Jeanne Mandeville is the School of St. Mary’s health-room director for kindergarten-through-eighth-grade. Loved by parents and children alike, Ms. Mandeville has been known as the school’s Tooth-Fairy for many years because she helped students in the final stages of a tooth falling out. For the children, going to the school’s Tooth Fairy was a rite-of-passage; a badge of honor in a child’s growing up years. But not all liked Ms. Mandeville’s role as Tooth Fairy. A complaint was emailed to Susan Rogers, Executive Director of the State Board of Dentistry. [Tulsa World] In response to the complaint, Ms. Rogers warned that,
Maybe a kid avoids a dentist because they know she’ll (Mandeville) do it and it will be cheaper. She may not be able to evaluate things that need to be evaluated…There are so many diseases in your mouth that can happen…There’s biological waste there. Someone needs to ask where it’s going…A general citizen is not allowed to go pull several kids’ teeth in a row; that is illegal practice of dentistry. It’s technically a felony. [Tulsa World]
Ms. Rogers stated that the complaint will be investigated because “…the dentistry board has authority over anyone determined to be practicing dentistry, whether they know they are technically ‘practicing dentistry’ or not.” [Tulsa World]
The State of Oklahoma has approximately 175 agencies, boards, commissions, and offices charged with varying degrees of oversight ranging from abstracts and boll weevils to wheat, wildlife, and women. Although not all have the authority to have someone charged with a felony for violating its rules, many have the ability to interject their regulatory noses into the lives of citizens and their businesses. [Oklahoma Department of Libraries] Most have worthy and important roles to play in governing and providing for the wishes of the people, but something has gone wrong with the regulatory process.
As government involves itself with an ever expanding array of concerns for its citizens’ welfare, various occupations and professions are swept into the net of regulation. Few complaints are heard from these regulated professions and occupations whose prestige and bank balances are elevated as competition is restricted by limiting ease of entry and prohibition of competing services.
Government intrusion and over-regulation in the lives of its citizens have grown exponentially since the New Deal and beginning in 1936 with the court’s exceptionally expansive interpretation of the Constitution’s general welfare clause. Laws and regulations have become repressive tools of a nanny-state government interfering in the lives of a free people capable of making rational decisions without government interference.
But in the larger picture of government interference in the lives of a free people, over-regulation of businesses, occupations, and professions is only one facet of the general trend toward organizing a socialistic society. This trend is the direct result of the rapid abandonment over the last three-quarters of a century of the Christian worldview upon which the nation was founded. In its place has risen the humanistic worldview which has been embraced by the institutions of American life and most of its leadership. Christianity leads to truth and freedom. Humanism leads to relativism and socialism whose ultimate end is totalitarianism.
Writing about America 180 years ago, Alexis de Tocqueville described this new type of despotism that would eventually threaten democracies.
I see an innumerable crowd of men, all alike and equal, turned in upon themselves in a restless search for those petty, vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls…Above these men stands an immense and protective power which alone is responsible for looking after their enjoyments and watching over their destiny. It is absolute, meticulous, ordered, provident, and kindly disposed. It would be like a fatherly authority, if, father-like, its aim were to prepare men for manhood, but it seeks only to keep them in perpetual childhood; it prefers its citizens to enjoy themselves provided they have only enjoyment in mind. It works readily for their happiness but it wishes to be the only provider and judge of it. It provides their security, anticipates and guarantees their needs, supplies their pleasures, directs their principal concerns, manages their industry, regulates their estates, divides their inheritances. Why can it not remove from them entirely the bother of thinking and the troubles of life?…
Thus, the ruling power, having taken each citizen one by one into its powerful grasp and having molded him to its own liking, spreads it arms over the whole of society, covering the surface of social life with a network of petty, complicated, detailed, and uniform rules through which even the most original minds and the most energetic of spirits cannot reach the light in order to rise above the crowd. [Tocqueville]
Tocqueville did not have a name for this new despotism, but today we know it as socialism. Socialism is humanism’s template for organizing society and is inherently domineering, restrictive, and restraining in the details of life and ultimately leads to loss of freedom.
The political/intellectual/bureaucratic class will deny they are socialists or that their actions are socialistic by nature. However, their denials appear similar to those of the small boy who denies he ate the chocolate chip cookies even though his face and hands are smeared with chocolate and cookie crumbs. Hmmm. Children, teeth, chocolate…cavities? I’m sure the Oklahoma Board of Dentistry will have something to say about this.
Larry G. Johnson
Sources:
Dylan Goforth, “Tooth Fairy to be extracted,” Tulsa World, March 22, 2014, A-1.
“Oklahoma State Agencies, Boards, and Commissions,” Oklahoma Department of Libraries, September 2, 2013. http://www.odl.state.ok.us/sginfo/abc/index.htm (accessed March 24, 2014).
Alexis De Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Gerald E. Bevan, Trans., (London, England: Penguin Books, 2003), pp. 805-806.
