Liberal and conservative elites agree on one thing: Americans are too free for their own good.
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A. Barton Hinkle
Reason
To outward appearances, it might seem as though the left and right have never been more at odds. And for the average man in the street, drawn to the Tea Party on one side or the Occupy movement on the other, this might be true. But it is not so true for elite opinion. The nation’s high and mighty may be divided about many things, but on one point they often agree: Americans are still too darn free.
For example: Not enough people exercise their right to vote. Problem, right? Well, William Galston of the Brookings Institution has a solution: Force them to. The other day he took to the pages of The New York Times to explain why we should be “Telling Americans to Vote, or Else.” (It doesn’t seem to have occurred to Galston that making people exercise a right takes that right away, by turning it into an obligation.)
Galston is hardly alone. Mitt Romney considers it a problem that many foreign nationals enter America without a government permission slip. His solution: Force every U.S. resident to carry a biometric ID card. (Just the thing to present at the polls when meeting your mandatory-voting requirement, eh? Great minds think alike.)
One of Romney’s GOP primary opponents, Michele Bachmann, laments that many Americans—53 percent of them—pay no federal income tax. So she proposed forcing everyone to do so, even if they don’t have any income to pay taxes on. That’ll show ’em.
Time magazine proposed forcing every American into national service. A federal advisory board has decided, to much applause, that we should force boys as well as girls to receive the HPV vaccine. Proponents of ObamaCare believe the government should force everyone to buy health insurance.
The Obama administration also has lots of other bright ideas about how to bend the American people to its will. Last year Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood told those at a National Press Club that the administration’s “livability” initiative “is a way to coerce people out of their cars.” The administration also wants to force insurers to pay for birth control and abortifacients, and to force consumers to buy more fuel-efficient cars.
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