Michelle Obama on Personal Responsibility and the Limits of Federal Programs
Yesterday the First Lady addressed high school students visiting Georgetown University for a day. Her message was to encourage students to strive for academic success and college degrees, but her answer to one question said a whole lot more. Here’s the question:
about the community, like, about this violence and teen pregnancy that’s going on…. What could you and your husband do to change or help out us young people? Because it’s like someone dying every day. Like, it’s just crazy.
Mrs. Obama answered at length, stressing the need for every individual to take responsibility for his own life and his own destiny, going so far as to add that
there’s all this stuff the President and Congress can do, but trust me, they can’t fix that. No matter what, they can’t get in your head and change that. You have to do that.
The First Lady is right that people must take responsibility for themselves, but what she seems not to realize is that government programs often stifle that kind of behavior. Responsibility is like a muscle: use it or lose it. The only way you learn how to behave responsibly is to actually have real responsibilities. Government has gotten in the way of that process in a host of ways, but nowhere so perniciously as in education. Today, the only educational responsibilities most parents have is to get their kids up in the morning and point them in the direction of the school or the school bus. They don’t decide where their kids go to school, who teaches them, or what they’ll be taught. The natural result—the inevitable result—is the atrophy of parental responsibility towards their children’s education and the horrendous cascade of social ills that flows from it.
Most of this is the fault of our state school monopolies that automatically assign children to schools based on where they live. But the federal government has exacerbated that problem by centralizing control over schooling even further. By abolishing their failed k-12 education programs alone, Congress would save the nation’s taxpayers roughly $70 billion annually. And by encouraging states to return power over education to parents instead of leaving it with bureaucrats, they would dramatically increase the exact kind of responsible behavior that Mrs. Obama knows is essential to solving so many of our social and economic problems.
Consider that the state of Florida has a program that cuts taxes on businesses that donate to non-profit k-12 scholarship funds. Those scholarship organizations subsidize private school tuition for low-income families. According to two separate studies, this program improves achievement in public schools, by virtue of the new competitive pressures it introduces, and it improves the achievement of the students who participate. And by requiring parents to make the difficult decisions as to where to send their children to school, and by requiring most parents to contribute at least a small co-payment, this program builds exactly the kind of responsibility and exactly the kind of social capital that Mrs. Obama so rightly yearns for.
Oh, and, by the way, it saves taxpayers $1.49 for every dollar it reduces state revenue, so it makes economic sense in the immediate term as well as in the long term.
But there’s a catch: This practical and proven solution does not seem to fit well with Mrs. Obama’s political ideology—or, more damagingly, with her husband’s. So instead of ending failed federal education programs and encouraging parental choice, power, and responsibility, the president will keep pursuing federal programs that even his own wife recognizes are doomed to fail.
But while it’s hard for a person to change his ideology, it’s easy for a country to change its president.
Don’t Tread on My Plate
Last week First Lady Michelle Obama and the U.S. Department of Agriculture unveiled “ChooseMyPlate.gov,” an updating of the federal government’s ongoing efforts to lecture us on how to eat. While the idea of nutrition recommendations from Washington, D.C. isn’t itself new, the past couple of years have seen a lurch toward a more coercive approach, especially under the Obama administration, under pressure from a burgeoning “food policy” movement, as I explain in a new Daily Caller op-ed:
All sorts of nannyish and coercive ideas are emerging from that [movement] nowadays: proposals at the FDA to limit salt content in processed foods; mandatory calorie labeling, which poses a significant burden on many smaller food vendors and restaurants; new mandates on food served in local schools; advertising bans; and on a local level efforts to ban things like Happy Meals at McDonald’s. No wonder many parents, local officials and skeptics in Congress are beginning to say: Back off, guv. It’s my plate.
The fact is that the federal government’s dietary advice has changed often through the years—the Washington Post had a great feature on past federal dietary guidelines, under which sweets and even butter held their place as food groups—and that government’s recommendations have regularly proved wrong and even damaging, a point that Steve Malanga elaborates on in this City Journal piece (“Following the government’s nutritional advice can make you fat and sick.”)
Yesterday, C-SPAN’s Washington Journal had me on opposite Maya Rockeymoore of the group Leadership for Healthy Communities to discuss issues that ranged from the school lunch program to whether Washington should serve as an “arbiter” of contending dietary claims, an idea I didn’t much care for. You can watch here.
Wednesday Links
- America’s unemployment rate has nothing to do with immigration.
- It’s possible to cut waste in government without succumbing to the Washington Monument ploy.
- Does this anti-obesity crusade make me look fat? (No, the junk science behind it shaping policy does.)
- Did Wall Street greed create the housing crisis? Or did government subsidies incentivize subprime lending by buying up 40% of new private-label subprime mortgages during the height of the housing boom?
First Lady Asks Nurses to Engage in Legislative Advocacy with Their Patients
No, seriously. First Lady Michelle Obama is asking nurses to promote ObamaCare to their patients.
With hundreds of thousands of medical errors occurring each year — a problem that ObamaCare does nothing to address — this is exactly what I want my nurse thinking about as she’s inserting a needle into my arm.
Filed under: Cato Publications; General; Government and Politics; Health Care
Eat Your Vegetables — If You Want To
This morning’s question at Politico Arena is:
The New York Times reports that despite two decades of public health initiatives Americans still aren’t eating enough vegetables. Healthy eating is a priority of First Lady Michelle Obama. Should those of us with less than Olympic-calibre physiques heed the first lady’s dietary advice? Does this smack of Big Brother — or more precisely Big Sister — wading into personal decisions? Could voluntary preferences on food issues morph into government mandates?
Of all the “Washington elites” they surveyed, I was almost the only one to express skepticism about the First Lady’s and the New York Times‘s expectations for the rest of us:
I was struck by that New York Times article on Saturday. The headline is “Told to Eat Its Vegetables, America Orders Fries.” We Americans are just a constant trial to our elites. We cling not only to our religion and our guns but to our French fries. The government has TOLD us to eat vegetables, and yet we persist in eating tasty food. Soon we may be sent to our rooms without supper.
And then the reporter wrote, in this news story, “Despite two decades of public health initiatives, stricter government dietary guidelines, record growth of farmers’ markets and the ease of products like salad in a bag, Americans still aren’t eating enough vegetables.” America to the New York Times reporting staff: We’ll decide the proper tradeoff between taste, price, nutrition and so on. “Enough vegetables” is a subjective decision, not a fact.
More fundamentally, Why is it any of the federal government’s business how fit we are? We don’t need a national nanny.
The federal government has an important role in our society. Its primary function is national security, and it hasn’t been doing a very good job. It should focus on that.
Americans know that first they say you “should,” and the next thing you know they want to make it mandatory. Already people are talking about taxing junk food. And they’re filing suit against fast-food companies.
We teach our kids to take responsibility for themselves and to Mind Your Own Business — the government should take that advice.
A lot of this is old-fashioned American Puritanism — the idea that anything you enjoy is bad for you– so they tell us don’t smoke, don’t drink, don’t eat, recycle, practice safe sex, ride that bicycle.
A subversive page editor at the New York Times inserted a pull quote (in the print edition) reading “Besides, the taste, trouble and cost, what’s the problem?” Exactly. We Americans are sorry for being such a disappointment to the first lady and the New York Times. But not that sorry.
Rhodes Scholars and the Business World
On the weekend that next year’s Rhodes Scholars are announced, Elliot Gerson, American secretary of the Rhodes Trust and executive vice president of the Aspen Institute, writes in the Washington Post that he is greatly disappointed that a few Rhodes Scholars have gone into business.
Yes, you read that right. He’s disappointed that even a few Rhodes Scholars have chosen to go into business:
For more than a century Rhodes scholars have left Oxford with virtually any job available to them. For much of this time, they have overwhelmingly chosen paths in scholarship, teaching, writing, medicine, scientific research, law, the military and public service. They have reached the highest levels in virtually all fields.
In the 1980s, however, the pattern of career choices began to change. Until then, even though business ambitions and management degrees have not been disfavored in our competition, business careers attracted relatively few Rhodes scholars. No one suggested this was an unfit domain; it was simply the rare scholar who went to Wall Street, finance and general business management. Only three American Rhodes scholars in the 1970s (out of 320) went directly into business from Oxford; by the late 1980s the number grew to that many in a year. Recently, more than twice as many went into business in just one year than did in the entire 1970s.
Apparently Gerson believes that our best and brightest can accomplish more good for the world in such fields as writing, law, and bureaucracy than they can by creating, innovating, and improving lives in the world of business — the arena that not only provides all of us with more comfortable, more interesting lives, and has lifted billions of people out of the back-breaking labor and short lives that were the human condition for millennia, but also makes possible the luxuries of the Aspen Institute, which was founded by Walter Paepcke (1896-1960), chairman of the Container Corporation of America, and is supported by successful businesspeople and their heirs today.
Of course, it’s not clear that business needs Rhodes Scholars. Think of the businesspeople who have revolutionized our world in recent decades: Bill Gates and Paul Allen, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, Larry Ellison, David Geffen, Ted Turner, and Malcom McLean, among others, either never attended or never finished college. Sam Walton, Bill McGowan, and Fred Smith did finish college but weren’t Rhodes Scholars. In the Washington Post Jay Mathews notes that the chief executives of the top 10 U.S.-based Fortune 500 companies attended Pittsburg (Kan.) State, Texas at Austin, University College Dublin, Texas Tech, Texas at Austin, Dartmouth, Kansas, Gannon, Georgia State and Central Oklahoma, not the usual sources of Rhodes Scholars.
But the elite hostility to business — a holdover from Europe, perhaps, where aristocrats looked down on “trade,” or an unconscious echo of Marxism — is unseemly and harmful to both general prosperity and the individuals who are influenced by it to avoid productive enterprise. It crops up in President Obama’s commencement addresses sneering at students who want to “take your diploma, walk off this stage, and chase only after the big house and the nice suits and all the other things that our money culture says you should buy” and in Michelle Obama’s urging hard-pressed women in Ohio, “Don’t go into corporate America.” It’s nice that some people, like senators’ wives, can make $300,000 a year in “the helping industry,” but it’s business that produces the wealth that allows such nonprofit generosity.
Gerson and the Obamas are disparaging the people who built America – the traders and entrepreneurs and manufacturers who gave us railroads and airplanes, housing and appliances, steam engines, electricity, telephones, computers and Starbucks. Ignored here is the work most Americans do, the work that gives us food, clothing, shelter and increasing comfort. That work deserves at least as much respect as “scholarship, teaching, writing, medicine, scientific research, law, the military and public service.”
Is Michelle Obama Right about Teachers?
First Lady Michelle Obama wrote yesterday in US News and World Report that we face a teacher shortage. She laments that up to a third of current teachers could retire in the next four years. The solution, she says, is to embark on an aggressive and multifaceted teacher recruitment campaign.
But here’s an interesting thought: What if a million teachers really did retire in the next four years, and we only replaced half of them?
Catastrophe? Millions of kids without teachers? Nope. In fact, we’d still have a lower pupil/teacher ratio than we did in 1970. Back then, we had 2 million teachers for 45.5 million students. Today, we have 3.2 million teachers for not quite 50 million students.
For the past 40 years, we’ve added teachers a lot faster than we’ve added students. In fact, we’ve added other staff even faster. As a result, the total staff to student ratio has gone up by nearly 75% since 1970.
There are plenty of critical problems with American education, but a looming crisis in the size of the teaching workforce is not one of them.
More Evidence on the Turning Tide
I wrote recently about the anti-Obama T-shirts on display at Washington’s Dulles Airport. This week I can report that at the Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport, there are big cut-outs of Barack and Michelle Obama. But they’re standing by a display of shirts reading “Don’t Blame Me, I Voted for McCain and Palin” and another reading “NOPE (with the Obama campaign logo) — keep the change.” The times they are a-changin’.
In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that out in the real America, the airports of Albuquerque and San Diego, there are no T-shirts on display for or against any politician. It’s like they don’t think Americans care about politicians.
Keeping Michelle’s Promise
“Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that. . . . you push yourselves to be better. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.”
-Michelle Obama, February 3rd, 2008.
“[D]ropping out of high school is no longer an option. It’s not just quitting on yourself, it’s quitting on your country – and this country needs and values the talents of every American.”
-President Barack Obama, February 24th, 2009.
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