The Attitude Problem

To follow up on yesterday's post, George Della quickly dropped his proposal to outlaw beer pong But that is not really the story I'd like to focus on here.

I'd like to focus more on attitude, particularly the attitude of legislators to try and legislate our way into social order. You have Della's bill outlawing beer pong. You have attempts to outlaw texting while driving. This gets added to a number of other behavioral bills that we have seen over the years; smoking in bars, smoking in homes, smoking in private homes (at least in the Montgomery County fiasco from a few years back), mandating seat belt use, banning trans-fats. Greg Kline keeps a whole list of bills to legislate how we eat during episodes of the Conservative Refuge. Communities across the country mandate participation in recycling programs. All of this examples deal with government trying to overlegislate human behavior.

Is that any way to live? Is this any way to treat free people? Of course it's not. But government officials (usually Democrats) always try to come up with new ways to limit freedom, to limit the ability of people to enjoy the fruits of our American way of life. Most of them are patently unenforceable. A lot of them certainly do not stop certain human behaviors; people still smoke, people still choose not to wear their seatbelt, and elected officials still (allegedly) have sex in public. A law is not going to stop certain behaviors that are objectionable to some other people. You socially engineer people through legislation in a free society.

George Della's foray into beer pong just goes to display the lengths that we have Americans have allowed politicians to convince us that our safety and our ability to regulate our own lives need to be sacrificed in order for the greater good. All the while Della tries to overregulate the lives of regular Baltimoreans, Della was doing bumpkis to lower Baltimore's crime rate, get drugs off of city streets, create economic incentives for city job creation, and provide city students with a decent education. All of those things went unaccounted for as Della worried about beer pong.

That sis the larger attitude problem. Elected officials would rather pass on doing the hard work that is needed, and instead do the easy but meaningless things to get their name in print. That's the attitude that we as Marylanders need to fight. We need to expect more from our elected officials, and demand that they stop nannying us to death....