A Life Controlled by Government is Not Real Life

Photo credit: CNN

It seems as if every day’s news brings a story of some egomaniacal politician, bureaucrat or billionaire with another harebrained scheme for how the rest of us should live. We all need to be eating bug paste instead of hamburgers, living in caves, driving cars powered by windmills (when the wind is blowing), and living small, contained, pre-planned, freedom-free, government-monitored lives to “save the planet,” while our superiors (at least, that’s how they see themselves) keep living in mansions and flying around on private jets to “climate conferences” at five-star resorts with surf ‘n’ turf buffets.

What’s almost as galling as the utterly unearned sense of moral and intellectual superiority among this clique of trust fund babies and second husbands of wealthy widows is their smug assertion that we will “own nothing and be happy.” This notion that people are happier when Big Brother Government does all their thinking for them is anathema to basic American values, but they keep coming up with new ways to sell it, as if it were another overhyped and underperforming consumer product.

Remember “The Life of Julia?” That was an early attempt at selling the Nanny State that was rolled out during Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign. It was an animated online video that depicted a woman named Julia who was dependent on government for all things from cradle to grave. She could live her life only thanks to the ever-present benevolent hand of Uncle Sugar. This was meant to make people feel grateful for all those “government services” (or more precisely, the administration of those “services”) that have contributed to our $36 trillion national debt and demand more and more.