you watch out
• 09/28/11: Leftist bugbears on the march
• 09/23/11: Still hope for coal to help us
• 09/21/11: Obama's Madoff ploy
• 09/19/11: U.S. can't afford to wait until it happens
• 09/14/11: Defending -- and strengthening -- gung ho collectivism
• 09/12/11: A pipeline to better times
• 09/08/11: Obama just keeps destroying jobs
• 09/06/11: Ultra-feminists thwarting justice
• 08/31/11: Corporations are people? Yes, Count the ways
• 08/26/11: What an earthquake tells us about debt
• 08/25/11: The tyranny of scientific consensus
• 08/23/11: Fracking hardly a public health threat
• 08/17/11: Why Obamacare won't control births
• 08/15/11: Balanced budget amendment unbalanced idea
• 08/10/11: Kerry's war on citizen speech
• 08/05/11: Upside to the compromise leaving the door open for obnoxious maneuvers
• 08/03/11: The people who may save America
• 07/29/11: On making deals, Obama is no LBJ
• 07/27/11: The threat behind the debt
• 07/23/11: Mean opposition to means-testing
• 07/20/11: Leftist babble makes debt crisis even worse
• 07/18/11: Time to raise demagoguery ceiling
• 07/13/11: Obama treating treaties badly
• 07/08/11: Is decline of U.S. exaggerated?
• 07/05/11: Not math deficiency, but demagoguery
© 2011, SCRIPPS HOWARD NEWS SERVICE
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