Dangers of Nanny State are to More than Just Our Liberties

That’s the conclusion of the Washington Examiner in a story by Michal Conger this afternoon about a CPAC panel on the nanny state sponsored by the Independent Women’s Forum and featuring, among others, the National Center’s own Jeff Stier.

The Examiner quotes Jeff noting some negative unintended consequences of the nanny state:

Negative unintended consequences of nanny-state regulation are not uncommon, said Jeff Stier, a senior fellow at the National Center for Public Policy Research.

“The nanny state isn’t even very good at protecting the environment or public health,” he said.

Stier described ineffective and expensive policies the administration has used to push is agenda, and how they have proved detrimental.

Schools are paying 30 to 50 percent more for organic fruits and vegetables in their healthy school lunches, for instance, even as the administration points to the cuts in funding school lunches will take because of sequestration.

“It’s irresponsible,” said Stier.

Panelist Angela Logomasini of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, according to the Examiner, said that San Francisco’s plastic bag ban also had unintended negative consequences:

The city banned plastic bags because of their alleged environmental dangers, deciding for shoppers that reusable cloth shopping bags would be safer for them and for the earth.

Instead, the cloth bags spread diseases, and hospital admissions for food-borne illness rose 25 percent in the city.

Panelist Julie Gunlock of the Independent Women’s Forum, the Examiner says, believes the nanny staters’ goal is to scare the public into being more willing to submit to regulations.

The Examiner wasn’t the only outlet to cover Jeff’s remarks. Supplementing a near-constant stream of radio and TV interviews for Jeff was this tweet from a Media Matters employee:

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Max Greenberg could be tweeting a message to his followers that they shouldn’t imply that the National Center is pro-industry, but in light of the remote possibility that he’s trying to imply via sarcasm that the National Center’s work regarding the Pebble mine (which Jeff Stier has nothing to do with) is funded by industry, we responded as follows.

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No response yet, but it has only been six hours. We note that no one from Media Matters has ever contacted our organization to ask if our Pebble Mine work is funded by industry, so the likelihood that Media Matters was implying that is probably minimal. We’re sure they’re quite responsible in that regard.

Unlike, perhaps, climate scientist Michael Mann of Penn State, who a few months ago tweeted the following apparent attempt to make it appear that the Colorado Springs Gazette had reported that the National Center is receiving funding from the Koch brothers. It has never done so.

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At the National Center, we assume liberals make up things about our funding whenever they can’t rebut what we’re saying. So by that standard and others, we congratulate Jeff on a fine performance on IWF’s CPAC panel today.



The National Center for Public Policy Research is a communications and research foundation supportive of a strong national defense and dedicated to providing free market solutions to today’s public policy problems. We believe that the principles of a free market, individual liberty and personal responsibility provide the greatest hope for meeting the challenges facing America in the 21st century.