Sunday, July 12, 2009

Prophesies About Prohibition; the Small Laws

P-Mac's column today is a fulfillment, in a way.

About 20 years ago, a (now-deceased) Miller Brewing exec told me that the country 'was entering a new era of Prohibition.' He was not quite right; perhaps the better description would have been that we were 'entering a new era of Nanny-State'.

The Small-Laws era.

You knew that your government is planning to put a blood-alcohol interlock on your car's ignition, didn't you?

...the feds and the car industry are nonetheless going halves on inventing a device to be mandated on every new car. Ferguson says the project aims to have a prototype within a year and a demonstration vehicle by 2013.

For all the obvious reasons, the devices will not be particularly accurate, and will most likely over-compensate--that is, disable your car even if you snarfed down only 1 or 2 beers in the hour prior to saddling up.

That's "prior" as in "prior restraint." Legal techies may not like the way I use that term, but then.....oh, well.

My friend from Miller Brewing was, perhaps unwittingly, a Chestertonian, who famously quipped "When you break the big laws, you do not get freedom; you do not even get anarchy. You get the small laws." - Daily News, 7/29/05

And Nanny-State is the state of Small Laws.

5 comments:

Reaganite Republican said...

Dad29, I'm overdue to add you to my blogroll- I've been reading you off and on for months. If you'd consider recipriocating, I'd sure appreciate it.

Keep up the good work, my friend-

The Reaganite Republican

http://reaganiterepublicanresistance.blogspot.com

Dad29 said...

Done!

Thanks for reading!!!

Jay Bullock said...

There is no proposed law as McIlheran describes. He's making it up, or someone fed him bad information.

Dad29 said...

Who needs a "law," Jay?

How about a nice, shiny, new Directive from the CPSC, or Dept of Transportation?

Regulation: better than laws, because we don't need Congress to make it happen!

Jay Bullock said...

Normally when people say a thing is going to happen, and it isn't going to happen, we say that those people are lying.

YMMV, of course.