Fixing the Headline for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Their headline: As trash fills the seas, Missouri lawmaker wants to block government crackdowns on plastic:

State Rep. Dan Shaul, R-Imperial, the Missouri bill sponsor and director of the Missouri Grocers Association, said he has no problem with business owners cutting back on wasteful materials, but he said he does not believe the government should mandate restrictions.

“What we’ve seen throughout the country is a continued attack on business being able to take care of consumers the way consumers want,” said Shaul, who added that any movement toward a more biodegradable future should be consumer-driven.

“It (the bill) will not impede a business from making a decision that’s in their best interest or meets their business model,” Shaul said. “We think it should be their decision.”

Shaul’s legislation, if signed into law, would mark an expansion of current Missouri law, which forbids localities from restricting single-use plastic bags through bans or taxes.

Not found in the article amid the pro-environmentalist anecdotes? Any mention of the developing nations that contribute most of this waste.

Here, let me fix the headline: Paper Takes Opportunity To Expound The Virtues of Meaningless Virtue Signalling, Expresses Enthusiasm For Onerous Government Regulations That Do Not Solve Anything.

On the one hand, I am for pushing regulation down to the lowest possible level, but on the other hand, the “laboratory” of democracy currently experiments with bad ideas by implementing them far and wide through the power of media and social media pressure before anyone can figure out if they work or not. And when they all fail together to solve the problem, the people who make the rules think the solution is more rules applied from the top down.

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