So new Senate chair-warmer Thom Tillis (and thank you for that, North Carolina) is against restaurant owners making their employees wash their hands
after they poop.
Tillis related a story from his time in the state legislature in 2010, complaining that the U.S. is "one of the most regulated nations in the history of the planet," video via C-SPAN shows.
“I was having a discussion with someone, and we were at a Starbucks in my district, and we were talking about certain regulations where I felt like ‘maybe you should allow businesses to opt out,'" the senator said.
Like the rule that says the people handling your food and drinks have to wash their hands after they poop? Why yes.
“I said: ‘I don’t have any problem with Starbucks if they choose to opt out of this policy as long as they post a sign that says “We don’t require our employees to wash their hands after leaving the restroom,” Tillis said.
“The market will take care of that," he added, to laughter from the audience.
And we all laugh because the senator's radical anti-regulation stance, in which Freedom is now defined as the choice to put human shit in food or not put human shit in food in accordance with whatever the market will bear, is America being elaborately clown'd upon by one of the few people in America in an actual position to decide whether our food has too little human shit in it these days, and because with the advent of the tea party we all know that there is indeed a nontrivial portion of America that believes it should be their God-given right to crap in their hands and then hand you your five dollar breakfast danish if that's what they want to do.
Tillis' argument is a variation of the building code debate. At some point in college, or in an upscale bar, or in some other setting that tends to have more than its fair share of fervent self-important libertarian blowhards with little to no real-world experiences on these things, you have no doubt been exposed to the argument that we should not have building codes, or fire codes, etc., because if a builder constructs a neighborhood of houses and they all fall down during a strong wind and kill the families living there then well that builder will look really bad now, won't they, and people will be less eager to buy houses from them in the future. In this situation all the dead people are considered Learning Experiences, both for the people building the houses and the people buying them, and it's a damn shame they're all dead but at least now the market has some better data on whether this particular construction company gives a damn about proper load-bearing walls.
Maybe some people will still want to live in deathtrap-level housing because those buildings will no doubt be a lot cheaper, after all, and if they die too then we've got even more data. It's a utopia, damn it. The graveyards will be a good bit larger and maybe some of the bodies won't get buried quite deep enough to keep all those bones in the ground, but it will be a utopia. For the survivors, anyway.
Thom Tillis is not, however, a true libertarian. He is a fraud, because he thinks maybe you should be able to serve food with occasional human feces on it so long as you post a sign somewhere saying so. That's not actually saving any regulation, that's just shifting the regulation from an anti-poop regulation to a poop-neutral regulation. This is an attempt to woo his audience into not thinking of him as entirely insane, but the whole trouble with the building code debate is that the consumers who are living in the shoddily built apartment tower or the people getting handed food through a drive-in window do not have full information on what they're getting. And they're not likely to get it, because it is almost certain that the company building substandard cheap-ass dangerous housing or the restaurant serving cholera with a side of fries will not want customers to know lest those customers shop elsewhere, so they will try to hide it as best as they possibly can, and that is why nearly all true ideological libertarians are just petty sociopaths who don't really give a damn about any implications because it sounds so pompous and pseudo-intellectual and whatnot to be agin' regulations and paperwork and those stupid signs reminding people not to smear human waste on your food.
Again—thank you, North Carolina. We couldn't have had this conversation without you. In 2015. Again.