Mark Steyn: Let Them Go Hungry

I dislike first ladies — as a concept, I mean, not as dinner dates. I think of the first lady as an individual who happens to be married to the guy with the job, rather than as a job in its own right with a huge staff and bloated budget. But I seem to be in a minority, and most Americans appear to be comfortable with the neo-monarchical inflating of the president's wife into a full-blown Queen Consort. So, to give all those staffers the pretense of something to do, it's necessary to identify a "cause" for the first lady to "champion." The Arab Spring? Whoa, steady on. By "cause," we mean something kinda non-political, more like good works, but with the force of federal power behind it.

So it was decided that Michelle Obama would go to war on childhood obesity....

The first lady was on hand for the launch of the new federally mandated lunch limits. The stench of failure and risibility has not yet attached to this initiative as it has to so many other Obama-era bureaucratic excesses. But, through September, returning schoolchildren complained about their new, insufficient lunches. Teachers and parents who took up their cause did so in statist terms, beseeching the commissars to raise the mandated calorie limits. Very few did so on first-principle grounds — which is to say the argument that a system in which a centralized bureaucracy attempts to impose a uniform menu on a nation of 300 million people is nuts, and cannot survive. In theory, education is the responsibility of local school districts in sovereign states. Yet somehow a bureaucrat in the Department of Agriculture wound up with a monopoly on what your kids eat.

Where do you go to vote out the Commissar of School Lunches? Even if Romney wins in November, I doubt this will be anybody's big priority. Statists well understand that you don't need a president-for-life if you've got a bureaucracy-for-life. Sometimes your team has to take a time-out for a couple of years, but, even when they do, all the departments and agencies and bureaus are still in place, hyper-regulating away. I mean, how often does the party of small government actually abolish anything? ...

Ever since I was a kid, and began to understand such matters, I have despised the concept of 'First Lady', for just the reason Steyn mentions: I am, and have always been, a republican.