Muth: Big brother government + Crony government = Bad Nevada government

Nevada Democrats have gone bonkers. Not only are they suffering from a combination of PESD (Post-Election Stress Disorder) and TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome), but apparently they’ve been caught up in some kind of time warp.

Liberal legislators have resurrected the silly ERA (Equal Rights Amendment) issue that was killed and buried 35 years ago, along with the gay marriage, even though the United States Supreme Court settled that issue long ago, as well.

Meanwhile, when not digging up meaningless legislative fossils the rest of the Democrats’ agenda seems to be focused on killing jobs and strangling small businesses.

For example, somehow these people got it in their heads that the government should be allowed to tell private businesses they must pay a “minimum wage” of $15/hour. Where this has been implemented already the result has been thousands of workers losing their jobs as thousands of businesses shut down.

Talk about stuck on stupid.

Along the same Big Brother line there’s also a bill to force employers to give employees PAID sick leave. Of course, the politicians pushing this bill don’t have to come up with the money to pay workers not to work. It’s what in government-speak is called an unfunded mandate.

Seriously. Where do these politicians – many of whom work for the government and have never signed the front of a paycheck – get the authority to tell private sector employers how much they must pay and what benefits they must give to willing adult employees? It’s outrageous.

And then there’s the opposite end of the stick.

A new bill has been introduced which would use the power of government to reward a deep-pocketed special interest – optometrists – from competition. It’s a bill similar to others being introduced in state legislatures around the country.

The bill would block the emerging and cost-saving practice of telemedicine for eye care while simultaneously ham-stringing the consumer’s ability to buy contact lenses online or from discount retailers such as Costco and WalMart.

The intent of the bill is to protect market share of professional optometrists who enjoy the luxury of being the only medical professionals who regularly fill their own prescriptions. A very convenient “captive audience” profit center the eye docs desperately want to save.

This bill is crony government at its worst, couched in consumer safety rhetoric. But such laws, as former House Speaker Newt Gingrich points out, are “a blow for the goal of less expensive, more convenient, more innovative health care.”

So on one hand, we have the collective gaggle of legislative Democrats in Carson City abusing the power of government to stick it to Nevada businesses while at the opposite end we have a bill abusing the power of government to protect some favored businesses from competition.

Washington, DC isn’t the only swamp that needs draining.

Chuch Muth is president of Citizen Outreach and publisher of NevadaNewsandViews.com.