Are Asinine Environmental Laws in Our Near Future

With a new Democrat president this fall and both houses of Congress likely to become even more Democratic, our Puritanical overlords will have a field day implementing their myriad pet projects. Among these are silly environmentalist schemes that make them feel superior to the slobs in their midst but merely make the rest of us miserable. Congress has already put through a ban on incandescent light bulbs starting in 2012.

NPR, Brahmin central command, has a series this week on recycling which would be rather funny if it were a MAD TV skit. This morning they covered San Francisco's courageous ban on plastic shopping bags. Nowhere is it even remotely suggested how silly this is* - plastic shopping bags weigh nothing and pose no threat to the environment - particularly in landfills where they won't see the light of day for 10,000 years. They're instrumental in providing dog owners a handy means to pick up their pets' solid waste, which of course poses an actual environmental threat.

Yesterday they covered the scourge of un-recycled electronics. Host Renee Montagne described the searing guilt she felt when tossing an old cell phone in the garbage - a confession that sounds all the more comical when spoken in her perfectly tuned female public radio cadence.

There simply is no end to the extent that these people wish to control our lives. I live in a state that is as activist as any when it comes to this - the New Jersey legislature simply cannot fathom an activity which they cannot outlaw. No social transgression is too trivial that it can't be solved by police action. They haven't gotten around to plastic bags yet - that one might finally wake the populous up - my advice on that would be to let sleeping dogs lie.

Unfortunately, with the sorry performance of the Republican party over the prior 6 years in failing to implement a single small-government initiative other than tax cuts, we conservatives have little credibility in the public arena to complain about anything Democrats might do.

* To be fair, host Steve Inskeep, if you listen to the audio, does attempt to provide some irony in his intro, remarking on how hard times haven't kept local governments from telling us "what to do."