Just about every week County Executive Marc Elrich sends out a video message. Almost all of these messages pertain to policy, commemorations, awards, meetings, and the CE’s outs-and-abouts.
The message from September 1 was quite different. He gave us a view of his home, his gardening, and to some extent his personal life.
Mr. Elrich does embody, certainly to a respectable extent, the values he champions. In the video he points out the solar panels he installed, the electric vehicle he purchased, and a healthy garden sprouting tomatoes and leafy greens that makes me jealous because the only leafy green I can grow is crabgrass.
I was, and still am, struck at this view into one of our elected officials’ personal interests and lifestyle. Around voting day we get a picture of them with their partners and/or children, but that’s about it. Why did he make this extraordinary, unusual, and almost intimate video?
I got a clue by playing the video 10 million times (just joking, 11 million times) and identifying a few key phrases.
- “I tell people you ought to do this and you ought to do that.”
- “It’s hard to tell other people to do something and not do it yourself.”
- “Everybody should try this.”
We all have aspirations, world-views, and social priorities. We all have a desire to make the world better, to serve the poor, and give our children a better opportunity than what we had. We are so sure of our core values that we use modal verbs, telling our friends “you should get more exercise” or “you ought to give back one day a month to SOME.” That’s a very human behavior.
What we don’t do is force our friends to go to the gym and run for 50 minutes on the treadmill, and we don’t force our relatives to work in the soup kitchen under the threat of fines and jail.
Mr. Elrich’s priorities are absolutely valid—but they are valid for him alone. What isn’t valid is using his office to force his values onto everyone else. The tax credit he exercised to buy the solar panels is financed either by someone else’s taxes or by our children’s future burden to pay down today’s federal debt. We are paying property taxes so the county can install vehicle charging stations (see related article) or purchase electric school buses from a company that went bankrupt. There is no reason why we should pay for infrastructure for his vision of living green, not to mention for his own transportation needs.
It’s not that Mr. Elrich’s personal priorities are “wrong.” What’s wrong is that he and the other progressives are using coercion to have us subscribe and materially support their social views.
Related posts:
CM Will Jawando’s Home Could Host an Acre of Solar Panels – With Room to Spare
More Tire Toxicity in MoCo? Why the “EV Push” by MoCo is a Push for More Toxic Tire Pollutants in Our Local Ecosystem
Livin’ Large: MoCo Young Democrats Hosting “Paint the County Blue” Fundraiser at 3,000 Sq Foot, 2 Acre Estate of CM Dawn Luedtke