It's
like nagging your parents to let you go skiing when you hate the cold
and the snow: urging voters to elect you to a government office when
you hate government. Needless to say, there are voters dumb enough to
do so, and thus we have the likes of Thom Tillis, senator from
North Carolina.
This
week Tillis opined that (as paraphrased by BBC.com) “restaurants
should not have to make their employees wash their hands after toilet
visits.” “Let
them decide,” said Tillis, referring to the regulated businesses.
Tillis has a problem with government regulations and thinks that market
forces should rule the world and would set everything right. He thinks that people would avoid
non-washing establishments, which would quickly go out of business.* Until those
disease-spreading eateries go under, of course, patrons will be in danger of becoming ill (and
some may even die). But, even so, germs are better than government.
The
next logical step would be for surgeons to be allowed to decide
whether to free themselves from regulatory procedures prescribing
scrubbing-up before operating. (Certainly from an economic point of
view it would make sense to do so: they would free up time to perform
more procedures, and more procedures=more money.) Of course, we would
then be plunged back into the dark ages of surgery, before Ignaz
Semmelweis discovered that hand disinfecting would reduce mortality
rates in maternity hospitals. In an unregulated surgical marketplace,
Tillis would undoubtedly argue, patients would vote with their feet,
putting the unsterilized practitioners out of business—that is,
except for those patients who were wheeled out feet first to the morgue.
But why stop there?
How about letting all other businesses decide what regulations to follow? Like construction companies, for example. So what if a
shoddily-constructed apartment building went up in flames, or a
bridge of inferior design collapsed? It's all good for the
marketplace (and the morticians). And if the plagues of Egypt were
resurrected in this country because government regulatory agencies
were toothless? Well, it would be OK, I guess; after all, we would be
free to choose between boils and the death of our first born.
***
*How would patrons
know that a restaurant doesn't require staff to wash? Tillis, in the
words of BBC.com, “suggested
that restaurants that did not require hand washing would have to
alert customers with prominently displayed signs” (itself a
regulation, as BBC.com pointedly noted).
We
could invent a new parlor game: create a Tillis sign. Just off the
top of my head, how about:
HANDS
SPRINKLED WITH PEE
MADE
YOUR BLT
***
Sources
and Suggested Reading:
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