The Washington Post reports on the busy little beavers in the Obama regulatory agencies who are focused, laser-like, on protecting Americans from ourselves.
For instance, Cheerios has made a claim that eating a bowl daily can reduce cholesterol by as much as 4 percent. Bad, bad General Mills, says the Food and Drug Administration. That’s making a drug claim, writes reporter Lyndsey Layton, “which would require clinical studies and agency approval before a
product is put on the market. The food giant has removed that claim
from its Web site and a spokeswoman said it is in discussions with the
FDA.”
Says Layton:
Top appointees at the Food and Drug Administration, for example, have
cracked down on dietary supplements with “steroid-like” substances that
for years had been sold in gyms and health-food stores. In a move
designed as much for symbolism as effect, the new chairman of the
Consumer Product Safety Commission dispatched all 100 agency inspectors
across the country last month to enforce a law that requires special
drains on swimming pools to prevent children from entrapment. The
agency shut down more than 200 pools.
The new regulators display a passion for rules and a belief that
government must protect the public from dangers lurking at home and on
the job — one more way the new White House is reworking the
relationship between government and business.
Alexis de Tocqueville envisioned the creeping pestilence of nanny state policies more than 150 years ago. He put it well:
Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary
power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and
to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular,
provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if,
like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it
seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood; it is well
content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing
but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors,
but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that
happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their
necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal
concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property,
and subdivides their inheritances; what remains, but to spare them all
the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?
