Remember: if one regulation is just and useful — say, putting a cap on the number of hours per week a child under a certain age can work in a factory — than all federal regulations are just and righteous, and if you don’t happen to agree with them, you are a vicious, mercenary capitalist who, given the chance, would have bent Upton Sinclair over a butcher block and buggered him with a lamb shank.
Or so I’m told by many “liberals” whenever I complain about ever new governmental regulations that presume to micromanage everything from our medicine cabinets to our lightbulbs to our house painting to our vegetable gardens.
To which I say this: blow me, fascists.
CNS:
Labor Secretary Hilda Solis faced congressional opposition Wednesday over the Obama administration’s proposed regulations that would curtail what chores children are allowed to do on their own family’s farm.
Among other things, the Labor Department wants to bar children under age 16 from participating in the cultivation, harvest and curing of tobacco; operating almost all “power-driven” equipment; and working with animals in feed lots, grain silos, stockyards, or livestock auctions.
Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) told Solis that the proposed regulations would change the way family farms work, preventing farm kids from learning their parents’ trade.
“This is an issue that fundamentally alters an historic and familiar relationship [that is] so important to America and particularly important to rural America,” Moran said during a Senate Appropriations subcommittee hearing Wednesday.
Sen. Moran called the regulations “overly broad,” giving a few examples:
“Regulations prohibiting a young person from working six feet off the ground mean that no child, no young person, is going to be in the cab of a tractor or a combine. And in fact, your rules suggest that a young person could not even use a power-driven screwdriver.”
Moran said in his view, “If the federal government can regulate the kind of relationship between parents and their children on their own family’s farm, there is almost nothing off-limit” when it comes to government intrusion.
[my emphasis]
Senator Moran, you’ll note, says that like it’s a bad thing. I mean, once the government assumes all responsibility, imagine the freedom the rest of us will have to live our lives without consequence!
Besides, clearly Sen Moran hates children and views them as nothing more than birthed appendages to a working farm — kind of like little human cotton gins fueled on whole milk and corn bread — and given the opportunity he would thoroughly exploit the poor little demi-wards of the state, as would their unsavory pig-farming parents, who shouldn’t have the right to force dangerous slave labor on helpless children just because they happened to sire them.
There’s a reason these “rightwingers” fight against benevolent government watchdogism: they’re greedy mercantilists who long for the days of slavery and fully unregulated free market capitalism.
Whereas the Left, through a kindly government, is here to protect your freedom to live your life without consequence, fully owned and controlled by a very kindly government master.
Who, if you ever get to DC, will even allow you into the Big White House!
How ya BREEDERS gonna run yer family farms without the help of
illegalsimmigrant laborers who do the work lazy Americans won’t do now?Humn … we can kill our children up until they point they are a few hours old, but once they’re born, we have reduced say in what they may do.
Interesting.
Under these regulations, my family would likely not have been able to afford to send ANY of the kids to college. Mom and Dad worked, but we also farmed — tobacco and occasionally cattle. My brothers also raised a little extra money cutting firewood from our woods — with chain saws, naturally.
These are not safety regulations — though I’d admit that some of the work with tobacco is dangerous, I’d also point out that no one in my family was ever seriously hurt doing that work. Cuts and scratches, sure, but that’s why it’s called “work”. The restrictions on livestock work are, IMHO, simply there to destroy 4H and FFA.
Hmmm… if the definitions are broad enough, I suspect we’d also have had to do without eggs, as we kids were responsible for gathering them from the chickens.
I’ve never felt more personally targeted by the government. Obama denied the request for a disaster declaration for Franklin Township, OH — where I grew up. Now he’s saying the childhood I had is illegal.
I would venture to guess that more children are “injured” in their “play” than while working on a farm.
But judging by the injuries that occur on a sky hill. Or on a bike. Or driving a car.
cripes – being a kid is dangerous. We should ban it.
Whose children do you think they are, anyway?
There are no citizens left in the United States. There are the Clients, and the Cattle. The Clients exist to be fed, housed, and clothed by the Government; the Cattle exist to be harvested so as to feed, house, and clothe the Clients.
Don’t you think we’re already doing just that?
Does the birth and growth of industrial farming techniques and methods have a direct correlation with the withering of a more robust conservative thought across the broader population? That is, when men in their bulk numbers move from the countryside into cities, does their onetime immediate connection to the regularities of the earth (in general, to nature) fall away, giving place to the dominance of conventions as new regularities (such as conventions may pretend to be)? If not precisely a necessary connection, wouldn’t it appear to be at least a probable one?
Which is to say in turn that the assumption of more dominant conventional stances in place of more nearly natural stances can be overcome with effort, but if with effort, some motive force to propel that effort must be first acquired. We might call that motive force, skepticism.
I see a boom in prison camp construction for all of us negligent parents who taught our kids to drive before they were ten, to use power tools, take engines apart, use log splitters, drive tractors and lawn tractors, small dirt bikes and power boats.
I even have my kids climb extension ladders to clean out the gutters and retrieve their basketballs and other throwing objects off the roof.
They’re losing their fucking minds.
Can you lose something you no longer have?
Only if he begged me.
And why are these people outlawing the only fun things for a kid to do on a farm? Why do they hate children?
…does their onetime immediate connection to the regularities of the earth (in general, to nature) fall away, giving place to the dominance of conventions as new regularities (such as conventions may pretend to be)?
I think it’s all of a piece, as the technological progress of our forebears has so nearly assured our safety, survival and comfort that we no longer give much thought to the fundamental principles underlying our modern lives. Absent such a comfortable environment, I believe most of us would be forced to pay much more attention to the Gods of the Copybook Headings.
(I do have to point at the absurdity of “the regularities of the Earth.” If the Earth were regular, we would not need irrigation, nor roofs over our heads.)
Why do I have an image of Jamie Lee Curtis shoveling Activia down a bore hole somewhere?
You can’t take those regularities as the flow of the seasons, as the nearness of births and deaths, as the progress of the stars overhead and even the planets wandering in their courses Squid?
sdferr,
My ancestors, for as much as they understood that Winter Is Coming, were probably a lot more concerned that they would take enough food from the harvest to see them through the inevitable winter. And the abundance or scarcity of the harvest was largely dependent on each day’s weather, and the coming of locusts or blight or bandits or war, none of which are terribly predictable.
I know that when I’m doing my yearly wilderness camping, I’m a hell of a lot more focused on each day’s uncertainties than I am on the givens. (The stars, I will grant you, are majestic as all get-out.)
Regularities doesn’t entail predictability to daily precision, though, so much as point to the non-absurdities by which we are surrounded in nature as such, and possessing, as we say, a nature of our own fit to that natural articulation. I mean, if we notice that our habitat has a regular dry season, and we’re dependent on rain water to kick off our seed, we’ll hardly go scattering seed in the expected midst of the dry season, will we?
To put this slightly more directly, perhaps, we claim that the regularity of human nature inclines us to the order we make in our politics. The political left, on the contrary, contends there is no human nature, period. Disconnect us humans from the immediacy of nature in general and I believe we will be far more susceptible to accepting the assertions of the political left.
Or, Montesquieu vs. Marx.
I believe the Left have largely deluded themselves into thinking that they have mastery over Man and Nature. Such delusion would not be possible if they (and more importantly, their flocks) were more often exposed to the whimsical violence of Mother Nature. Dependable harvests, sturdy homes, and antibiotics have made a lot of people way too cocky.
Their first mistake was having children in the first place. These contraceptives are being offered for “free” for a reason, people. Take the hint.
I had merely hoped you’d have taken my meaning, is all.
Or alternatively, Sophocles’ chorus:
I would say(if I’m close to your thrust sdferr) that the further society is removed from nature and natures laws, the more likely it is society will embrace a philosophy at odds with natures laws. Utopianism.
Disconnect us humans from the immediacy of nature in general and I believe we will be far more susceptible to accepting the assertions of the political left.
sdferr,
I took the above to mean “removed from objective reality, we’re a lot likelier to buy the contrived reality of our would-be masters.” Hence, my comments on their delusions of grandeur, and how they’d never get away with it if their audience were confronted regularly with a reality at odds with what they’re being sold.
I don’t think you and I are really that far apart.
I don’t think we’re apart at all Squid, as it happens. Hence my surprise at your initial thrust (I do have to point at the absurdity of “the regularities of the Earth.”) When we speak of natural right — and we do — we aren’t kidding.
Yeah, I was obviously coming at the thing from a different perspective. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some small children that are neglecting their painful, nasty, dangerous farm work. Where’s my cat o’ nine tails?
sdferr, it’s actually even simpler: every facet of your existence, from food to water to transport to whatever, is dependent on other people in a city. There is literally nothing you can do for yourself, including taking a dump, which in the city depends on a functioning sewer system.
Meant to add: this is even more true than it was in the Founders time, because unlike the Founders, no one can really decide to get up and move away from other people.
Ok, now that the Administration has unleashed the EPA on farmers on the dust pollution they emit, and the DOT on the trucks they drive, and strangled the USDA conservation programs that help farmers while siphoning off that money to food stamps, and now this, can we *now* say they are engaged in a war against Agriculture?