David McElroy

We see programs today encouraging kids to ride bikes to school — just like the Beaver did years ago — but the Nanny State in Elizabethton, Tenn., apparently thinks that a mother can’t be trusted to decide whether her 10-year-old daughter is mature enough to ride her bike to school.

The mother says she’s been threatened with being charged with “child neglect” for allowing her daughter to bike a mile to school and back each day. Teresa Tryon tells her story:

“On August 25th my 10-year-old daughter arrived home via police officer, requested to speak to me on the front porch of my home,” Ms. Tryon said. “The officer informed me that in his ‘judgement’ it was unsafe for my daughter to ride her bike to school.”

Ms. Tryon called the mayor’s office and the chief of police office in order to determine what laws she was breaking by allowing her daughter to ride her bike to school.  Her daughter’s route to school was reasonably safe.

Major Verran of the police department returned Ms Tryon’s call.  She said he told me, “He had spoke with the District Attorney’s office, who advised that until the officer can speak with Child Protective Services that if I allow my daughter to ride/walk to school I will be breaking the law and treated accordingly.

She asked, “What law she would be breaking, to which the answer was ‘child neglect.'”

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If California Democrats have their way, hiring babysitters and nannies is soon going to get pretty complicated. It’s going to take more than a spoonful of sugar for this medicine to go down.

California Assemblyman Tom Ammiano (D-San Francisco) has proposed legislation that would require any adult hired as a sitter to be paid at least minimum wage, but the bill would also require parents to “provide a substitute caregiver every two hours to cover rest and meal breaks, in addition to workers’ compensation coverage, overtime pay, and a meticulously calculated timecard/paycheck.”

The bill has already passed the lower house of the California Legislature and is on its way through the Senate now. The only good news so far is that the Senate has stripped out the part about paid vacation days.

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A commission investigating U.S. wartime spending over the last decade estimates that the federal government has wasted $60 billion in Iraq and Afghanistan due to “lax oversight of contractors, poor planning and payoffs to warlords and insurgents.” Is there a single person who’s surprised at this?

The Associated Press got an advance copy of the report Tuesday from the Commission on Wartime Contracting, but it will be public Wednesday. As disgusting as it is, I just find myself wondering why commissions bother to investigate such things. This happens with pretty much every government-run project of any sort, doesn’t it? Except for some super-scrupulous manager in a fairly small local state office, it’s almost impossible to stop it from happening.

Why can’t we stop it? Simple. There’s no incentive to stop it. When bureaucrats are in the middle of spending money — especially for what counts as a “crisis” — there are no brakes on the system. They simply spend the money and do the accounting later. It’s always this way. It can’t be any other way, because they have no incentive to stop.

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