Here is your answer. Three of them, in fact.
Of course, because I live in the Chicagoland area, the ridiculous over-regulation of food trucks in the city hits home the most. But that may just be my parochialism talking. It ought to go without saying that all three instances of nannyism are utterly outrageous and in a better world, the people responsible for perpetrating this nonsense would be laughed out of any civilized gathering.
And while we are laughing them out of civilized gatherings, let’s not forget that nannyism abounds. The examples provided to us by Ted Balaker may be over the top, but in many ways, it is the not-over-the-top nannyism that we have to worry about. There are any number of politicians at the local, state and federal level who believe that they know better than we do when it comes to spending our tax money (as opposed to letting us have more of it–it’s our money, after all!–to spend and invest ourselves) and educating our kids, and who believe that policy should be dictated from on high and far away rather than formulated at the most local level possible. Their form of nannyism fits in more nicely in mainstream political thought than do the examples that Balaker gives us. But that doesn’t make their form of nannyism any less pernicious.
