The lamentations of old-school football fans are many these days: Rules and regulations are compounding, leading to more and more penalties and therefore more commercials, stifling the once-brisk pace of the game. The games have become lifeless and enervated. The fun, say football fans, is being regulated out of the beloved winter pastime.
As such, football is a perfect metaphor for our creaking, over-regulated republic. The true nature and number of laws we have on the books cannot even be known, let alone understood. The new health care regime is but the most recent and egregious example; it is so complex, and contains so many provisions, that even (especially) the legislators who passed the abomination do not fully understand it and cannot fully explain it.
And yet it is law of the land.
The raison d’etre of the health care law, of course, is that it is for our own good. The same is given for the compounding football regulations, which NFL officials claim is for the good of the players. God forbid grown men be allowed to risk their safety for the enrichment of themselves and the entertainment of the masses. And God forbid citizens be allowed to choose whether or not they want to purchase health insurance.
Chaos and freedom are exciting. They’re also dangerous. And so officials in Washington and the NFL are bound and determined to make sure we have as little of both as possible. Lucky us.
Matt Patterson is senior editor at the Capital Research Center and a contributor to Proud To Be Right: Voices of the Next Conservative Generation (HarperCollins, 2010). His email is [email protected].
