I’m so sick of our nation’s focus on this ridiculous rich vs. poor scuffle.  We all know that there will always be a distinction between rich and poor, even in Communist Utopias, because the rich and the poor have always been opposing one another and have, over the millennia, reached a sort of natural equilibrium which prevents one from eliminating the other.  Thus, over the course of thousands of years, the poor’s standards of living have increased dramatically, with a similar increase realized by the elites.  Neither of those groups is likely to be the instrument of oppression in the United States of America.

For that dubious distinction we need to look to our Crusader Class.

So what is our “Crusader Class” and why are they so powerful?  Our Crusader Class is both abundant in number, and yet all of its power rests in the ultimate minority, that of a single person, combined with the ever increasing power of our unrestrained state.  These are not the government bureaucrats and politicians we so often target.

In terms of “dangerous to the liberties and freedoms of the American people”, politicians and bureaucrats are as nothing compared to the Crusader Class.

The Crusader Class is the foot soldier of the oppresive Nanny State machine.

The story which prompted this missive is the one about the Child Protective Services office in Ohio which took a kid from his mother because the state deemed him “too fat”.

 CLEVELAND (AP) — An Ohio third-grader who weighs more than 200 pounds has been taken from his family and placed into foster care after county social workers said his mother wasn’t doing enough to control his weight.

The Plain Dealer reports that the Cleveland 8-year-old is considered severely obese and at risk for such diseases as diabetes and hypertension.

The case is the first state officials can recall of a child being put in foster care strictly for a weight-related issue.

http://news.yahoo.com/ohio-puts-200-pound-third-grader-foster-care-191032515.html

So what happened?  The article states that some “social workers” have decided that this kid is too fat and needs to be removed from his mother, but we all know that’s not what really happened.  The media is covering for one of their pets in the Crusader Class.  Make no mistake, this all went down because one, single, individual case worker got mad at his mother and decided to take this kid.  The whole bureaucratic process required to remove the child had to be started by a single case worker.

There is no law giving this lone case worker the power to do this.  This is the first time anyone has ever tried such a thing.  This is a single person, a lonely Crusader, deciding that the state has the power to do this without a popular vote, an Act of Congress, a criminal investigation, nothing.  And that’s what makes the Crusader Class so freaking vicious:  They balloon the power and scope of the Federal Government on their own whim, for their own designs and ulterior motives without any restraints.

We like to lament our political bureaucrats and politicians, but these people are all spineless wimps, too scared of causing political waves which might produce negative repercussions for their careers to ever do any serious damage.  They never do, or say, anything.  That’s the whole point.  All of our laws are vaguely worded series of loopholes designed to give politicians as much wiggle room as possible in case the legislation becomes unpopular, or turns out to have dramatic unintended consequences.  Heck, our laws are written by lawyer-politicians who are trying to keep their lawyer buddies in business; they’re designed to say absolutely nothing at all so the details can be hammered out in court later.

These politicians and bureaucrats are the people who think the four words “General Welfare” and “Interstate Commerce” are more important than the 28 words in the 10th Amendment.  They exist purely to wordsmith nonsense, not to actually get their jackboots dirty holding people down.  That job falls to people like our lone case worker, the Crusader fighting for their own sense of morality and justice, and it’s entirely possible that they make their decisions based on nothing else.  These nannies and moral crusaders are the people who make up the new government regulations on the spot, who make the decisions which cost our country billions in deficit spending every year, and who keep our courts clogged, the low level government employee with an axe to grind is the most destructive force American liberty has ever encountered.

I broke 200 pounds in the 4th grade. Did it mean that my parents were neglecting me, or breaking the law? No, because I am a big man from a long line of big men and it was natural for me to be that large.

We’ve got a newspaper clipping from the early 1900s telling about how my great grandfather was arrested for getting drunk, punching a mule, and killing it.

My grandfather could carry an 8 cylinder engine block across the factory he worked in with nothing but his hands while other teams of men used a lift.

My dad is not a small man either.

Sure, I was pudgy in 4th grade, but once I entered puberty that all changed and by my 8th grade year, I was 6’1″, and the 215 lbs. didn’t look nearly as flabby when I was playing middle school football. Today, I’m 6’3″, 300 lbs. and after watching me hold 60 pounds at arms length for three or four minutes, the only person who would ever say I’m severely overweight is an overly educated idiot who was looking solely at a chart of recommendations…

The state social worker saying that this woman’s son being overweight, at his age, is justification for taking the kid away is absolute nonsense. How does this harpy know what this kid is going to look like as an adult?

Can this …  lady (sorry to all of you real ladies out there)… predict which ugly kid is going to remain ugly? Or which beautiful kid is going to remain the best looking kid in their class? Can she pick the class’s “Most likely to succeed” without a miss? Where did this case worker gain such otherworldly insight and fortune telling abilities?

People change as they grow, if they didn’t, you wouldn’t see shows like “Before They Were Stars” on TV.  For this Crusading Nanny to state that it constitutes a danger to this kid’s health for him to be chubby as a youngin’ and take him from his mother requires some form of high powered, Holy Inspired prognostication.

Apparently this lady has never heard of Charles Atlas.

But this is still old news.  Child Protectives Services have been pulling these stunts for a long time, all over the country.  They’ve taken 400 LDS kids away from their families at one time, on what was basically an anonymous tip.  Nothing is beyond the realm of possibility for them any more.  But the Crusader Class isn’t limited to just CPS.

I’m a forester.  I’ve worked as a logger, in sawmills, for both public and private institutions from the shores of Lake Superior to the swamps of East Central Arkansas.  I’ve run into these people in the DEQ, where they actively work to limit logging by ensnaring projects in lengthy permit processes, or through unfair inspections and selective enforcements.  I’ve seen the DNR shut down large tracts of land because the remote possibility existed than some endangered woodland critter might someday decide to cross it on a 1000 year migratory pattern, or some such nonsense.  I have watched low level government Crusaders shut down entire operations, send whole crews home for weeks, because they had a bug up their arse that morning and just decided to be impossible.

Or what about the Amish farmers being busted for selling their cow’s milk, or the picnic in Nevada where a government agent (one woman named Mary G. Oakes) forced people to pour bleach on the food they themselves had grown and wanted to eat, something men have been doing quite successfully for many thousands of years without a complete meltdown of the world’s economy or health, telling them that this food wasn’t even good enough for slopping their hogs?  These scenarios all had to start because one low level asshole felt insecure about his life and decided to make some other people suffer just to prove he wasn’t as weak as he feels himself to be.  It always takes a willing enforcer to start the indomitable movement of the bureaucracy, and the bureaucratic higher ups usually don’t get things moving themselves.

And there’s not much you can do about when you run into these people.  As of that moment, their individual decisions have the full force of the United States Government behind it, regardless of how things work out in court years down the road.  Our Crusader Class makes up the law on the spot, selectively, often with ulterior motives, rarely based on real science, and outside of the judges who might hear a resulting case, the rest of us have no say in the matter whatsoever.

These people cost our country BILLIONS of dollars every year.  Possibly trillions, but hey, our CBO is about as reliable as Pravda, so who could even know?  Suffice it to say, every time you hear about the wasteful spending from some obscure government agency with an alphabet soup name, it’s more than likely caused by some Crusader trying to right the world, to make it conform to their vision of how everything should be, and their willingness to blow as many taxpayer dollars as it takes to make their vision of the world become reality.

When we talk about limiting the size and scope of government, these are the people we need to target.  The politicians could hand out orders 24/7, but until a willing lackey follows them, they’re just so much blather and hot air.  Its the Crusaders who need to be repelled.

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