-By Warner Todd Huston
President Obama has failed in many ways to get Americans to follow along with his giant government, Big Brother ways. So, instead of changing his policies to what you want, he’s investing your tax dollars into creating ways to “nudge” you into accepting his extreme policy ideas.
On Tuesday Fox News released a report that revealed Obama’s plan to use psychology and “behavioral insights” to cajole America into accepting his way of thinking.
“The federal government is hiring what it calls a ‘Behavioral Insights Team’ that will look for ways to subtly influence people’s behavior,” Fox reports.
The newser found that these “insights” teams are already fanning out across several government departments to help them fine-tune the message to fool Americans into thinking Obama’s ideas are just what we need to cure our nation’s ills (you know, the ones Obama caused in the first place).
“Behavioral sciences can be used to help design public policies that work better, cost less, and help people to achieve their goals,” reads the government document describing the program, which goes on to call for applicants to apply for positions on the team.
The document was emailed by Maya Shankar, a White House senior adviser on social and behavioral sciences, to a university professor with the request that it be distributed to people interested in joining the team. The idea is that the team would “experiment” with various techniques, with the goal of tweaking behavior so people do everything from saving more for retirement to saving more in energy costs.
Some of those Fox asked thought it sounded like a great idea. But others aren’t so sure.
“I am very skeptical of a team promoting nudge policies,” Michael Thomas, an economist at Utah State University, told FoxNews.com.
“Ultimately, nudging … assumes a small group of people in government know better about choices than the individuals making them.”
Well, of course it does. Thomas is 100% right. The problem with this policy is that it is not being used to “improve” government. It is being used to sell us on what government wants to do.
As Ronald Reagan said, the scariest words in the country are “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”
These “nudge squads” are “here to help” and they’ll promote all the wrong-headed policies that elitists like Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid want to further burden the country with.
Lastly, do we really want to sell government like its a commodity, like our politicians are ad salesmen trying to get us to buy a new breakfast cereal?
I know I don’t.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, MrConservative.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, Wizbang.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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