Goverment: Who doesn't hate it?

Hey, had your morning coffee yet? Good, be prepared for it to come back up, because Radley Balko's out to get your bile rising:

It is something of a clichéd tradition for a columnist to write a year-end or New Year column that makes exaggerated, sometimes humorous predictions for the next 12 months.

I wrote such a column at about this time last year, with "predictions" that reflected the continuing, creeping influence of government in our lives. Unfortunately, the state of civil liberties and both economic and personal freedom haven't improved much over the past year. So I figure it's time for another round of unlikely predictions as to what we might expect from our government in 2007.

Whoops, that doesn't sound so bad. What are the predictions, after all? Here's a choice sampling:

--In a scenario straight out of George Orwell's "1984," several local governments will begin to encourage children to turn in their parents when the parents fail to abide by building and property code violations, such as mowing the grass, properly sorting recyclables, and similar mundanities.
--Now that the federal government has made online gambling a crime, some state government will take things even further, and make writing about online gambling a crime.
--Not content with micromanaging parents when it comes to bicycle helmets, car seats and any number of laws and regulations, some state legislator will get the idea that we should make kids who play soccer wear helmets.

Ooo, that doesn't sound good. But those aren't even the heavy hitters Balko writes up.

But hey, what's the big deal? It's just some libertarian playing Chicken Little, right? Wrongodongo, Balko's actually listing events of 2006. Horrified yet? You ain't see nothin'. Get on over to Balko's article and be prepared to taste the morning java again.