Steve Stanek, a research fellow at the Chicago-based Heartland Institute, which he calls a free market-oriented public policy group, views the San Rafael ban as part of a wider trend: a proliferation of rules of all kinds. I dont like cigarettes, and Ive never taken a puff, he said. My sympathies arent with smokers because I am one, its because of the huge growth in laws and punishments and government restricting people more and more. Illinois criminal code was 72 pages long in 1965, he said; today its more than 1,300 pages long. The encroachment of government is astonishing, he said. A look around the U.S. finds towns and cities busily regulating anything and everything. (Yet many of my libertarian friends are convinced that Americans have become much freer during the past several decades. I do not read the evidence as a whole in this way at all. And I view the surveillance state alone as having already laid a sufficient foundation for the creation of full-fledged totalitarianism in this country.)
Posted on: Sat, 23 Nov 2013 02:31:19 +0000
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