What Motivates Them

Maybe it will get vetoed for not including a subsidy for unversal juggling training... (Image by Juan Pablo Rodriguez, via Unsplash, license.)

An article at Reason reports that a lawmaker in New Jersey is pushing a ban on all single-use bags (paper or plastic) in his state, and will likely succeed. The piece focuses on many of the well-known practical results of similar bans on plastic bags -- although it fails to mention that reusable bags are often contaminated with choliform bacteria. Notably, the ban will, like practically everything else the left does, fail to achieve its stated objective. In this case, it's a reduction in litter.

The Reason piece over-generously grants that Bob Smith (D-Middlesex) is sincerely "concerned with the aesthetic appeal of [his] state," but it does contain a passage that I think better illustrates why someone would use such a flimsy excuse to violate the rights of his constituents so flagrantly:

The idea, Smith says, came to him while on vacation in Aruba, where a similar bag ban is in effect.

"Nobody's grumbling," the senator told NJ.com, saying that the Arubans have really taken to bringing their own reusable bags to the store. "Everybody in the line, they all do it." [link in original]

Let that last sentence sink in for a moment, because this is the "practical result" Smith is really after: Everyone in line, meekly following orders no matter how intrusive or ridiculous -- in a nation founded in part because its original inhabitants found stamps to be a tyrannical abuse of government power.

Up to a point -- and only because Americans have been acclimated for decades to look to the government first to solve problems -- one can take a policy proposal to come from a place of genuine concern for our welfare. But this proposal -- which unsurprisingly includes a ban on plastic straws -- is far, far across that line.

The people of the state of New Jersey should be viscerally angry about this whole idea. I certainly am.

-- CAV