Are We All Anti-Statists Now?

Maybe it's not just the loony, right-wing Tea Partiers (unfair characterization courtesy of MSNBC and the NYT) who have the feeling that creepy, heavy-handed government interference isn't serving them or their communities.

Health-care workers, many of whom are unionized and not generally renowned for their conservative bent, are objecting to mandatory swine-flu vaccinations:

"I don't want to be a guinea pig," said Orne Banks-Hopkins, 55, a clerical worker at Washington Hospital Center. "I don't think I should be forced to take something I don't want to take." ...

"I have a problem with being mandated to put something in my body," said Sandra Morales, a labor and delivery nurse at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City. ...

"As a general rule, medicine should be a voluntary occupation," said George Annas, a Boston University bioethicist. "Once you start requiring doctors to get it, doctors are going to think it's reasonable to make patients get it. It starts you down that mandatory route, and I don't think we want to go there."

Unions themselves, including nurses' associations and the SEIU, are speaking out against the mandatory vaccines on the grounds of workers' rights, as nurses and other health-care workers take to New York's capital in protest.

Also in New York, an environmentalist mom who likes her son to bike to school for the earth and his health, is running afoul of the nanny state:

Seventh-grader Adam Marino is getting a firsthand lesson in civil disobedience.

The 12-year-old and his mother, Janette Kaddo Marino, are defying Saratoga Springs school policy by biking to Maple Avenue Middle School on Route 9. The Jackson Street residents pedal more than four miles together each way to the middle school on nice days despite being told not to by school officials and police.

"I guess you can say that we continue to do what we feel is our right," Kaddo Marino said recently. "We feel strongly we have a right to get to school by a mode of transportation we deem appropriate."

Check out the creep factor, here:

On the night before classes started, school authorities called parents to say that walking and biking to school would not be tolerated.

When the pair stuck with their plan, they were met by school administrators and a state trooper, who emphasized that biking was prohibited, Kaddo Marino said.

A state trooper to compel a seventh-grader to stop riding his Huffy? In response, the community put together a group of protest riders to accompany the Marinos. If you take the time to read to the end of the article, you'll find that in true nanny-state fashion, the school had banned biking for safety reasons despite the fact that there have been no bike accidents on the road to the school in three years. The school system is thinking of rescinding the policy, probably more on the strength of the argument that the Marinos want to save the earth than the stronger argument that parents have the right to send their children to school exactly as they please, but nonetheless. (Perhaps all arguments against big government should be made in the service of politically correct crusades.)

Meanwhile in Michigan, the state's investigation of a woman who babysits her neighbors' kids while they wait for the bus each morning, is making clear how big government can undermine a community's efforts to act like, well, a community.

Each day before the school bus comes to pick up the neighborhood's children, Lisa Snyder did a favor for three of her fellow moms, welcoming their children into her home for about an hour before they left for school.

Regulators who oversee child care, however, don't see it as charity. Days after the start of the new school year, Snyder received a letter from the Michigan Department of Human Services warning her that if she continued, she'd be violating a law aimed at the operators of unlicensed day care centers.

As Instapundit put it: "If people are neighborly, they need the state less. This cannot be permitted."