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Nation of Regulation

Yesterday, Governor Schwarzenegger signed a bill banning the use of trans-fats in restaurants and baked goods. California now joins the cities of New York, Philadelphia, and Stamford in controlling what sort of fat people can and cannot put into their bodies. Congress is currently considering passing a bill that would give the FDA the authority to regulate the content and marketing of all tobacco products. (For those of you who took Frick*y's legislation class, the bill would be legalizing the 1996 rules that the Supreme Court struck down in the FDA Tobacco case.) However, as has already been much discussed in this blog, in Heller v. D. C. Commissioner, the Supreme Court struck down the D.C. ban on handguns.

Are we just going through one of those upswings in regulatory cycles that seems to happen when the economy starts sliding downhill? It doesn't seem so, since neither the trans-fat nor the tobacco regulation would have much effect on the economy. Is the main difference that the right to own guns is found in the constitution? I would suspect not. Instead, I think the rationale behind the current regulations (although politicians will never admit it, and probably wouldn't even understand it) is the Puritan nature of this country.

Trans-fats and tobacco can kill you - but only if you make the choice to ingest those substances. Guns can kill you as well - but gun regulations are meant to curtail homicides, not suicides. Despite the separation of church and state, this is a religious nation, and it comes through most insidiously not in creationism or biblical sculptures but in an overwhelming belief that people must be protected from harming themselves. Maybe its time for us, as a nation, to take a little more self-responsibility and worry more about protecting ourselves from those who want to harm us and less about protecting ourselves from our own choices.

Full post as published by Nuts & Boalts on July 26, 2008 (boomark / email).