Radley Balko has a great editorial over at Fox News.
Interestingly enough, the one statistic that bucks the trends outlined above is drug use. Drug use among adults is up fairly dramatically over the last twenty years. But drug use is one area of personal liberty the government has gotten more aggressive about policing. Which to me suggests that government efforts to control our decisions not only stifle individual freedom, they aren’t very effective.
Please take the time to read the whole thing. Nannying adults is expensive and ultimately, counter productive. When we insist that our government lead us by the hand through life, we become lazy. And because government is essentially the productive providing for the non-productive, encouraging people to be lazy over long periods of time decreases the ability of government to redistribute income from those who produce to those who do not. We are heading towards a situation in which the producers are being eaten by the non-productive. How long can a nation remain viable with such an imbalance?