Saving You from Yourself, One Right at a Time
IF THERE’S ONE THING that liberals, conservatives, communists, capitalists, vegetarians, teetotalers, pet lovers, bureaucrats, Republicans, and Democrats can all agree on, it’s telling you how you should live your life.
From punitive “sin” taxes and laws dictating your house’s paint color to rules and regulations aimed at smoking, drinking, dancing, eating, washing your car in the driveway, keeping a cat in your store, smiling for your driver’s license, or playing tag, you can rest assured that local, state, and federal governments are more ready, willing, and able than ever to make decisions for you. Laws and taxes are passed in the name of improving community standards, keeping you safe and healthy, maintaining order, spreading morality, or because somebody somewhere complained, died, or had their feelings hurt.
Even if a seemingly trivial ban on the sale of cheap cigars doesn’t affect you directly, eventually one of these mini-tyrannies will. Before you know it you’ll find yourself breaking the law because your pants are too baggy, you didn’t wear a helmet for soccer, you went trick-or-treating when you were 12 or—perish the thought!—you sat on a milk crate.
Where’s all this madness coming from?
Good intentions. A great deal of the plague of the Nanny State stems from the desire of various individuals to make the world a better place for everyone—the proverbial “greater good” argument that progressives so often recite. Of course, “a better place” means different things to different people—and that’s a big part of the problem. Fidel Castro thinks he made Cuba “better” but there are a few folks who might disagree.
LIVE FREE, OR . . .
. . . live in Concord, New Hampshire, where a manicurist received a 30-day suspended sentence for not having a license to give a manicure.
. . . live in Farmers Branch, Texas, where some residents have asked the city to forbid “bold” colors on houses.
. . . live in Washington, where state officials banned washing your car in the driveway.
. . . live in Arizona, where a restaurant was harassed by officials because it allowed patrons to dance.
. . . live in some poor areas of Los Angeles, where fast-food restaurants are off-limits.
. . . live in Belmont, California, where you can no longer smoke in your own apartment.
. . . live in New York City, where officials want corner-store owners to get rid of their cats.
. . . live in Texas, where admitting what a vibrator is for is illegal.
. . . live in Indiana, where you’re not allowed to smile for your driver’s license.
. . . live in Virginia, where some students can no longer play tag.
. . . . live in Philadelphia, where the sale of individual “blunt” cigars is banned.
. . . . live in small-town Louisiana, where baggy, sagging pants are banned.
Nanny State-ism often starts with a universally accepted, noble idea that on its own seems quite hard to argue with. For example: We must stop drunk drivers. They’re a menace. They kill thousands of people a year and put innocent families at risk. So you say, Heck yeah! We need to get rid of drunk drivers.
But how?
In the Nanny State, the answer is “By law, of course!” Using legislation to “solve” an issue at the expense of some of your personal liberty. And laws, as we all know, are always subject to “mission creep.”
First they came for the cigarettes, and I didn’t speak up because I’m not a smoker.
Then they came for the trans fats and I didn’t speak up because I’m a healthy eater.
Then they came for the foie gras and I didn’t speak up because it’s French.
Then they came for the ice cream and I didn’t speak up because I’m lactose intolerant.
And then they came for the rib eye. And by that time there was no one left to speak up because all of the restaurants were already out of business.
The United States was founded on a few simple principles, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness being some of my favorites. I’ll leave life and happiness for another time, but for now I want to deal with liberty since that’s something the Nanny State movement isn’t quite able to fully comprehend.
The principle of “liberty” puts each of us in control of making the decisions that will affect our lives, for better or for worse. Thomas Jefferson put it like this:
“It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”
In other words, you and I are free to think as we like and do as we like—as long as doing so doesn’t harm anyone else. Live and let live. Simple, right? Not anymore. Not with the State involved.
Punitive taxes on cigarettes resulted in smuggling and a thriving black market that harmed local, legitimate businesses.
The banning of alcohol from legitimate sources meant criminals like Al Capone made millions and millions from the bootlegging and sale of it during Prohibition.
The number of DUIs increased after smoking was banned in bars because smokers drove to jurisdictions that did not have smoking ordinances.
Food-handling legislation in Indiana effectively rendered the average potluck dinner illegal.
A law punishing legislators for passing stupid laws resulted in better politicians being elected. (Just kidding, that’ll never happen.)
Back to drunk driving. The Nanny State approach is to use the police department to set up roadblocks and spot-checks (which, as a fun side benefit, helps to concentrate law enforcement personnel in one area, thereby creating traffic jams and penalizing innocent people who are merely trying to get home from work). Then, the ideas become more intrusive and inane: banning the sale of cold beer, banning the sale of fruity adult drinks, dictating the exact composition of a martini, watering down beer, making establishments and their workers liable for your getting drunk, demanding “Happy Hour” be renamed and, the Grand Prize: requiring ignition-locking breathalyzers in all cars—an idea promoted by Nanny Statist New York assemblyman Felix Ortiz.
Some hospitals collected DNA samples from newborns so they could be screened for genetic predispositions to diseases. Sounds like a good idea . . . until mission creep kicked in and suddenly the government was saying, “Hey, why don’t we hold on to those samples for . . . like, forever?”
Does it matter if you don’t drink at all or that you’d never, ever consider driving under the influence? Nope. It’ll be a round of breathalyzers for everyone.
Unrelated A.D.D Moment: I wonder if scientists will ever discover a gene that makes people prone to revolutionary thought. If so, I wonder if that will show up in DNA samples. And, if so, I wonder if those babies will ever live life outside a prison cell?
Completely unrelated A.D.D. Moment:
I should call Steven Spielberg and tell him I have the premise for Minority Report II.
Now, if you make the really, really terrible decision to get liquored up and hit the road, you deserve to be severely punished. Choosing to call a friend or a cab is your personal responsibility, and, until recently, each of us used to be personally responsible for it. But not anymore. Now the government, assisted by a wide assortment of legislation-happy enablers, has decided that it knows what’s best for you.
And that’s the problem: In their effort to make the world better, Nannies enact nuisance laws that undermine our liberty, punish everyone equally—and make our world worse.
Candy Lightner founded Mothers Against Drunk Driving in 1980 after her daughter was killed by a drunk driver, but she ended up leaving her own organization. Why? Mission creep. Here’s what she said:
“[MADD has] become far more neo-prohibitionist than I had ever wanted or envisioned . . . I didn’t start MADD to deal with alcohol. I started MADD to deal with the issue of drunk driving.”
She started an organization for a noble purpose but was incapable of stopping it from expanding its mission far beyond her intentions. As MADD transitioned from fighting drunk driving to more of a zero-tolerance stance on alcohol, she became disenchanted.
MADD is now one of the staunchest supporters of ignition-interlock (aka Prohignition) legislation in the country. They’ve helped pass laws requiring installation of the technology in the cars of first-time DUI offenders—but that was just the beginning. An article in USA Today said the group doesn’t currently support installing the technology in all cars. Not because they don’t agree with the concept, but because they don’t believe in the technology. Yet. In other words, baby steps.
Here’s something that Nanny Staters don’t like to talk about: The largest percentage of vehicular deaths related to alcohol are from repeat offenders. Therefore, the commonsense solution is that you lose your license after a second DUI. Forever. Problem solved.
Deter bad behavior by targeting every offender, not every person. But ideas like ignition-interlock reverse that. They target everyone with the hope of catching the proverbial drunk needle in the haystack.
Drunk drivers? Let’s make cars more expensive and force everyone to blow into their dashboard to go to the bank.
Millions of law-abiding citizens wind up penalized for the irresponsibility of a relative few. And, of course, the tiny percentage of repeat offenders the technology is actually meant for will find a way to get around it anyway.
Nanny State legislation unrealistically assumes that 100 percent of human behavior can be corrected. Even in a scary totalitarian state like China, a place that has over 60 crimes punishable by death, you will still find people who will break the law. Why is that? If their uncon-tested, all-powerful government can create any law they want to outlaw any behavior they deem undesirable, then why does China have a need for prisons or their terrifying mobile execution vans?
Never underestimate an alcoholic’s resourcefulness. Believe me, I know. One man with the interlock installed on his car simply rented a car that didn’t have it. Another repeat offender figured out that the best way around it was to use a balloon filled with (someone else’s) alcohol-free breath.
The answer is simple: No matter what we do, no matter what laws we enact or what creative punishments we invent, there will always be people who will make bad decisions. It’s human nature, but, more important, it’s the price we pay for liberty.
What’s truly alarming is that as those liberties are quietly being chipped away at by federal laws, overzealous city councils, school boards, lobbyists, activist groups, and power-hungry politicians, we do nothing about it. We shrug our shoulders as officials frighten us with scary (often manipulated) statistics and we applaud draconian legislation because we’re told it saves lives, protects the children, keeps other people from being annoyed, or any of the myriad excuses the Nanny Staters give. They’ve learned that it’s easier to slowly whittle down your rights rather than seize them en masse—which tends to cause people to notice.
Nannies are truly a bipartisan, eclectic, cross-cultural group. From the pale-faced vegans of PETA working to keep live lobsters out of supermarkets, to the God-fearing folks of Alabama who can’t stay out of your bedroom, to concerned college administrators devising Orwellian speech-and-conduct codes for students, and bored bureaucrats who simply need to justify their paychecks—it’s nearly impossible to pick a Nanny Stater out of a lineup.
Of course, they do all have one thing in common: They’re all idiots. Here’s what you might face if you ever have the opportunity to argue with one of them . . .
So let me get this straight . . . The government can’t efficiently run the post office, the school system, or the DMV. It can’t police our borders properly, it failed to prevent the S&L crisis, 9/11, the dot-com bubble, the housing collapse, and the credit crisis. Its IRS created a fully incomprehensible 78,000-page tax code and its Congress writes bills so long that no one has time to read them—but I should still trust it to make personal decisions for me against my will?
I think I’ll pass.
The fatty-fat-fatsos of America are a good example of how this works in practice. We can all agree that, in most cases, saying “It’s glandular!” just doesn’t cut it anymore. Obesity is, by and large, caused by someone making bad decisions like eating too many unhealthy foods, sucking down sodas, and using their Nintendo Wii for exercise.
But the government ignores those commonsense explanations and instead assumes that you’re a moron. They believe that you must have no idea that a 64-ounce fountain soda contains an unhealthy amount of sugar or that a Hardee’s Monster Thickburger with bacon, cheese, burger patty, more bacon, more cheese, another patty, more cheese, more bacon and mayonnaise isn’t healthy. And you can’t possibly be expected to instinctively know that coffee is hot or that a venti-triple-caffmega-lard-mocha-choco-rama has lots of calories.
Kudos to David Harsanyi’s great book Nanny State for letting us know that the Hardees Monster Thickburger not only exists, but has . . .
1420 calories, 108g fat, 43g saturated fat, 230mg cholesterol, 2770mg sodium, 46g carbohydrates and 100 percent deliciousness.
After unilaterally deciding that you’re an idiot, the government then decides that it must act to protect you from yourself. The result is warning labels, calorie counts, bans on advertising, purging chips and soda from schools, restrictions on portion sizes, sin taxes, suspending honor students who dare bring candy to school—you name it. Of course, the easiest and least intrusive thing to do would be to simply say: Hey, buddy, if you eat too much junk food, you’ll get fat—but the very first thing the Nanny State ever outlawed was common sense.
I’ve been turning more and more libertarian lately and that side of me would really like to know why people can’t just get as fat as they want. Sure, it may not be good for you, and, yes, I don’t want to see you in a Speedo on the beach, but it is still YOUR life, isn’t it?
Look, if you decide that 45 great years eating nothing but pizza and ice cream, watching movies, and making fun of joggers is better than 85 mediocre years eating salads on the treadmill, who am I to second-guess you? Like Thomas Jefferson said, it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg . . . though I will grant you that Jefferson didn’t have to deal with the Speedo thing. Or the weight limits on elevators. Or the middle seat on an airplane. Or TLC documentaries with names like The Half-Ton Man.
But, most importantly, Jefferson didn’t have to deal with the imminent adoption of government-run health care. Nowadays, when your irresponsibility means your fat has grown into the fabric of your couch, resulting in emergency crews having to knock down your wall, load you on a flatbed, and get you to a hospital to staple your stomach at taxpayer expense—guess who pays? We all do. And that picks my pocket . . . and makes me want to break your leg.
Our Founding Fathers never intended for government to start micro-managing our lives. That’s why the Constitution is a four-page document that primarily lays out what the government can’t do to individuals, rather than what it can do. But Nanny Staters act as though it’s the complete opposite by trying to get legislation passed that prohibits individual rights instead while expanding governmental authority.
You’re right, we do have that responsibility—but most Nanny State laws aimed at protecting our children do a lousy job of it. We have children who can’t play tag or dodgeball for fear they might get hurt. We have teachers who can’t correct with red ink because it might hurt kids’ feelings. We have soda machines stocked with water because soda might make kids fat. We have spanking bans, playgrounds without slides or swings, and a whole host of other laws eager to protect our children. So our kids are much safer now, right? Of course not. In fact, it’s just the opposite.
Psychologists have been telling us that our over-protected, over-coddled children are unprepared to deal with the realities of life because they’ve never experienced them. They are more prone to feeling angry and confused when faced with problems because they’ve never failed. They’re technically “safer” from bruises and scrapes than any generation in history, but they’re also more likely to be anxious and unhappy.
NAME THAT FOUNDING FATHER!
Name the founding father who said:
“Though liberty is a blessing, it must be managed closely, for only the collective can truly know what is best for the individual.”
30 Years of Progress?
It seems as though we love our kids so much that we’re protecting them to death. Remember: Bad things happen all the time—and we learn from them . . . or at least we would if we were allowed to.
One of the most frequent questions when it comes to people’s faith is: Why do bad things happen to good people? Well, the simple answer is because our Creator isn’t a Nanny. I believe that our Creator allows violence, death, and destruction to happen because He knows that the implications of stopping those things are far worse. I only wish the State would heed His advice. Unfortunately, most of our politicians believe they’re smarter than He is.
Oh, well, if it’s for the greater good then by all means, seize my freedom and strip me of my rights! Big round of applause for The Greater Good, everybody—it’ll be here all week, tip your waiters!
The truth is that there are lots of things we could do for the greater good . . . but we don’t. Sterilizing Paris Hilton before she has a chance to make babies with some goateed moron in a wool hat would definitely be for the greater good. Stopping young kids from playing violent video games so they would instead read a book would be for the greater good. Forcing you to eat broccoli with every meal would be for the greater good. Ceding control of Berkeley, California, to Europe would be for the greater good.
News headlines that compelled us to take (pointless) action.
Actually, no. The 400,000 included those who may have been fat,
but died of other diseases. Like old age. Actual toll: 25,000.
If you are stupid enough to leave a child unattended in a
tub full of water, then yes, lots of bad things could happen.
But we don’t do any of that because, among other things, they would all result in a severe violation of our rights as American citizens. Like it or not, Paris Hilton has the right to reproduce, no matter how awful the concept. You have the right to let your kid play Grand Theft Auto IV instead of improving their brain. You have a right to eat all the good stuff and leave the broccoli untouched. And, unfortunately, the people of Berkeley have a right to be American (or anti-American) citizens.
A lot of Nanny State legislation that stems from the “greater good” argument relies on scary statistics. Remember saccharin? A laboratory test conducted in 1977 tied the artificial sweetener to bladder cancer in rats. People freaked out. Politicians demanded action. Labels were made. Warnings were given. Saccharin was maligned.
But there was just one small problem: The test was conducted on rats under conditions that no human would ever experience unless they drank 800 diet sodas . . . a day. A day. Not even I could pull that off—and I love my fake sugar.
As always, unwarranted hysteria was quickly followed by unnecessary laws. If it’s not saccharin, it’s trans fats, bacon, milk, salt, nonpasteurized cheese, red wine, Tylenol, or eggs. Different day, different boogeyman, same predictable reaction.
Did you know there’s a silent killer in your house that claims the lives of around 75 children a year? Terrible, I know. We need to do something about it for the greater good. We need legislation. That’s why I’m proposing we immediately eliminate all bathtubs. They’re far more dangerous than saccharin. Or lawn darts.
The Prohibition Amendment was a progressive reform, passed by the teetotalers—for, of course, the greater good. After all, alcohol was a vice. People got drunk and did bad things. Some even ruined their lives—a concept that, as a recovering alcoholic, I can definitely relate to. Banning it would be for the greater good, right?
Right?
The problem—and you’ll find this happens a lot with idealistic Nanny State legislation—is that the 18th Amendment ignored one very important fact: Lots of people liked alcohol. Yeah, it’s true! And lots of other people REALLY liked alcohol. They still do! In fact, December 5, 2008, was the 75th anniversary of “Repeal Day” and it was widely celebrated by bar owners and patrons alike. You can be pretty sure a law was bad when, three-quarters of a century later, people are still toasting its demise.
The progressives’ attempt at prohibition failed. Instead of creating a sober utopia where everything was sunshine and lollipops, it drove the entire industry, along with all of its customers, underground. Legitimate businesses closed or became speakeasies. Legitimate, licensed breweries and distilleries closed and gave way to fly-by-night bathtub-hooch operations that weren’t subject to any kind of regulation. In one Prohibition year in Philadelphia at least 875 people died from alcohol-related incidents—mostly connected to bad moonshine. Over 4,100 died nationwide in 1925! And all the alcohol-related tax revenue that the government used to collect? Much of it went straight into the pockets of tax-evading organized criminals like Al Capone, as well as countless opportunists, entrepreneurs, and bootleggers—possibly including Joseph Kennedy, Sr. (whose resulting political dynasty still plagues us today).
The 18th Amendment banned alcohol right on the heels of the 16th Amendment, which gave us the federal income tax. Talk about bad timing.
During the nearly 14 years of Prohibition, people who wanted to drink still did so, but legitimate business owners suffered. Organized crime flourished and the murder rate in large cities increased nearly 80 percent.
But at least it was all for the greater good.
Ahhhh, there’s nothing like the good old government stepping in to punish you financially for something you like to do. Nannies cannot comprehend that people who drink like to drink and people who smoke like to smoke—that’s why they spend so much of their money buying cigarettes. You can run all the commercials you want showing people talking through a hole in their trachea or doctors scraping goo out of diseased aortas—people are still going to buy their smokes.
In New York City, cigarettes are now in the vicinity of $10–$11 a pack. Is that because they’re shipped to New York in private jets and limousines? Are they wrapped in velvet and gold foil? Does every pack come with a small, nearly flawless diamond?
No. It’s because every pack comes with something else: a whopping $2.00 in punitive taxes. Wait, did I say $2.00? I meant $3.25. No, sorry, I meant $4.00. Actually, hang on, I was wrong—it’s still going higher and now President Obama has even tacked on his own tax.
But people keep smoking anyway.
When the price of a pack of cigarettes is astronomical compared to the average price across the U.S., something crazy happens: Smokers buy their cigarettes from somewhere cheaper. In 2007, one in three cigarettes sold in New York had been illegally channeled, without tax, through New York’s Indian reservations. That’s at least $1 billion in lost state tax revenue. Bootleggers and online vendors have pulled in another $500 million.
THE LAW OF UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES . . .
All of that spells really bad news for the struggling guy running the legitimate corner convenience store. One told The New York Times that his cigarette sales were down 75 percent. “In two or three months, you won’t see me here,” he said. “I should never have gotten into this business.” Another said that, if not for the lottery, he’d have no morning traffic at all.
Black markets mean that local and state budgets lose out as well. And here’s another bonus: At least three individuals accused of funding terrorists overseas got their funds from trafficking bootleg cigarettes here in the good ol’ U.S. of A. Way to go, helpful government bureaucrats!
Don’t get me wrong, I hate cigarettes. Nasty, stinky, smelly habit. But think about this logically for a moment. If I’m a smoker who owns a restaurant, and I want my patrons to be able to enjoy a smoke as well, I’m out of luck in most places.
Why do people who’ll probably never set foot in my establishment get to tell me how to run my business? After all, I’m a businessman who is putting my own time and money on the line in the hope of making a profit by accommodating my customers. If people aren’t coming to my restaurant, then let me make the decision to toss out the ashtrays. Or to hire mimes. Or to put an inflatable-balloon ad on my roof (except in Houston, where that’s banned). If I’m a bad businessman and I ignore the demands of my customers and refuse to innovate, then I deserve to go out of business, or at least to get a nice interest rate on a loan from the federal government.
Smoking bans must present a terrible quandary for the government. On one hand they would love to ban all smoking because it’s evil and bad for you, but on the other hand they make a ton of money from taxes and lobbyists. I really feel for them.
There are 490 calories in a Starbucks snowman cookie.
Smoking is not good for you.
You should not leave your infant child alone in a bathtub.
You should not use a hair dryer in the bathtub.
You should not use a hair dryer on an infant child in a bathtub.
Coffee is hot.
You should not iron a plastic shower curtain.
You should not put a toilet brush in your mouth.
You should remove your child before folding up the stroller.
You should not touch a chainsaw blade if it’s moving.
Our finger-wagging politicians could learn a thing or two from the Strawberry Street Café in Richmond, Virginia. They didn’t get rid of their smoking section because meddling Nanny Staters told them to. They got rid of it because a poll of customers and staff revealed that over 70 percent of them wanted a smoke-free establishment. Many cited health concerns, but at least one waiter said the motivation was financial: the smoking section was never busy.
That’s exactly how it should work. If the poll had gone the other way, there’s no reason a bitter Nanny State complainocrat should deny them the right to be an all-smoking, all-cigar, all–Barry Manilow, all-the-time dining establishment. There are plenty of other places for the nonsmoking crowd to go. As the restaurant’s owner told a reporter, “We did what was right for us at Strawberry Street Café. No one wants government in their business.” Amen to that.
Okay, what about AIDS, then? It costs us a fortune and transmission would cease almost entirely if people abstained from sex. No more sex allowed!
Obesity costs us $93 billion a year. Fat people take more sick days off from work, weigh down their cars (which uses more gasoline), and many wind up with diabetes or heart disease. Let’s ban fast food and sofas and require gym attendance.
Wait a second! Cars result in a tremendous number of accidents . . . I don’t want to pay for them either. Let’s ban cars!
But there is good news. Kind of. A study showed that by living longer, healthy people can accumulate more health-care costs over their life spans than a smoker. In other words, healthy people are a drain on our health-care system! Ban the healthy!
The big government Nanny Staters are always looking out for our own good—unless it’s in their own best interest. Let’s look to the Live Free or Die state of New Hampshire for an example. It’s the only state left in the Union that has the common sense to let drivers exercise their common sense by deciding whether or not to buckle up. A round of applause for that—but don’t clap for too long because, sadly, even New Hampshire isn’t immune from Nanny State–itis.
Two New Hampshire men found themselves facing felony charges and jail time because they operated video poker machines at their local VFW post. The outraged authorities made sure to point out that these terrible men and their evil machines were guilty of helping irresponsible people divert money away from their loving families.
Fair enough, gambling can do that.
But the kicker here is that the state doesn’t have a problem with gambling so long as they are involved in it. The same people who took the moral high ground on video poker are able to find the low ground when it comes to games like Megabucks, Powerball, Hot Lotto, Pick 3, Pick 4, Weekly Grand, Paycheck, and a variety of scratch tickets that range from $1 to $30 a pop. And they don’t mind dog racing, horse racing, or casino ships either. In fact, gambling seems to be fine so long as the state gets its slice of the action.
I guess that Nanny State laws aren’t always meant to ban vices, sometimes they’re also meant to protect the state’s monopoly on them.
Actually, seat-belt laws haven’t saved anyone’s life—those who wear seat belts save their own lives. You simply can’t legislate personal responsibility and intelligence. But, just for the sake of argument, let’s assume you’re 100 percent right: seat-belt laws save lives. So what? A 5 mph speed limit would save even more lives, as would staying locked in your house all day. Banning yard work (count me as a supporter), hang-gliding, and swimming pools would save lives as well. But where do we draw the line? At what point do we decide that we want Lady Liberty to wag her finger in our face whenever we opt to do something that can cause ourselves harm?
You should wear a seat belt, they do save lives—but while you could argue that it’s the government’s job to inform you of that, it’s not their job to penalize those who don’t play along—like they did to a Texas mother who was stopped and arrested in front of her children because she was unbuckled. However, it is their job to solve murders, hunt down criminals, and protect the public—all things that get harder to do when you’re cuffing renegade soccer moms.
Don’t agree with me? Perhaps we need a law that will require you to see things my way.
Nope, sorry. And here’s why: I mentioned mission creep earlier and the seat-belt law is a great example of it. Originally, it was a “secondary” law, meaning you couldn’t be pulled over specifically for not buckling up, they had to stop you for another reason. But now, some states have made seat-belt laws “primary”—allowing the police to stop you solely for seat-belt infractions.
As I write this, several more states are considering the same thing. Is it because they love you so much it hurts? Not really, it’s because their budgets are in the red. Ohio estimates that pulling drivers over for seat-belt infractions would bring in nearly $27 million in revenue a year.
Fortunately for Ohio, that $27 million can’t be touched by bankruptcy magnet (and alleged friend of the aliens) Dennis Kucinich.
Speaking of millions of dollars, The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration spent $7.5 million to tell you to “Click It or Ticket” in 2008. And that doesn’t even include what individual states spend every year to “educate” you about seat-belt use. Think about that the next time your school district is forced to cut teachers or deny free treatments at the city hospital.
On their own these Nanny State laws may seem petty, annoying, ridiculous, or unimportant. Some might even seem tolerable because they address our personal pet peeves (like teenagers who wear pants clearly meant for someone of Barney Frank’s girth). But, when you bundle together these myriad intrusions into our lives, you wind up with Death By a Thousand Paper Cuts.
The Nanny State is poison to a free society, a very dangerous overextension of government that usurps our personal autonomy and undermines a wide variety of freedoms, all the while claiming that doing so is beneficial to us and our fellow citizens.
Every Nanny law chips away at our individual liberty—one of the pillars of strength that make this country great. By conditioning you to look to the State to make even the most mundane decisions, it creates the mind-set that the government is the answer to all problems. That opens the door for the powers-that-be to take further control of your financial affairs, appearance, diet, and virtually every other aspect of your life.
After all, if they’re telling you what to eat or wear, shouldn’t you also trust them to tell you how much money you can earn or how to spend it? Of course not, but when citizens willingly surrender the rights and privileges they don’t care about, they soon realize that it’s too late to stop them from taking the ones they do care about
Remember: First they came for the cigarettes . . .
