The distinguishing feature of the emboldened left has increasingly become their thinly-veiled desire for control of as many areas of our lives as is humanly possible. And the most effective way to do so is to pass laws and regulations that reduce individual freedom by categorizing things in one of two ways:
Mandatory or Forbidden.
To be sure, not all that the left seeks to mandate or forbid can actually be precisely and federally codified. For example, the best they can do to advance their goal of limiting free speech on college campuses is to push for speech codes and free speech zones that assure nobody is offended…except, of course, those who don’t agree with their politically correct worldview and agenda.
They increasingly attempt to mandate campus diversity on matters of race, ethnicity, gender and sexual preference, while doing all they can to forbid intellectual diversity.
They would just love to get the 300 million guns in America completely out of circulation, but bowing to the reality that it’s not possible, they seek to grab the guns of law-abiding citizens through mostly dead-on-arrival legislative proposals to forbid “assault weapons,” among others. These are all driven by their public pronouncements in the immediate aftermath of gun-related tragedies designed to shame the public into finally “doing something” about these tragedies. Never let a crisis go to waste.
In California, they have actually succeeded in mandating legal consent for the one area of life that should be driven by choice and free association more than any other – our sex lives. This is a joke – figuratively, not literally. I will boldly predict that the compliance rate will be be near zero. But what matters to the left is that the mandate is on the books.
But the left’s thirst for control hardly stops at areas where they have limited power to enforce their will.
Healthcare insurance has famously been transformed with a Rube Goldberg-style law that turns the equation from choice to mandate, requiring everyone to share in the massive and ever-increasing costs while mandating required levels of coverage. At the same time, they have forbidden people from buying such insurance for many months during the year.
Barack Obama has fulfilled his campaign promise to all but forbid coal mining. And he was so insistent on cap and trade legislation that, when it failed even in a congress fully controlled by his own party, he simply directed his Department of Energy to copy much of the failed legislation and paste it into their increasingly massive volume of regulations. That makes for more mandates. At the same time, taxpayer money has been used to prop up favored green energy failures like Solyndra because, dammit, people need to get with our program, no matter the cost to consumers.
Even though we can all agree that a college degree is neither necessary nor appropriate for everyone, the left seeks to mandate that everyone subsidize universal “free” community college.
But this narrative would be incomplete without the myriad smaller examples of the leftist mandate or forbid mentality that are not as significant but in many cases, just as revealing.
Most recently, comedian/fake journalist Jon Stewart, in noting that less than one percent of Americans have served in the military, suggested mandatory national service. Great to know that Stewart is pressing for more mandates and less freedom during his secret meetings with the leader of the free world, who unsurprisingly called Stewart’s idea “wonderful.”
And they’re not the least bit averse to turning the truth upside down to control the unwashed masses and forbid competition. Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf recently vetoed the privatization of liquor stores in his state by claiming such a move would raise prices and limit selection. Yes, he actually said that.
This insidious assault against liberty is being waged in earnest against children. They have figured that if the kids can be taught to eschew freedom from an early age they will be less likely to clamor for it as they become adults.
The first lady’s attempts to mandate healthy and inedible food in school lunches while forbidding popular selections that don’t meet with her approval has led to students actually bolting from school to chow down on food that is less healthy than the good tasting stuff removed from the school lunch menu.
The Meitiv family of Silver Spring, Maryland have had their kids seized, and have gone through multiple rounds of challenges and threats with local police and the child protective services due to one simple act – they let their children walk to the park to play – without adult supervision. We can’t have that!
Earlier this summer, a 7 year old in Westbrook, Maine was taken while playing in a local park. Thankfully she was returned home later that day – her kidnappers were the local police. They were called when someone saw an unsupervised child. No matter that the girl literally lived across the street from the park, and that she was there with the knowledge and permission of her mother.
The left will target even their own base of support in their mandate or forbid worldview. You wonder why things got so bad between the police and residents of Ferguson, Missouri? The Michael Brown shooting may have been as much a symptom as a cause. Consider:
[T]owns in St. Louis County can derive 40 percent or more of their annual revenue from the petty fines and fees collected by their municipal courts. A majority of these fines are for traffic offenses, but they can also include fines for fare-hopping on MetroLink (St. Louis’s light rail system), loud music and other noise ordinance violations, zoning violations for uncut grass or unkempt property, violations of occupancy permit restrictions, trespassing, wearing “saggy pants,” business license violations and vague infractions such as “disturbing the peace” or “affray” that give police officers a great deal of discretion to look for other violations.
We learn that some large group of local defendants were in court because they had been fined for not subscribing to the town’s approved vendor for trash collection. These people had not been fined for unkempt properties mind you – they simply hadn’t contracted with the town’s authorized collection firm. They didn’t have the freedom to determine how household waste would be removed from their own homes!
The Eric Garner case in Staten Island was also particularly revealing in the leftists’ thirst for control. The man was subdued and killed by five cops…for the crime of selling loose cigarettes. All because the leftist politicians who run the city demanded that cops vigorously enforce the law forbidding the dangerous act of someone using spare change to buy a smoke or two that was not subject to New York’s huge and regressive tobacco taxes.
Indeed, the enforcement of so many laws, regulations and mandates takes a lot of cash. And the left has demonstrated a willingness to do whatever it takes to collect it. Sure, use the citizenry as a piggy bank, and as a nice bonus, crack down ever harder on their petty offenses.
About the only remaining area where the left seems to actually favor choice is abortion. And we now learn they’ve figured out how to collect even on that.
The opening of my radio show Liberty Nation features a number of liberty-related clips. My favorite is from the movie Good Will Hunting, when Matt Damon’s character says “Liberty, in case you’ve forgotten, is the soul’s right to breathe.”
The soul’s right to breathe. That’s what the petty tyrants of the left have steadily tried to forbid, and the cost gets steeper by the day.
