There’s a basic rule that folks who seek power tend to forget and those in power flout outright: the principles we foist on others must apply also to ourselves.
Notoriously, Congress piles regulation over regulation upon the American people, but absolves itself from those very same laws. This became an issue, recently, when our moral exemplars on Capitol Hill began to speak loftily for a higher minimum wage and against modern internship programs.
“A new study,” Bill McMorris wrote last month, “found that 97 percent of lawmakers backing the minimum wage are relying on unpaid interns to help get the bill passed.” McMorris used the H-word in his title, as have many similar reports before him: hypocrites.
The program requirements of the Democrats’ “ObamaCare” have proven to be more burdensome than Nancy Pelosi promised. So President Obama now declares, unilaterally, to postpone applying the employer mandate in the law. Consider, too, the many waivers granted to other groups for various rules and regulations rules. None of this was done to better implement a carefully thought-out policy, but not to aggrieve certain influential groups.
And here we get to the heart of today’s weakness on principles.
You see, it’s not individuals who matter to our leaders, it’s powerful groups . . . groups that fund or swing re-elections.
And that’s the principal reason government policy works at cross-purposes, to our general detriment. Instead of insisting on broad rules that apply to all, our leaders pit group against group, favoring one, then another, then later still another.
Madness for us; method for them.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.