Nick Covington is an Iowa parent who taught high school social studies for ten years.

As I round the corner on 40, it’s been humbling and heartbreaking to reflect on how much of my life experience has been defined by global historic change: a child of the 1990s growing up at the peak of American exceptionalism, bookended by the worst attack on the United States since Pearl Harbor, graduating college during the worst recession since the Great Depression, and having my own young children attend school during the worst viral outbreak since the flu epidemic a century ago.

However, regardless of which epochal change I’ve lived through, there has been at least one constant: lectures from the party of “personal responsibility.” 

Their argument was that when Big Government creates dependence, you’ll come to it to solve all of your problems! So when a generation of Millennials sought student loan relief because the Great Recession trapped us in compounding repayment programs, we were told we should have become plumbers instead of chasing fancy degrees from public universities.

As adults, when the sticker shock of daycare costs set in, we were told we shouldn’t have kids we couldn’t afford and it wasn’t fair to subsidize other people’s children.

Now approaching middle age, we’re told lifestyle choices are the primary cause of Iowa’s rising cancer rates—we just smoke and drink more than any other state, you see—and unlike our peers in Canada and around the world, the United States can’t have a universal single-payer healthcare system because, well, it’s your personal responsibility to decide whether or not you and your kids and your aging parents get sick. 

But sometime in the last decade, the party of “personal responsibility” put Big Government on speed dial. Like the busybodies on your neighborhood Facebook page, there isn’t a mild annoyance that they won’t call Big Government to step in to address:

• If you don’t like what other people’s kids wear to school, don’t just mind your own business, Big Government will tell those kids to pull their pants up.

• If there’s a book somewhere on a library shelf that you’ve never read but know you don’t like, don’t talk to your own kids about it, just let Big Government parent for you.

• If you think the red lights on wind turbines are annoying, don’t use human free will to direct your eyeballs in any other direction, get Big Government to hit the switch just for you.

• If you get upset about what people say online about public figures, instead of blocking them and deleting your X account (which you should do anyway), tell Big Government to take away their teaching license.

• If you’re mad that other people are gay and transgender, instead of living your life because it doesn’t impact you at all, Big Government will make sure nobody can ever talk about it in public where your kids may hear about it.

• And if you want money to send your kid to an exclusive religious private school, that’s not on you to budget for, Big Government will pay the tab!

Instead of using state government to address systemic issues that impact all of us, from water quality to the condition of roads and bridges, the party of personal responsibility has a dependency problem of its own: they’ve turned Big Government into Big Daddy, and there isn’t anything they won’t tattle to Daddy about.