The [Nanny] States of America

"A government big enough to give you everything you want, is strong enough to take everything you have." - Thomas Jefferson

After seeing this quote, I was shocked at how applicable it is to today's society. Although Jefferson lived hundreds of years ago, we now realize how far ahead of his time he was. Simply put, Jefferson was a philosopher-king - the very type of leader that Plato considered to be most adept at leading people. Put metaphorically, Plato described a philosopher-king as a captain of a ship: "A true pilot must of necessity pay attention to the seasons, the heavens, the stars, the winds, and everything proper to the craft if he is really to rule a ship." To Plato, a philosopher-king looked at the "big picture" of things, always re-examining issues from varying perspectives - and always putting the people first. When I look at the people who are in leadership positions in this country today, I see the opposite of what Plato describes. I see a government that exemplifies exactly what Jefferson warned us about.

We have all heard the age-old adage that says you learn best by doing; anything else in inferior. When I reflect on all the lessons that I have learned throughout my lifetime, I realize that the vast majority of them came from the act of actually doing something. Additionally, the best ones have come from trying and failing. To put it plainly, we learn from our mistakes.

In the context of present day American society, the opportunity for citizens to learn by doing has largely been stomped out - due in large part to the rise of what many refer to as "big government."In my opinion, good government should allow people the chance to make their own choices, and then learn from them. Today, there is a growing trend in which regulations, bans, and restrictions rule every aspect of our lives. Obviously, the element of law needs to exist to a certain degree in order to keep society from falling into chaos. However, the American government of today goes above and beyond this. Today, it exists at a level where people aren't even allowed the chance to fail. Rules and regulations constrain behavior to such a degree that citizens are often banned from doing something before they are even given the chance attempt it, and thus, learn from it.

When I was a kid, my friends and I started up a neighborhood business to make some spending money. We emulated the old "lemonade stand" style of businesses, in which people driving by could stop and buy some homemade refreshments and snacks. The first day we didn't do bad, we made a good amount of money, but probably not enough to justify standing outside in the sun all day. With this in mind, I came up with a plan: in addition to selling snacks and drinks, I got the idea to set up a car wash. So as people would stop for a drink or a snack on the way home from work, I would explain that we could wash their car while they sat and ate. After implementing this, our business exploded and we made hundreds of dollars the first day. The food and drinks are what got customers "foot in the door" so to speak. Once we already had them, we would be in a better position to offer them a higher priced service - the car wash, which is where we made our real money. While the first attempt could be seen as a failure, I learned from it and adapted my business model, and found that by offering both snacks and a car wash simultaneously, I could make much more money than by running either aspect of the business alone.

Now, fast forward a decade to 2011. Four-year-old Abigail Krstinger, tried to run a lemonade stand in Iowa, in which she was selling cups for 25 cents each. Before long, the police arrived and shut her down for not having the proper permits to run a business. This isn't an isolated incident either. In Maryland, a group of young children set up a similar neighborhood stand selling beverages, with the plan to donate half of the money made to a non-profit organization that fights pediatric cancer. In this case, police not only shut down the stand, but they fined the parents $400. After reading about this ridiculous war on the childhood tradition of selling lemonade, it made me appreciate the fact that I was able to experience what it was like to run a business of sorts. Additionally, it made me sad that these children were denied a great life lesson, one that I have remembered dearly to this day.

While these stories don't exactly make for front page news, they are an important reflection of the prevailing cultural zeitgeist of our time. Government today exists in such a way that people are often times denied the freedom to take a little risk, in exchange for the hopes of gaining some sort of favorable outcome - be it monetary gain, or more importantly, a fulfilling learning experience. While there are certainly scenarios in which these business permit laws serve their purpose, the cases of these neighborhood lemonade stands are not among them. Law and order today operates in the form of what can essentially be considered a bureaucratic machine; rules are automatically and thoughtlessly enforced uniformly, without regard for special circumstances. While the laws themselves are enacted by various levels of government, the stories of these lemonade stands shed light on the way in which these laws are actually implemented in real life, by real public administrators - in this case, the police. As stated above, while these two occurrences are only a "drop in the pond" so to speak, they are a representation of the greater overarching attitudes of the government today. Furthermore, they serve as testament to the fact that this existing "nanny philosophy" that has been adopted by our government is an outright failure to the American people. We need to wake up and smell the coffee, or in this case, the lemonade, and vote in people who will lead this nation of individuals, not hold them back.