On July 1st, California launched a number of laws designed to protect Californians from…well…themselves.
No Plastic Bags
To protect Los Angeles from “selfish” poor people bent on destroying the planet, help is here!
Los Angeles county supermarkets and pharmacies can no longer offer customers plastic bags for anything other than fruit, vegetables, and raw meat. Instead, they will provide paper bags at the new low price of 10 cents a bag!
That’ll teach ’em!
Residents Are Required to Purchase a Carbon Monoxide Detector
California residents are now required to purchase carbon monoxide detectors.
Good luck with enforcing that one, California.
Unless California regulators have a warrant, I am not letting them in my house.
Restaurant Employees Must Receive Formal Training on Why They Should Not Spit on Food
California restaurant employees must now take a food handling course.
Why? Because the state obviously assumes restaurant workers are too stupid to have any common sense. Plus, it will cost businesses even more money to run their operations.
Seems like a win-win to me.
Reflections of a Rational Republican 
I take offense in your categorisation of the carbon monoxide law as stupid. This law will save lives, carbon monoxide is a silent killer. Carbon monoxide poisoning is only the leading cause of accidental poisoning deaths in America.
Purple Chimp,
I don’t think owning a carbon monoxide detector is stupid in its own right. I just think government mandating that people must purchase one is stupid. Let people make their own decisions. If people die, so be it.
Plus, California has so many of these ridiculous laws that they are impossible for the state to enforce. At some point, if not already, people will start ignoring these laws because they know the government doesn’t have the bandwidth to enforce them.
well, you have to admit, Californians can be pretty stoopid (at least half the state, anyway). BTW: you and your family can die while sleeping soundly in your bedrooms from carbon monoxide leaking from your gas or oil burner. Such detectors are required in 24 states, including “Live free or die” New Hampshire. Big, bad Gov’mint–why doesn’t it just let us croak in peace?
Alice,
Regardless of whether it is good personal policy to own a carbon monoxide detector or not, the government has no business in telling me what I can or cannot buy. Let me make my own decision and suffer the consequences. If the cost is death, so be it. As Patrick Henry once said, “Give me liberty, or give me death.”
Well, carbon monoxide kills about 500 people a year in accidental exposures. Making it only slightly less dangerous than that other scourge of modern man, the bicycle.
I’d be interested in seeing a more detailed breakdown as to cause than the statistics I found from the CDC, but it certainly has some implications on its own. Mostly that yes, people are stupid enough to do things like burn charcoal indoors because it’s cold in the winter.
And that is, as you said, why these laws get written; those in power are mistrustful of the masses ability to make good decisions. And to an extent they’re right, but I still don’t approve of the practice.
For one, it undermines the fundamental principles of democracy in some ways. The idea being that we trust the populace to select our leaders, but we don’t trust them to have the common sense to, say, put a carbon monoxide detector in their furnace room and not to fire up the ol’ Coleman grill in the garage when it gets too cold to do it outside.
Secondly, it’s an extremely difficult law to enforce, short of spending vast amounts of money to save a very small handful of people. Millions of homes, maybe what, a half-hour to search each one on average for a sufficient number of carbon monoxide detectors, and we’ll set a reasonable timescale of a year to complete the process.
Good luck with that.
And finally, YES, if I want to suffocate to death in my sleep due to accidental CO exposure because I was too damn lazy/cheap to install a detector even though I lived in a high-risk environment (because really, if you don’t have gas/oil heat [or more importantly central air] your chances are pretty damn low) then it’s MY RIGHT TO DO SO.
Chris,
A highly rational and insightful analysis. Thanks for posting this!
To be honest, I’m a little skeptical of the classroom locks law as well. I can understand that people are nervous about school shootings (they should be; the media has been fanning the flames of that particular bit of hysteria for decades), but I can see a lot of potential for abuse if it’s not carried out very carefully.
Especially, if everyone is locked in and then the shooter starts a fire. California lawmakers obviously have no head for military tactics.
obviously no clue…i very much agree!
California’s pursuit of the perfect nanny state can actually make me grateful I live in New York. Then again Mayor Bloomberg and Governor Cuomo still have plenty of time to perfect their nammyness. While at its face funny, it does illustrate the attitude of those that not only think government should penetrate every aspect of the citizen’s life but that government has the right to do so.
Yeah, I have about had it with California’s intrusiveness.
The 10 cents a bag doesn’t fly where i live…i’m estimating 1 out of every 40 people actually want it to happen, and 1 out of every 20 didn’t even know it passed. They say that a portion of the money goes to restoration projects, but i am very very positive we will never see it. I hate how all these things are passing before it ever let a single citizen give their opinion. What ever happened to by the people for the people? And when are we going to get rid of the EPA….what exactly have they done right lately with OUR money?