Dear Reader (including those of you who continue to insist they won’t preorder my book despite the fact that I slave at this “news”letter for you almost every Friday morning when I could be sleeping right now, hence putting off the undesired, sleep-deprivation vision quest I am drifting in and out of as we speak – someone please tell Rutherford B. Hayes to put down that trident and stop scaring the minotaur. Besides, I personally like pecan pie particularly when the batteries are fresh and that guy who played Captain Stubing guest stars in a very special episode of Manimal where the man-duck hybrid tells Punky Brewster he won’t be her friend anymore unless Mork wins the Holitacker – man would I like to see Pam Dawber during Pon Farr! Do I have something in my teeth? Let me open the jar and check . . .),
It was inevitable, I suppose, that the White House would drop the proposed Labor Department rule, basically bringing to an end the traditional family farm, crushing 4-H, and, by extension, infuriating vast swaths of America. I don’t mean it was inevitable because the White House is so open to reason and opposing points of view. I just mean that the president is running for reelection, and I imagine that when word reached David Axelrod that the Obama administration was about to hand over every farming state in the country to the Republicans without a fight, he threw his plate of chicken wings across the room and pressed his buffalo-sauce-drenched lip-warmer to the phone and barked out orders to stop it.
(Upon hearing that bark, President Obama popped his head into the office and said, “Hey are you making lunch?”).
Now, the eagle-eyed reader of my oeuvre will probably conclude that I do not have an extensive farming background. No, no, it’s true. But I have nieces and nephews who do 4-H. I’ve been to a lot of county and state fairs on my numerous cross-country drives and I know quite a few people in agriculture-related businesses. So I do know enough about the America outside the Bos-Wash corridor to know that going after 4-H and the family farm is, for tens of millions of Americans, like telling Manhattanites you’re going to pave-over Central Park, ban brunch, defund NPR, and invite Rush Limbaugh to speak at the 92nd Street Y.
And, for what?
Via Brit Hume’s twitter feed, I found this info sheet at the Department of Labor. Look at question four:
Question: Are these proposed revisions in response to any event or accident, or string of events or accidents, or child labor violations?
Answer: The Department of Labor has continuously reviewed the federal child labor regulations to better protect working children while still allowing them to enjoy the positive work experiences that they can safely perform. Secretary Solis directed the Wage and Hour Division (WHD) to take steps to update the child labor regulations in agriculture after the WHD had concluded a similar rulemaking in May, 2010 for children working in nonagricultural workplaces. The Department’s comprehensive proposal is based upon the enforcement experience of the WHD, recommendations made by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, the desire to bring transparency to the agency’s procedures for assessing child labor civil money penalties, and a desire to equalize as much as possible the agricultural and nonagricultural child labor protections. The child labor provisions for agriculture have not been updated in more than 40 years.
Translation: Nope.
Making Things Legible
In today’s regular column I write:
If there were one thing I could impress upon people about the nature of the state, it’s that governments by their very nature want to make their citizens “legible.”
I borrow that word from James C. Scott, whose book Seeing Like a State left a lasting impression on me. Scott studied why the state has always seen “people who move around” to be the enemy. Around the world, according to Scott, states have historically seen nomadic peoples, herdsmen, slash-and-burn hill people, Gypsies, hunter-gatherers, vagrants, and runaway slaves and serfs as problems to be solved. States have tried to make these people stay in one place.
But as Scott examined “sedentarization” (making mobile people settle down), he realized this practice was simply part of a more fundamental drive of the state: to make the whole population legible to the state. The premodern state was “blind” to its subjects. But the modern state was determined first to see them, and then organize them. This is why so many rulers pushed for the universal usage of last names starting around 1600 (aristocrats had been using family or clan names for centuries already). The same goes with the push for more accurate addresses, the standardization of weights and measures, and of course the use of censuses and surveys. It’s much easier to collect taxes, conscript soldiers, fight crime, and put down rebellions if you know who people are and where they live.
I was writing in the context of the Arizona immigration law, but the same points work just as well in the context of this Department of Labor thing. This wasn’t an initiative from the White House, this was simply DOL bureaucrats doing their jobs as they saw fit.
Children on farms are “invisible” to government when government doesn’t have rules covering children on farms. By requiring kids to be trained by a federal program instead of 4-H or similar non-governmental agencies, the kids suddenly become visible. Once visible they can be manipulated, organized, directed. (Ironically, 4-H itself is already a government program! But it has embedded itself in civil society, it seems to me, in ways the Department of Labor couldn’t countenance.)
It’s not altogether different from parents who demand their teenaged kids check in with their parents by phone or text periodically. If you don’t hear from your kid, you don’t where your kid is. He, in effect, becomes invisible to you. Or think of ex-cons on parole. They need to repeatedly check in with their probation officers, take urine tests, etc. They must remain visible.
But here’s the problem: We are not the government’s kids! Nor are we presumptive criminals.
As the fact sheet makes clear, the DOL didn’t craft this proposal in response to a real problem, it crafted this proposal because this is the sort of thing government agencies do when left to their own devices. They make the population visible, then set about organizing it.
Vote For Me! I Will Give You Money – Maybe
“If there had been any formidable body of cannibals in the country,” H. L. Mencken complained of Harry Truman’s 1948 presidential campaign, “he would have promised to provide them with free missionaries fattened at the taxpayers’ expense.”
And then there’s Obama trolling America’s campuses for votes the way Bill Clinton trolled the White House intern pens for thong snaps. What makes Obama’s student-loans-for-votes offer so pathetic is that it is designed to seem like a far more generous bribe than it actually is. Like trying to trick the cannibals into thinking some emaciated vegans and a few mannequins rubbed in bacon fat are the fattened missionaries Truman apocryphally promised. The interest-rate extension amounts to a whopping 80 cents a day and isn’t even available for most of the students he’s talking to. It’s all so pathetic.
The Coming Days
I am exhausted. I didn’t get home from California until about 2:00 A.M. So I need to keep things light. And I have much work to do before I sleep. But I wanted to give you folks a heads-up about what’s in store.
In the next issue of NR I have a long adaptation from The Tyranny of Clichés.
In this Sunday’s Washington Post Outlook section I have a different adaptation.
I am writing something pegged to the book for my Tuesday USA Todaycolumn.
One problem I’m having with these adaptations is that they don’t really allow the room for much of the G-File-ish jocularity of the book to come through.
On Monday, I will be on the Piers Morgan show discussing the book. On Tuesday (Pub Date, Baby!), I will be on Fox and Friends, Sean Hannity’s radio show (though not TV, alas), Red Eye, and Glenn Beck TV. On Wednesday, I’ll be doing – among others – Dennis Miller’s, Michael Medved’s, and Jim Bohannon’s radio shows.
And then things get busy.
Last chance for the preorder.
Please check out the Tyranny blog or my Twitter feed if you want more regular updates. No heavy sell from me; while I am eager for the preorders, I am so glad to be done with this part.
Various & Sundry
Now, here’s a salesman!
Cindy Sheehan vs. the IRS (h/t James Taranto) Let’s give both sides nuclear weapons!
A similar battle from the world of nature (warning: icky).
Actually, I guess now that she’s an anti-tax nut, Maureen Dowd no longer thinks Sheehan’s moral authority is absolute.
History of English in ten minutes.
Lah-dee-dah, out for a stroll . . . what the!?!?!