We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing,
while others judge us by what we have already done.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
It's Time To Fire Big Nanny
We conservatives love to poke fun at the First Lady, a trained lawyer (not nutritionist), whom decided that a key education priority that can't be trusted to local school administrations but requires federal intervention is school lunches. (She, like any other good self-superior progressive, must wonder just how kids, given their parents' obviously deficient dietary decisions, ever made it to her nutritionally sound school lunch programs.) We've also chuckled at Mayor Bloomberg's nutritionally dubious concerns with salt content of foods ("no salt for you!") or intake of alcoholic beverages.
But this story out of North Carolina (hats off to the Carpe Diem blog) really irritates me:
A preschooler at West Hoke Elementary School ate three chicken nuggets for lunch Jan. 30 because the school told her the lunch her mother packed [turkey and cheese sandwich, banana, potato chips, and apple juice] was not nutritious [i.e., did not meet U.S. Department of Agriculture guidelines of one serving of meat, one serving of milk, one serving of grain, and two servings of fruit or vegetables, even if the lunches are brought from home]. [The missing portions (i.e., chicken nuggets) resulted in a fee from the cafeteria, in her case $1.25.]Where do you start with this? [Note: I have a nutrition blog, but I haven't posted there in a while.] Even if you ignore the state's questionable authority over family dietary decisions, the child's lunch, in fact, fully complied with specified guidelines. Moreover, the fix? Three chicken nuggets in place of a sandwich consisting of white whole wheat bread, cheese, and turkey? Are you kidding me? Even if you assume the nuggets weren't deep-fried (with possible trans fat issues), chicken and turkey are both excellent sources of protein (and cheese is an excellent dairy choice), but the breading on nuggets compared to whole grain bread? Kudos to the mom who prepared a more nutritious lunch for her child than the school!
By any objective standard, the bureaucrat inspecting the children's homemade lunches was clearly incompetent and should be terminated. Guidelines are just that: guidelines, not inflexible standards which have been proven in a scientific context. A school official (or state/local bureaucrat) doesn't know and shouldn't care how a family distributes its nutritional targets during family and school meals. Short of parental negligence (e.g., the parents sent the child to school for an extended period without a calorie-sufficient child's meal or money for lunch), I think the school or bureaucrat needs to respect a parent's authority. If the school has concerns, it should address those concerns in a nonjudgmental, respectful way directly with the parents. (For example, a school bully may have stolen a child's lunch.)
There is no reasonable justification for pushing-on-a-string, busybody bureaucrats analyzing the content of student lunches. It is not the function of government to look over our shoulders and stand in judgment; that violates the spirit and intent of limited government. Government must stick to core functionality. Will we always make the right or best decisions for ourselves and our families? Perhaps not. But liberty means being able to make those decisions: for the government to serve us, not our serving the government.
Word of the Day
iatrogenic: "of or relating to illness caused by medical examination or treatment". George Will, in an earlier commentary focusing on the contemporary publication of writings from the late Daniel Moynihan, the Democratic senator from New York whom was succeeded by Hillary Clinton, used the term to describe certain unintended consequences of government; for example, he used the colorful phrase "feeding the sparrows by feeding the horses" in describing the dysfunctional, unnecessary evil of building a government bureaucracy. The federal government claims that it is addressing the general welfare, but it creates new problems, not unlike trying to squeeze a balloon. Consider, for instance, a desperate father whom knows, if he abandons his family, his wife and children will be guaranteed a level of government support he himself cannot provide: how is society served by a perverse government policy that undermines the family unit? But not to worry: there will be government-paid workers attentive to the needs of broken families.
In one of my favorite movies, "You've Got Mail", independent bookstore owner Kathleen Kelly's (Meg Ryan) business is starting to fail due to competition of a new Fox Books Superstore just around the corner. Employee Christina is starting to worry about where she'll live if she loses her job, but George rubs it in that he lives in a rent-controlled multi-room apartment for a modest, well below-market rent.
There are all sorts of arbitrary rules and regulations in a number of cities that strip apartment owners out of any real economic liberty over their own property. It can become next to impossible to end leases, even if you want to rent the apartment out to relatives. There are often high barriers to exit an agreement (e.g., finding the current tenants a comparably (below-market) rate apartment). In many cases, landlords have found it necessary to offer tenants thousands of dollars to vacate--the equivalent of months or even years of rent.
George Will's column this week focuses on a potential Supreme Court case based on an appeal from the Harmons whom own a 6-apartment building on the Upper West Side of NYC. (Harmon filed petition for certiorari in the Supreme Court after the Appeals Court rejected his suit, and SCOTUS has responded by requesting responses from the tenants and the city.) Half of the apartments are subject to rent control, 40% or more below market value. As a related WSJ article points out, bad Supreme Court decisions since as early as 1921 effectively granted property rights to apartment dwellers in residence for a year with local government able to regulate tenant rights after that period:
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia exposed the deeply antidemocratic nature of rent control in Pennell v. City of San Jose (1988). If the government thinks some high social end is served by allowing tenants to sit on someone else's property in perpetuity, then it should use public funds, after democratic deliberation, to buy or lease the premises for market value which it can then lease out to particular tenants. The correct way to handle this issue, he wrote, is by "the distribution to such persons of funds raised from the public at large through taxes," and not to use "the occasion of rent regulation to establish a welfare program privately funded by" landlords.George Will points out some of the counterproductive unintended economic responses to rent control. For example, a below-market yield for an asset lowers its market value; it limits the cash flow available for and lessens the incentive for making repairs, improvements or development of new residential properties. (You would think that it's a no-brainer: the government should want to maximize the number of residents whom, say, pay sales or local income taxes or owners whom pay property taxes. But tenants benefiting from their windfall below-market rents feel entitled and are willing to vote against any politician whom dares to question their rights to below-market rents.)
Will implicitly notes that the start of rent control was based on a limited number of available apartments and a large number of returning WWI veterans; we have a typical application of the laws of supply and demand, i.e., more tenants than apartments tends to drive up rents. The problem is that if you cap rents, you lower the incentive and lengthen the payback period to invest in more apartments. NYC thought it was doing a good thing by legislating "good" or "fair" rents. But a naturally larger supply of apartments should result in lower rents--a vacant apartment yields no income.
Where do I stand? I'm hoping that the justices, just as in prominent recent cases restoring some meaning to the First (Citizens United) and Second Amendments, will suddenly rediscover the intent and spirit of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments. Thomas Kuhn once noted that a paradigm shift occurs when the prevailing house of cards expansion of a theory is unsustainable and a simpler theory emerges. Let us pray for a SCOTUS paradigm shift from decades of bad rent control laws: they are based on bad economics, and they vitiate the very concept of property, one of John Locke's unalienable rights on which this republic was founded.
Entertainment Potpourri
- The CW Network is planning to resurrect one of my favorite all-time TV series, "Beauty and the Beast" originally starring Linda Hamilton and Ron Perlman. Beautiful green-eyed , raven-haired Kristin Kreuk, who played Lana Lang, Clark Kent's first serious girlfriend in Superboy's home town of Smallville, will reprise Linda Hamilton's role as Catherine. (Kristin also shares the same birthday with an obscure political blogger.)
- We do know that 16-year-old Symone Black returned to the American Idol Hollywood Week competition after her fall off the stage, but I don't know what happened to her thereafter; the episodes are edited for time. She wasn't mentioned in any of the four rooms (two rooms of contestants are eliminated at the end of Hollywood Week.) She is not listed on the Las Vegas week roster of contestants. I did a couple of Internet searches but couldn't find any more recent follow-up than the post-cliffhanger revelation she returned to the Hollywood competition. Presumably her stage dad had second thoughts and withdrew her from the competition, or the show didn't want to draw attention to her elimination, knowing lots of fans, like me, were pulling for her to advance.
Paul McCartney & Wings, "Give Ireland Back to the Irish". I remember this song was very controversial when it came out; in fact, it was banned in England. If any Beatle was political, it was John. So when Paul directly took on the partition of Ireland, I remember being surprised; Paul always came across to me as the Beatle whom wanted everyone to like him; he wrote cheery love songs. As a Catholic, I was saddened that the two sides in Northern Ireland contradicted Christ's message with each civilian casualty. As a matter of political philosophy, I look at foreign occupations with skepticism.
