We (the government) regulate hairdressers and car exhaust and doctors and lawyers and how you add a new room to your house and we license you to drive a car and regulate boats and regulate your speed on the interstate and how you educate your children and test whether your toys are safe and whether your lettuce is clean and we regulate what the word “organic” means on a food package and we regulate how people houses are sold so it’s fair and we monitor air quality and we regulate how much you get paid on unemployment and we regulate how and who can vote and we have rules on lead in paint and we regulate if you can own a ferret in some places. Most of us see these as good things because a hairdresser not meeting standards can hurt you and cars with too much emissions cause smoke and untrained doctors and lawyers are a terrible idea and you need to learn to drive a car properly if you’re going to drive and if you’re going to teach your kids yourself you aught to do it right and if the lettuce isn’t clean you can get really sick and if something is “organic” it should actually mean something and the real estate business has a really shady history of treating people different based on race so we need to fix that and we should keep track of air quality because again, health and yes we should make sure people who vote have the right to vote (although more of us really should vote because we all have a stake in this world) and lead in paint has this really terrible history of hurting people bad and while I don’t understand why some places don’t allow ferrets, even worse I have no idea why my idea of monitoring and regulating firearms better — as in, in such a way that we maybe get less people killed every year — makes me Un-American.
