The economy is in the tank. Unemployment is stagnant. The budget crisis has brought us to the brink of a government shutdown. Libya is burning, and Egypt is still in turmoil.
Last week, President Obama responded to this swirling mayhem by pouncing with laser-like precision and finely honed intensity on the one issue that he has decided needs addressing above all the rest.
Of course, I am talking about the issue of bullying in schools.
Alongside his wife, first lady Michelle Obama, the president hosted a summit at the White House to focus on this problem. The course of the discussion featured many of the predictable and stale platitudes about how bullying over race, physical features or sexual orientation lead to bad grades and suicide.
Bullying is bad. I get it. However, that is not the issue here. This episode sheds light on two primary problems with big government.
First of all, this is not a federal issue. The president, Congress, the Supreme Court and all other officials and agencies in Washington have important and specific duties. The men and women who have been elected and appointed to perform those duties were selected because of their perceived ability to competently and faithfully execute them.
As the federal government has expanded, the duties have become muddied, and the focus has been lost. Washington bureaucracy has exploded to the point where the bounds set around the jurisdiction of the federal government have been obliterated, and the duties of office are no longer defined. This is why we have reached the point where Washington talks about obesity, bullying and health care as much as securing our borders, stabilizing the economy and stopping terrorism. The peripheral functions the government has assumed have distracted our officials from the issues and problems that really matter.
Secondly, this illustrates the problems that occur when the federal government assumes responsibility for issues that are best left to the smallest government possible.
As a conservative, I am a major proponent of small government. The concept of small government comprises two major principles. The first, and most commonly regarded, is that the federal government should be as small and unobtrusive as possible. The second is that smaller governments should have more direct influence in the lives of their citizens than larger governments. That is, state and municipal governments are more intimately linked with the everyday lives of those within their jurisdictions and thus should have greater control than the federal government over the laws and codes that maintain order within a community.
According to this principle, a teacher is the head of classroom government, and a principal is the head of school government. In the past, such individuals were given the freedom to establish and maintain order and discipline within their jurisdictions. Thanks to frivolous lawsuits and warped conceptions of child psychology, however, higher governments have stepped in and stripped away these rights. This has severely limited the control that teachers and principals have over their jurisdictions and the freedom they have to deal directly with problems such as bullying.
If the federal government were to mind the business for which it was designed, it would do less to create problems that it then deems necessary to step in and fix.
Bob Minchin is a fourth-year electrical engineering major. His column appears on Fridays.
