George Leef writes for Forbes about another instance of government nannies in action.
When I was a child, I was often told that I had to eat food I didn’t want “because of the starving people in China.” With similar illogic, we’re now we are being told that we must not use too much water because of the dry conditions in some places. The problem with the argument is obvious: using less water where you are won’t magically make more water available for the dessicated farmers of California or the thirty inhabitants of Sao Paulo. (Nor would more food appear in China depending on whether I ate the broccoli.)
Sadly, illogic almost never stops a determined nanny stater from making laws or regulations to mandate this or prohibit that. The Environmental Protection Agency is famous for such behavior. It has often tried to rewrite the law to expand its power (although not always successfully) and now has pushed the envelope further with a grant to fund a study on how to monitor the length of time that hotel guests spend taking showers.
According to this EPA document, “The proposed work aims to develop a novel low cost wireless device for monitoring water use from hotel guest room showers. This device will be designed to fit more new and existing hotel shower fixtures and will wirelessly transmit hotel guest water usage data to a central hotel accounting system.” (Several University of Tulsa researchers have landed $15,000 for this effort.)
Oh good – more data for the bureaucrats to analyze. And after the analysis? In his article “How We Destroyed Indoor Plumbing” for The Freeman, Jeffrey Tucker gives us a good idea of the path they’ll take. “You can see where this is going. Study the issue. Test the plan on hotels. Extend it to new construction, apartment buildings, then homes. Enforce the rules. This is the trajectory, and to believe it can happen is not paranoia. In fact, the regulations on toilets, showers, washing machines, water heaters, and dishwashers are numerous, onerous, and truly awful.”
