 On Point Vincent Carroll, editor of the editorial pages, writes his On Point column most weekdays. He is also an author and freelance writer. Reach Vincent Carroll at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com. |
Carroll: Rating role models
“I want to apologize to all the young kids out there for my immature acts . . . I offer my deepest apologies to everyone. I will redeem myself.”
— Michael Vick, at Monday’s press conference
You can bet we won’t ever hear Broncos running back Travis Henry make a similarly chastened apology. Yet who has done the most damage “to all the young kids out there”? Is it Vick, who funded an illegal dogfighting ring and helped kill a few of the animals? Or Henry, who fathered nine children by nine different women in various states and, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, has been ordered by courts to provide for them?
Dogfighting is illegal. Only a few foot-in-mouth geniuses such as the New York Knicks’ Stephon Marbury has dared to defend it publicly.
Even if organized dogfighting thrives in a few cultural backwaters, Vick’s humiliating saga has hardly added to its allure. No young man who once looked up to Vick can be remotely confused about what lessons to take from his downfall.
On the other hand, fathering children out of wedlock is very much legal and very much socially accepted. Indeed, it is accepted to the point that 37 percent of all babies — nearly a quarter among whites, 45 percent among Hispanics and nearly 70 percent among blacks — are born to single moms. Meanwhile, this epidemic of missing-in-action fathers is a social calamity, especially for lower-income America where the pattern is so much more common and the need for stable male role models so much more acute.
When Henry — or New England quarterback Tom Brady, for that matter, whose former girlfriend just had a baby — becomes a father with apparently little thought to helping to raise the child himself, he is a much more potent, pernicious role model than the discredited Vick.
“I know these are a lot of kids, and there might be some questions about it, but he’s a really committed father,” Henry’s lawyer breezily told the Atlanta paper. So committed, it seems, that one day he might even decide to act like one.
Competition busters
In their never-ending quest to locate threats to our peace and prosperity, Colorado legislators this year passed a law to prevent “the improper design of public domain landscape infrastructure by unauthorized, unqualified and incompetent persons.”
Its short title: the “Landscape Architects Professional Licensing Act.”
Perhaps you’re wondering how this state survived for so long without raising its drawbridge against rogue landscape architects. Maybe you can’t wait to see which occupations will be the next regulatory targets. Some of us, however, have a different reaction: Are states that require a license for many occupations really better places to live than those that require relatively few?
Last week the Los Angeles-based Reason Foundation issued a report ranking states on occupational licensing, and California topped the list with 177 such jobs. Colorado came in 41st with 69.
In scanning the list — which includes states such as Arkansas among the top five to require licenses and states like Washington among the least restrictive — you can’t help but conclude that the compulsion to mandate occupational licenses has no bearing whatever on quality of life or consumer protection with a few obvious exceptions such as medicine.
As Reason’s Adam B. Summers explains, what such laws actually do is to help “existing businesses keep out competition” while “restricting consumer choice.”
Reach Vincent Carroll at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com.