Having tried its hand at regulating gas stoves, shower heads, and ketchup consistency, our benevolent nanny state has set its sights on a new target: ceiling fans.
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is like that mom in your family who wants every pillow in her home meticulously fluffed and every floorboard washed and spotless. Only this overbearing mom wants to micromanage 140 million homes nationwide.
The department’s recent proposed rule aims to make ceiling fans more energy efficient. The new regulations are set to reduce “harmful air pollution,” a DOE spokesperson informed FOX Business.
Department officials also argued that the new fans will cut consumers’ costs; however, the benefits seem minimal.
“According to the Energy Department’s analysis, the new rules would save households about $39 over the lifespan of the new energy-efficient fan,” the New York Post reported. “However, the cost to manufacturers associated with the increased equipment will total $86.6 million per year….”
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Already, the media has begun to mock “ring-wingers” for “panicking” about the proposed regulation.
“Where's the issue,” asks Salon. They’re just ceiling fans!
Well, on the one hand, that’s true—they're just ceiling fans. No biggy. But if that is the case, then why is the government regulating them in the first place?
The problem here is so much bigger than spinning blades on your ceiling; the problem is symptomatic of an endemic mindset of control that permeates Washington. The federal government feels entitled to control every tiny little detail of your life. Taken individually, these obnoxious rules and regulations would not be that much of a problem. But taken as a whole, they paint a more ominous picture.
For example, consider this absurd sentence from The Washington Post:
“The Energy Department has reversed a Trump-era rule increasing how much water could be used in a shower by allowing multiple nozzles to carry equal amounts of water at once. In closing the loophole… Biden officials restored a 2013 standard that most shower heads on the market were already meeting — or exceeding."
How genuinely ridiculous that the federal government has become embroiled in petty little kerfuffles about how much water can come out of our shower heads! It’s almost comical. But at the same time, while shower head regulations won’t kill anyone, and certainly won’t end the Republic, what do they say about our ostensibly “limited government” more generally?
Well, according to political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville, they might be warning us about our slippery bent toward authoritarianism:
“After having thus taken each individual one by one into its powerful hands, and having molded him as it pleases, the sovereign power extends its arms over the entire society; it covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated, minute, and uniform rules, which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot break through to go beyond the crowd; it does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them and directs them; it rarely forces action, but it constantly opposes your acting; it does not destroy, it prevents birth; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, it represses, it enervates, it extinguishes, it stupefies, and finally it reduces each nation to being nothing more than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”
SEE ALSO: Tocqueville on the deceptive nature of tyranny
It might seem absurd to make such a big deal about ceiling fans and shower heads. But if Tocqueville is right, this inoffensive “network of small, complicated, minute, and uniform rules” may be conditioning us for total control. As I previously wrote, “The parallels between Tocqueville’s discourse on despotism and America today are staggering. The lines between his hypothesis and our reality are blurred. Perhaps inane showerhead regulations are not evil in and of themselves, but perhaps they are indicative of a Machiavellian trend. Perhaps they are indicative that government as nanny shall soon be replaced by government as king.”
To push back against the federal nanny state and remind Washington that we, the American people, are capable of regulating our own ceiling fans, sign the Convention of States petition today.
