Sex and Potatoes

I expect that I will get a much more diverse array of search engine hits on this article than usual. They may not fit the usual profile of our readers here on Arkansas Watch, but these are not usual times.

I got a call the other day on behalf of bureaucrats in Benton County. The purpose of the survey was to "help determine how tax dollars in your area should be spent". They began to poll me, asking detailed questions about my head and my stomach. Questions like, "How many times a week do you eat potatoes? Do not include potatoes that have been fried or cut up into chips." From there they went to mental health questions, down to and including, "do you ever feel stress?" and "how much of the time do you feel that you don't have the emotional support that you need, once a week, most days of the week....".

You should feel really good about rolling out of bed at 6:AM tomorrow and spending a beautiful Spring day at work so that you can earn money to send to the government in taxes so that they can pester people about how many times a week they eat un-fried potatoes! How often to I lack the emotional support I need? Thankfully, since I got married seldom-to-never. But suppose I didn't? Will they send a government official around to give me a hug?

The whole thing is a perfect example of the government meddling in affairs which are outside its God-given functions as laid out in scripture and supported by history. It is not the government's job to insure people have the emotional support they need- that is the job of families and churches and individual people. Government can't do that job well. It's the wrong tool for that kind of job. All it can do is act indirectly by setting policy to strengthen the family and our connections to one another. One way they can do that is to spend less money so that families are not taxed so much so that they don't have to work all the time like hamsters on a treadmill to pay for things like these studies to see where government can next enlarge itself.

There was a knock at my door about ten minutes into this study, so I excused myself. They kept calling back day after day to complete the study. They finally got ahold of me once they started calling at night. This time the questions focused on my sexual habits and any diseases that I might have. I was sorely tempted to make up some wild answers, but I was afraid that any fantasy problems I invented would result in the creation of a new government office in my county to solve it! I declined to give much info in that area, except indirectly to boost my count in "times per week that I engaged in vigorous physical activity, which is defined as activities which induce heavy breathing".

So get out there and get to work- Your state government officials need you to generate even more tax money so they launch a new program insuring that you eat the proper number of potatoes. They have to do stuff like this because other stuff, like reducing illegal immigration, is "a federal issue" according to our Governor and therefore not their job. Maybe this program can hire the people who have been put out of work due to illegal aliens flooding the labor market. They could hire them to go around and give hugs from the government- after they have completed their certified training of course.