President Joe Biden
wants to ban your gas stove. He intends to do it stealthily by preventing you from buying a new one so that when your current stove conks out you have no choice but to replace it with an electric stove.
His Consumer Product Safety Commission is pouncing on a new study by four researchers, two of whom are linked to activist groups that
militate against carbon fuels
. The report blames
gas stoves
for 13% of childhood asthma cases.
One should be skeptical of that number, which should be confirmed by scientists who don’t have a conflict of interest, real or perceived. If the finding is important, it must be reproducible.
But even if the finding is reproduced, the case for government action is weak. Many of us choose to cook with gas because we prefer it, and the choice should be ours, not Uncle Joe’s. Bossing citizens around to protect them is not a proper function of government in a free country. It certainly comes ill from a government whose green obsessions contribute to the death of half a million Africans a year because it won’t facilitate financing for energy development in that backward continent.
There is, as suggested above, a trade-off between personal freedom and the culture of safetyism. Gas stoves and ranges are common because people prefer them. Real estate agents make sure gas ranges are mentioned in prospectuses because they are a plus, not a minus, with homebuyers. If they involve safety risks, the risk is for the buyer to assess. Caveat emptor.
Consider another example that illustrates the problem with many supposed safety rules. There is a push in many states to require booster seats in cars for children up to the age of 8.
A 2020 study
found that such laws save 57 children from being killed in car crashes each year. But the laws also discourage many thousands of parents each year from having a third child — simply because three booster seats won’t fit into the back of many cars. The study calculated that 145,000 more children would have been born since 2000 if the booster seat laws were not in place. How do you weigh 145,000 lives against 57 deaths?
The adage “better safe than sorry” is simplistic and doesn’t always apply. As COVID-19 proved, over-regulation by government has unintended consequences, often unwanted ones.
Uncle Sam’s officious efforts to minimize dangers should be limited. Sometimes they probably violate constitutional rights. The “right to privacy” under the Fourth Amendment is that there’s a point at which people must be allowed to live as they choose, to do as they like rather than as the government instructs them. Last year’s Dobbs decision drew the line for a privacy right on this side of aborting a baby, but such a right may still exist.
Excessive regulation of stoves for safetyist reasons also raises the question of consistency. Why does government fail to ban more dangerous appliances and activities? Cigarettes, for example, are still legal. We believe they should be. But why is it so if gas stoves are to be thrown out? Gas stoves are significantly less harmful than automobiles, which cause 42,000 deaths and more than 2 million injuries annually. What about flat-screen TVs, 18,000 of which fall on people and injure them each year? In fact, 451 children have died from such accidents since 2000.
We won’t, even in our irritation, suggest that bossy bureaucrats stick their heads in an oven, but we do suggest that they go away and do something more useful than interfering with the way people like to cook their dinner.
