Vincent Carroll
Carroll laments how our laws treat citizens like children. Specifically, he mocks Colorado's law that makes it an offense to warm up your car before you get in it.
Recently, Front Range police issued numerous $75 tickets for this offense, including to a young mother who left her car idling in her driveway for less than three minutes while she went "inside to get her 9-month-old daughter settled in with Grandma for the day."
It is this kind of arrogant intrusion that gives all government, especially police, a bad image. Police have an incredibly difficult and very important job. Harrassing young mothers should not be part of it.
The official reason for the law is that your car might get stolen if you leave it unattended and running. What a load of crap.
First, so what? It's a person's individual decision on how to use his car and how much risk he might be willing to take.
Second, it is a blatant lie. The actual reason for the law is that members of the Al Gore Cult of Global Warming want to end all use of the internal combustion engine, and this is the only crumb they could get. At least for now.
"A hobble on spendthrifts"
In part two of his column, Carroll laments the wrong-headed attempts by politicians to "stimulate" the economy via government programs.
As bad as it is on the national level, it is even more nonsensical at the state level. Of course, that does not stop state politicians from trying.
Polticians love Keynesian economics, because it gives them the excuse to expand the power of government in the name of the economy.
In sum, John Maynard Keynes taught that government could jumpstart a sluggish economy by creating "make work" for the unemployed to do. It can not.
All the government can do is redistribute capital from private uses to government uses. And there is a reason private money is never used to dig ditches and fill them back in.
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