Lunch Police

Coming on the heels of the friendly folks at the EPA abolishing the old Thomas Edison invented lighbulb and foisting the retrofitting costs on small business, we now face the lunch police. It turns out that many Chicago Public Schools have banned the old brown bag lunch from their schools. Parents no longer can be trusted to plan meals for their kids. Worse, we are told, some kids even use some of their allowance to surreptitiously purchase junk food like chips and candy bars and slip them in their lunches. Government has determined that parents are just too dumb or uninformed to make decisions for their children, and are largely ineffective at policing the nutrition of their kids, so parents now have no choice in the matter. At many public schools, children are required to eat meals provided by the school cafeteria. No matter that the children often complain that those meals are tasteless (and provided by a major contributor to the Democratic Party). Nope. Big brother has taken yet another decision away from the family. Lightbulbs, toilet tanks, microwaves, cars, and now school lunches. Day by day, bit by bit, decisions are taken out of our hands and placed in the hands of some administrator at the EPA, school board or Department of Energy.

I often eat at my desk, and sometimes I brown bag. Tomorrow, I plan to tuck two Twinkies in my lunch as my own quiet act of defiance.

Lightbulb Police

The lightbulb police came to visit my wife's office last week. She was informed that the EPA had banned the manufacture of certain lightbulbs and that she would be required not only to purchase new "Al Gore" approved lightbulbs, but that all the fixtures in her office would have to be retrofitted to accommodate the new bulbs. Total cost to her business of several thousand dollars. In addition to the city and state grabbing for more, the Obama administration pushing for more, now the lightbulb police get into the act. Light bulbs, microwaves, toilet tanks used to be designed by industrial designers. Not any more. Today, the specifications for those and other items are written by some "green" bureaucrat in Washington, who then turns around and hands the bill to us. We used to have choices in many products, weighing price, functionality, and design. Today, the bureaucrats have decided that those features must take a back seat to "green" conformity. You see, she had other ideas about how to spend that money--raises for her loyal, hardworking employees, a new computer, maybe stash some more away for retirement. But no, some pointy headed bureaucrat had other ideas. This is exactly the kind of thing that continues to weigh on our economy. At a time when small businesses continue to strain and struggle, the bureaucracy continues to pile more bricks on the load, without any thought whatsover as to the costs they are imposing. Germany's unemployment rate is 7.1%. Did you ever think you'd see the day when we would envy Germany's unemployment rate? Are you beginning to see how that happened?