David McElroy

If you have a young child in Europe and allow him to blow up a balloon or blow on a party whistle, you might just be a criminal under new safety rules handed down by the EU Nanny State.

You know that thing kids like to blow on and it makes a thing sort of like a tongue roll out? (I have no idea what it’s called.) That thing’s banned, too, for all kids under the age of 14.

When I oppose giving bureaucrats the power to make up rules for us to live our lives by, I frequently make up examples of things such bureaucrats could do with their power. And I ask, “Would you like it if they made up a rule about what color you could paint your house?” Or whatever. The response is always the same. “You’re just being silly,” they say. “They’d never do that.”

But as people grow comfortable with the idea that bureaucrats have the power to rule their lives, the bureaucrats do take more and more and more of these absurdities and turn them into reality. What starts off as absurd hyperbole or even satire ends up turning into reality. Parents are no longer exercising their judgment about what’s safe. Games that have been safe and reasonable for generations are suddenly banned or made hard to get.

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I thought some of the signs at Tea Party rallies represented sheer ignorance, but the Occupy Wall Street protesters are giving them a run for their money. These people know their trendy brands and piercings, but they know nothing about economics.

Take this guy on the right. Please take him. Can you think of any rational argument that Wall Street is responsible for “most of the poverty and suffering on this planet”? I can’t. I can usually take the flip side of almost any argument and find an approach to make case. There’s just not a rational argument for this one.

When the federal government and the Fed poured money into Wall Street banks in the past few years, it was wrong. Those firms should have been allowed to fail. That’s what makes the market work correctly — the fact that if you perform poorly, you fail. But the politicians in DC got scared and pulled their friends out of hot water. So why aren’t the people on Wall Street protesting against the politicians and the Federal Reserve? They’re the ones with the real power.

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Do people forward you as much political “humor” as they send to me? Since I started publishing this site, I get even more of it.

Just this week, different people sent me the two graphics here. One person sent a batch of anti-Republican stickers asking if I could use them. And then I got a batch of anti-Democratic graphics from another friend, with a note saying, “I didn’t know if you could use any of these graphics on your website or not. Very good bumper stickers.”

I appreciate my friends’ good intentions. I really do. (In fact, a few of you send me things that do turn into article ideas. You know who you are. Thanks.) But politics is already vacuous enough without dumbing it down even further. This isn’t what I want to be about. I don’t want to be “room noise” or “elevator music,” to steal a couple of phrases from an obscure old song.

Simplistic sloganeering such as what you see here doesn’t help anyone. Honestly, I don’t even find it funny. I will gladly take something I disagree with and write about why I think someone is wrong. I realize that some people don’t appreciate that — as was discussed in the comments of that article — but it’s a balance I try to strike between ideas, on the one hand, and attracting new readers, on the other. But most of what I see offered as political discourse today strikes me as the equivalent of children on a playground shouting insults at one another.

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