Mr. President: Please Mind Your Own Business

Mr. President: Please Mind Your Own Business
August 4, 2014

Richard Ebeling


Dear President Obama,

For nearly six years, now, you have declared your intention and desire of being my Nanny-in-Chief. Your original campaign slogan of “Hope and Change” was really a promise of “Control and Command.” Well, Mr. President, I have a request: Mind your own business.

Let me start out with some simple questions. How do you know what is right and good for me? Have we ever met? Do you know anything about me as a real, living distinct individual? Have you the slightest idea about the goals and purposes, and hopes and dreams I’ve had about my life? What do you know about the experiences I’ve had or the knowledge I’ve accumulated over the years as the guides and tools for deciding what I consider best for my family and me?

The answers to these questions and countless others like them are: You don’t know a damn thing.  Yet you have proposed, implemented and enforced legislation and regulations that imply that you possess the knowledge, wisdom and, most importantly, the right to tell me how I should live, work, and act.

Your attitude and statements suggest a hubris and arrogance concerning your own superiority, along with those who work for you, that borders on a serious and dangerous elitist complex.

For someone who often refers to the dignity of the ordinary American against presumed powerful special interests, your own outlook and behavior manifests a disbelief in and contempt for the individual person as a free, responsible human being.


A Life of Hopeless Dependency on Government

In your world, Mr. President, everyone is a dependent child needing a paternalist government to take care of him or her from cradle-to-grave. Remember your “Life of Julia” story that you hailed as a model for the future world of triumphant “hope and change.” From her entry into kindergarten to her time in college, through her work life to final retirement, not one aspect of “Julia’s” life was considered possible without the “helping hand” of government to provide education, job security, financial support, and a guaranteed old age pension.

Years ago, singer Helen Reddy may have sang of independent women who could say, “Hear me roar.” But in the world you envisage every woman is presumed not able to stand on her own two feet, and to compete and succeed in a society of equal individual rights for all men and women.

No, she is clearly a “weaker sex” that cannot make it on her own without lifelong and unending safety nets and financial and regulatory supports from a government that is viewed as the “adult” who always has supervision over the eternal female adolescent.

Is this how you view your own daughters’ future, Mr. President, never free of a political Daddy that takes care of his “little girls,” because the governmental Daddy cannot imagine them growing up and being on their own?


Hubris of Presuming How I Should Live and Choose

Let’s talk about your signature legislation, ObamaCare. Set aside the embarrassing disaster that followed the initial opening of the website or the shock and the anger among millions of people who discovered the loss of their health insurance and the higher premiums they were now faced with under your “affordable” health care act.

The underlying premise behind ObamaCare is that you and those manning the bureaucracies in government know what every American needs and should have in terms of health insurance and medical care.

How do you and your “experts” know this, Mr. President? What makes you think you know enough about every one of the nearly 320 million Americans in terms of what would serve their health care needs and requirements?

The collectivist mindset that clearly guides your view of people and society reduces the entire population of the United States to a homogeneous and interchangeable mass that if not confined exactly to one size fits all, then to a rather narrow range of options from which the citizens of the nation are to be allowed and commanded to select.

Each of us, Mr. President, has our own circumstances, our own family needs and preferences, our own judgments about trades-offs between coverage, premiums and deductibles. Plus, our personal situations and evaluations about these and many other related matters change over time.

Do you sit at our dinner tables after the plates have been cleared when husbands and wives decide what they can afford, what is the best alternatives based on their estimates about what will serve their and their children’s health care requirements?

Do you not think that your attitude demonstrates a degree of hubris that you would find presumptuous if I or any other individual American were to mandate what you and your family should be allowed and coerced to have for your possible medical needs?


The Mentality of the Meddler

I don’t know your daughters or your wife or you, Mr. President. For that very reason I would not presume to tell you how to plan your family’s health care and insurance, or how to raise your children, or where to vacation, or how to spend your money, or how to manage the domestic “ups” and “downs” of any marriage between two unique individual human beings over the course of their lives together.

I would be considered a busy body, a meddler, a know-it-all, or an arrogant and irritating pest if I were to put my nose into the business of your personal and intimate affairs of everyday life. So why, Mr. President, do you presume to do just that through the rules, regulations, controls and commands that you say you are willing to us your pen and phone to impose on me?

I only ask that you show me the same respect as a free and self-responsible human being that you would expect from me if we were simply neighbors living next door to each other in any city, town or small hamlet across the United States.


The Arrogance of Presuming What I’m Worth

Finally, Mr. President, how do you know what my skills and abilities are worth to me or anyone else in terms of the salary I may earn in the marketplace? To be honest if someone had asked me whether I thought a person who had never worked in the business world, had never held any truly senior management and administrative responsibilities, and only had a few years of elected governmental office should be President of the United States and be paid $400,000 a year, I would have said, “I don’t think so,” and quiet separate from that person’s political views.

But there you are, Mr. President, sitting in the White House, holding your finger on the nuclear button, while having that pen and phone in your other hand. And with plenty of time to go golfing and flying off on Air Force One for Hawaiian vacations and fund-raising trips around the nation. Only in America! What a country!

So how do you know that the minimum wage that I should be paid is not less than $10.10 an hour? Why not $9.99 or $11.11? While we are at it, why not $20.20? The last one, after all, might match my eye vision. That seems pleasantly symmetrical.

The fact is that what anyone is worth in terms of services they might render to others in the market is dependent upon a whole variety of combined circumstances about which you and others in the government know absolutely nothing.

Each person’s background, education, personal and workplace experience and skills have certain distinct qualities and characteristics different from many others in the type of complex and diverse modern society in which we all live.

At the same time, what particular skills, knowledge and abilities possible employers are looking for from employees in the context of the products or services they offer and sell to consumers, given the potentially every-changing demands those buyers demonstrate in an on-going competitive market, should make it very clear that it is absurd for you or anyone else to sit in your governmental offices in Washington, D.C. and dictate what people may be worth in terms of an hourly wage.

Have you ever given any thought to the fact that your minimum wage policy might price some low or unskilled workers out of the market, because you’ve legally priced them above what many possible employers may think that are actually worth? Have you taken the time to reflect that you might be preventing someone from ever getting that entry-level job that may pay little at first, but over time provides them with the on-the-job experience that can make them more valuable to that or some other employer in the future?


Only Paying What You Think Something is Worth

Before you had government employees to serve you hand-and-foot in the White House, there was a time, Mr. President, when you, no doubt, went food shopping, or bought a car, or purchased a pair of shoes, or spent money on an anniversary gift for your wife.

You had a certain income that constrained what you could buy and how much of the various things you would have liked to have. In other words, there was a time when you were closer to being, well, like the rest of us.

Did you ever pay more for anything than you thought it was worth? Did you not sometimes hesitate or decide not to buy something or not of the quality or in quantity you might have desired, because to do so would have left you with too little money left over out of your limited budget to purchase something you considered to be more important to you or your family?

If you think back and remember such a time, then why do you think it is any different for the rest of us now? Say that a person may not be paid less than $10.10 per hour, and anyone that a prospective employer or customer does not consider to be worth this amount will not be hired.


Plundering for Political Power

Sitting in the White House, such a minimum wage may make you feel good, that you’ve imposed a salary floor that you consider “fair,” “socially just,” or every person’s entitlement “right.” But that will not help the poor individual left without a job, prevented from getting his foot on the bottom rung of the ladder of lifetime employment opportunity, and now dependent on the redistributive largess of paternalistic government.

But perhaps that is what you want. If others in society will not give people what you think they should pay them, then you’ll just tax the rest of us to pay for this unfortunate person’s welfare safety-net programs. And, besides, the government-supported unemployed and unemployable will feel so grateful to those who care for and feed them at other’s expense that they will show their appreciation by keeping those who think and act like you in political office.

Plunder some so you can pander to others to maintain the political power you cannot imagine your life without.


Individual Freedom Instead of Collectivist Control

Mr. President, this is not the America that the Founding Fathers of our country wanted for themselves, for their children, or the future generations for which they signed a Declaration of Independence or constructed a Constitution that was meant to restrain government and leave each individual free to be a self-governing human being responsible for his own life, and respectful of the equal freedom and rights of every other unique person in society.

I have a simple but profoundly important request, Mr. President: Mind your own business and leave me and everyone else alone. I don’t want you managing and controlling my life.

Do I always make the right choices and decisions? No, I do not. Just ask my wife!

But I do not want to be controlled by a political collective possessing coercive power to tell me what I may do or not do, or with whom I may associate and on what terms. I am not your slave, I am not your government ward, I am not some helpless or hopeless “Julia” who needs you to serve as my lifelong Nanny.

I declare that I am a thinking, reasoning human being. I am a free person with inalienable rights to my life, liberty and honestly acquired property. I insist upon my right to live for myself, guided by my own purposes and goals, and free to interact and exchange peacefully and voluntarily with all others, with the only essential moral principle behind my conduct toward them being that I respect their life and liberty just as I insist that they recognize and respect mine.

You, of all modern presidents, should be most sensitive to the dangers and immorality of making some men masters over others who are to be coerced and commanded as slaves.

The master-slave relationship is equally unethical and perverse whether the master is a private person owning other human beings on a plantation, or a “democratically elected” set of masters who use the power and force of the government to make some others obey their commands under the threat or use of political violence.

Mr. President, I ask you to mind your own business, and I promise not to put my nose into your life, in turn. If not, at least admit the truth that you arrogantly believe that you should be the head master on the political plantation that your vision of “hope and change” has really always been about.

[Originally published at Epic Times]

Richard Ebeling
