Looking at a recent installment in Judy Aron’s series of posts about ‘What we learned from this week’s House session’, it occurs to me that it would be nice if instead of trying to make sure the gun is pointed in ‘the right direction,’ Republicans would focus on unloading it, and even disassembling it.
That is if they would live up to their claim to be the party of smaller government instead of the party of righter government.
To take just two of many examples from the post:
(1) Why is the state involved in marriage at all? Anything that can be accomplished with marriage (sharing of assets and custody, power of attorney over medical decisions, and so on) can be accomplished without it, with one exception: There are situations that involve taking money from some people (who are judged to have a surplus) to give it to other people (who are judged to have a need, or just an entitlement) that can’t be exploited without marriage.
In other words, we have made marriage a gateway to participation in certain Marxist redistribution schemes. When you get married, you commit taxpayers to your future support in various situations. So suddenly, they have to be concerned about who can or can’t line up at the trough.
If we just eliminate the schemes themselves, there would be no reason to fight over marriage. It would be a completely private affair, a commitment that two (or more) people make to each other, and no one’s business but their own.
(2) Why is the state involved in sports at all? It’s because sports are one more thing that we drag under the umbrella labeled ‘school’, so that parents can have their children’s hobbies subsidized by everyone else. That means taxes are involved, and that turns sports into a branch of politics.
Get sports out of schools, and who plays on what teams is no longer a subject for politics, but something that is determined by the choices of individual athletes and their parents.
This seems to be the GOP playbook: Set up state control over an institution or activity where it is inappropriate to begin with, and then spend eternity fighting over whose ideology should be imposed on that one-size-must-now-fit-all situation.
That’s what we learn at every week’s House session.
