Brian Gongol
It's a week of nanny-statism: People calling for tighter controls on cartoon characters on food packaging, Story County officials trying to clamp down on beer kegs by keeping track of individual buyers, and the perennial joy of Congress paying more attention to sports than to the real business of the people.
Is this just a case of crankiness? No -- it's a reminder that we can try to regulate everything, but we have to acknowledge that half the time, we're just creating new problems. Using the three examples above:
- Despite the incredible and indecipherable food pyramid, Americans are still getting fat...whether or not Sponge Bob appears on a cereal box.
- Whether college administrators like it or not, college kids are going to drink -- so making it harder to get keg beer might just end up leading students to drink hard liquor instead. It's a lot easier to get alcohol poisoning from vodka than from beer.
- For all the time Congress fritters away on idiotic investigations into sports, they're acting like the four-year renewal of the Patriot Act is a surprise -- not something they've been ignoring for the past 47 months.