| | "It was used as a tool to teach the glories of the proletariat work ethic to school children, along with 'trade is icky, and so are the vegetables at the supermarket.'"
I saw nothing in the White House puffery about a "proletarian work ethic," whatever that is. (Work on a physical task in front of you, with your own hands, can indeed be satisfying. What exactly is wrong about that?)
Nor about "trade is icky," although, yes, Mrs. O was praising knowing more about what you eat and where it comes from. (The fad for overpaying to be "organic" is self-correcting, like much else, in harder times.)
If that's dangerous or duplicitous, then the Obamas have lots of company, because such gardening is on a pronounced upswing, even in this nascent Depression. Burpee Seeds is doing record business, as are garden-supply centers. If anything, the White House is "leading" something it didn't start, hardly a new phenomenon.
Nothing is directed here at Teresa in particular, or anyone else, but I have to ask:
Doesn't carping about things like this add greatly to the broader perception of Objectivist types as being incessant moralizers? Isn't anything — Peikoff's absurd fulminations in "Fact and Value" notwithstanding — part of the realm of the morally optional?
Let the Obamas have their fresh tomatoes. The Carters had their solar panels. Nixon had his guards costumed as if in an operetta. Kennedy had a swimming pool, since removed. These are small things, really. To allude to an insight of Rand's character Leo, let's talk about their lions of destruction, not their lice.
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