Quote of the Day: Big Government Destroys Systems of Interaction and Help

I want collective action that is voluntary not coerced. I want people to have the incentive to come together and help others. Government takes my money and gives it to other people. Sometimes it’s good people. But sometimes it’s not. So it doesn’t just replicate what I would have done already. It distorts it. But more importantly it discourages the deeply human ways we help one another as friends and family. I don’t want to romanticize private charity or the way families work. They’re both deeply flawed and imperfect. But big government destroys those systems of interaction and help. Big government makes it cheaper to be on our own. It makes it cheaper to avoid helping others because the government is doing it already.

This is from Professor Russ Roberts at the Café Hayek, discussing a comment  skeptical of the Road to Serfdom.

EU Proposes To Ban the Family

From the Daily Mail

Books which portray ‘traditional’ images of mothers caring for their children or fathers going out to work could be barred from schools under proposals from Brussels.

An EU report claims that ‘gender stereotyping’ in schools influences the perception of the way boys and girls should behave and damages women’s career opportunities in the future.

Critics said the proposals for ‘study materials’ to be amended so that men and women are no longer depicted in their traditional roles would mean the withdrawal of children’s classics, such as Enid Blyton’s The Famous Five series, Paddington Bear or Peter Pan.

The document, prepared by the European Parliament’s Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality, also suggests EU-wide legislation is needed to tackle the way women are depicted in advertising during children’s television programmes.

It further complains about the number of women in EU parliaments, and floats the idea of fixed quotas on a minimum proportion of female MPs.

The report says: ‘Children are confronted with gender stereotypes at a very young age through television series, television advertisements, study materials and educational programmes, influencing their perception of how male and female characters should behave.

‘Special educational programmes and study materials should therefore be introduced in which men and women are no longer used in examples in their ‘traditional roles’, with the male as the breadwinner of the family and the female as the one who takes care of the children.’

The proposal to regulate the ‘traditional’ family values which have been used as justification for gender equality legislation signifies an Orwellian dystopia where the state hopes to subsume family values for state values, impose state control over the citizenry to the individual level via indoctrination or through the control of people’s thought and speech, substitute dependency on the state and the disintegration of the family and the individual, and importantly, the worship of the state. 

[This resonates with the local version of ‘I am the start of change’ being subliminally impressed upon by politically controlled mainstream media to inculcate docility and conformity to the government through the abstract virtues of supposed ‘selflessness’ and through nationalism]

Yet these are signs of desperation from EU’s political elites whom have been groping for the preservation of their privileges and entitlements amidst the rapid deterioration of the incumbent parasitical political economic institutions.