College students aren't expected to know much about or participate in politics. We've been branded with the stereotype that we're too busy partying and eating pizza to spend time waiting in line to vote. I don't know how accurate this description is--it could very well be right according voter statistics, but the overall disenchantment of all American citizens with the political process is unsettling. At least, for me it is.
That's why I thoroughly enjoyed George Will's forum address to BYU students on Tuesday. It shined a floodlight on the chaos stemming from a government that claims to "knows everything," from the correct price in exchange for pressing pants to the exact wage an immigrant should be making in 2014.
Speaking on "the political argument today," Will masterfully laid out the problems America faces today and in the near future. Whereas America had once borrowed money for the future, the ever expanding government has resorted to borrowing money from the future--funding billion dollar programs like Obamacare and immigration reform on the bill of our grandchildren. Watching with my friends, I felt validity for the similar personal opinions I had recently expressed to them. Now I had more than just Fox News to back me up.
Will later went on to explain the dangers of a government too involved in American's lives by relating the details of an event during the time of Franklin D. Roosevelt. The National Recovery Administration was a chief governmental program of the New Deal. It's goal was to eliminate competition in the market place, with the government setting the "correct" price for goods and services. The program went so far as to prosecute one New York businessman who charged 35 cents for pants pressing, when the NRA believed the service was worth 40 cents. The man was fined $100 and faced three months in jail.
Finishing his lecture, Will emphasized what he called the most crucial verb in the Deceleration of Independence, the word "secure." Government, he said, was to secure the rights naturally endued upon men by their creator. It is not to grant or revoke these God given rights. Unlike Vice President Joe Biden's statement that every achievement within the past decade was in part due to the government, an individual's ability and right to achieve success is granted without the consent or necessity of government.
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This is for extra credit in comms211 and comms239
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