An Actual Senator Said This 

I meant to post this a while back, but even a couple of weeks later, it still deserves comment.

An actual Senator, Senator Thom Tillis from North Carolina, said:

I was having this 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,” Tillis said, in remarks first reported by the District Sentinel. “Let an industry or business opt out as long as they indicate through proper disclosure, through advertising, through employment, literature, whatever else. There’s this level of regulations that maybe they’re on the books, but maybe you can make a market-based decision as to whether or not they should apply to you.

The idiocy of this statement knows no bounds. First, he's suggesting that we replace the regulation that businesses require their employees to wash their hands with another regulation that says businesses post a sign about whether or not they require their employees to wash their hands.

I'm not sure that's the type of savings the Tea Party folks in North Carolina were planning on.

Second—and granted, his statement was just stupid point scoring—this is where you draw the line? Hand washing? This occurred just a few weeks after the big measles outbreak in California. Hand washing wouldn't have stopped that, but it's probably not the best timing to talk about making it a market decision as to whether or not a restaurant requires its employees to wash their hands¹.