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.