Government knows best? Hardly

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Updated: May 4, 2012 4:44PM

The year is closing with prime examples of government acting like it knows what’s best for us — whether we like it or not.

Exhibit A is the Federal Communications Commission, in defiance of the sentiment of the courts and Congress, charging forward to place the heavy hand of government regulation on the Internet.

Never mind that it can’t find a problem to fix. The FCC, in a 3-2 vote with the Democratic majority reflexively favoring more government control over your lives, turned to speculation about possible problems to declare it has the authority to determine how the Internet should be operated and how its services should be priced.

Will the growth of broadband-gulping movie downloads lead to Internet service providers charging more for some access? Will some provider shut down access to a site, say Google maps, to promote its own mapping business? Such things may be legitimate concerns but why not let the competitive Internet culture and free market forces work them out? Or at least have the chance to before letting government bureaucrats take command? Any provider demanding unfair pricing or limiting access likely will find consumers looking to competitors.

The Internet has been a source of innovation, of overnight technological advances, of mind-boggling fortunes created by entrepreneurs, of AOL e-mail being king of the road one day and just another player before you realized it, of MySpace dominating social networking only to fall to Facebook. Amazingly, the Internet revolutionized our lives without the, uh, helping hand of federal bureaucrats. Somehow the FCC’s Democratic majority looked at the wonders worked by Internet creativity, individual inspiration and free market forces and concluded that what’s needed is . . . regulation.

The FCC acted even though a federal appeals court threw out its first rationalization to regulate the Internet. The wily minds of regulators then likened the Internet to the long-ago telephone monopoly (anybody remember that?) to justify its power grab. More than 300 members of Congress, more than a quarter of them Democrats, protested. It was all to no avail.

Exhibit B in the regulators-know-best category, you won’t be surprised to hear, involves ObamaCare, the overhaul of health care. One of the emotional debates in Congress about it centered on end-of-life issues. At one point, the legislation included a provision to pay doctors to offer patients advice about options on end-of-life care. That’s a good thing, but it also seems like a normal part of the doctor-patient dialogue. Why do physicians have to be paid extra to do it?

It fed fears in an emotional and at times irresponsible political fire storm over the issue of rationing care and whether ObamaCare directives would prompt a quicker reflex to pull the plug on grandma. Democrats dropped the pay-for-end-of-life-counseling provision.

Now Obama administration regulars have quietly written a similar provision into Medicare regulations. Regardless of how you feel about paying for end-of-life planning, Congress expressly left this out. Regulators shouldn’t override the will of the people as expressed through representative democracy.

Exhibit C in the government-knows-best follies is the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. These busybodies banned McDonald’s from giving toys with its Happy Meals unless the burgers, nuggets and fries meet certain nutritional standards. The ban’s sponsor, Supervisor Eric Mar, was upset by his daughter’s collection of giveaway toys. Think about that: A parent unable to supervise his child’s eating choices uses his government post to resolve his problem, punishing McDonald’s, other parents and children and damning those parents as being irresponsible as he.

The government-knows-best philosophy is rooted in the notion that people are too ignorant, too incompetent, too lazy or otherwise incapable of running their lives. It’s ugly elitism, and it’s offensive and corrosive to democracy.