By Selwyn Duke

On the radio today I heard Congressman Anthony Weiner, a member of the New York contingent and a liberal of true Empire State pedigree.  You can’t miss Weiner; he’s a gangly sort, obviously the guy whose meals fellow NY Rep.  Jerrold Nadler has been stealing (take a gander at Nadler and you’ll know what I mean).  Weiner was talking about a bill he proposed that would seek to cut down on the amount of materials manufacturers use to package their products. 

Weiner complained that gratuitous amounts of packaging hurt the environment.  As a case in point, he mentioned a high-efficiency light bulb he saw that was wrapped in "ten inches of plastic and cardboard."  Weiner said that you’d think such a bulb would be good for the environment, but then you see all the excess packaging.  Now, since I’m one of the few commentators who has written about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, I think you’ll believe me when I say that I appreciate conservation.  But Weiner’s proposal smacks of the kind of big government micromanagement that is a cure worse than the disease.

What exposes the unsoundness of liberal ideas perhaps better than anything else is that their proponents can’t even find valid examples with which to buttress them.  Let’s consider the light bulb he cited.  Here is a quick and simple I.Q. test.

The company uses all that packaging material because:

A.  It likes it when its customers feel a sense of accomplishment upon finally unwrapping the product.

B.  It likes to spend more money on packaging.

C.  None of the above.

You see, something tells me that a company which has been designing, producing, packaging, marketing and shipping light bulbs on a massive scale for decades probably knows a little more about packaging light bulbs that Congressman Wiener does.  I also know that business tends to turn reducing costs into a science.  A company might, for instance, determine that if it can reduce the amount of a given material used by three percent, its per unit cost will be reduced by a half a cent, thereby saving it another 1.76 million dollars a year.  Thus, I have to conclude that the light bulb company probably has a very good reason to package its light bulbs the way it does.

One doesn’t have to be an Einstein to figure out what that reason might be.  Since we’re talking about a fragile product, my guess is that such packaging is necessary to reduce the possibility of breakage during transport and handling to a satisfactory level.  And guess what?

If more light bulbs are broken, more will have to be produced and disposed of, creating even more garbage.

This little example is emblematic of the problem with big government micromanagement.  Liberals tend to believe that they can legislate society to perfection, that every perceived problem warrants the creation of a law, regulation or mandate as a remedy.  But rarely is this justified or effective, and usually it does more harm than good.

I’m reminded here of what Confucius once said:

"Wisdom is, when you know something, knowing that you know it, and when you do not know something, knowing that you do not know it."

Liberals perfectly illustrate why a little knowledge is dangerous.  They’re professional pros, experts in the area of everything — at least in their own minds.  And other people are so stupid that the simple (read: simplistic) solutions liberals so easily conjure up elude them.

In reality, I probably don’t know much more about light bulbs than Congressman Weiner.  But I know enough to defer to the expertise of those do.