From bans on Juul to gas stoves, government safetyism makes our lives worse
Katrina Hutchins
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Congress summoned Juul executives to testify on the e-cigarette company’s marketing practices in 2019. About a year later, the Trump administration announced a ban on most Juul pod flavors, and about a year after that, President Joe Biden’s FDA announced a total ban on Juul sales. Fast forward one more year to the present day, and the U.S. Consumer Product Commission wants to ban gas stoves. The seemingly unrelated measures are anything but.
The first regulatory event received bipartisan support and resistance only from the relatively niche overlap of activists and vape users. After all, we must protect the children, and anyway, nobody should use nicotine. It’s bad for you.
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The third, most recent announcement was met with bipartisan consternation. About 40% of Americans use a gas stove, and gas is faster and better than electric. Officials ranging from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) to West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin (D) said essentially the same thing — you can pry it from my cold dead hands.
But the regulatory state and its supporters reprised a familiar line. It’s bad for you. It doesn’t matter that the evidence linking childhood asthma to gas stoves is flimsy, just like it doesn’t matter that Juul was founded to help people quit smoking cigarettes. Time and time again, the government succeeds in abusing Americans by promising a safer tomorrow.
Richard Trumka Jr., a man responsible for both the Juul investigations and the suggested gas stove ban, knows this. Safety advocacy is his family legacy. What started with a third-generation coal miner’s efforts to protect workers has, over the course of two generations, morphed into compulsory puritanism. The story of Trumka father and son is the inevitable arc of progressivism.
Richard Trumka Sr. began working in the coal mines as a teenager. His father was a miner. His grandfather was a miner. After seven years under the Earth, he earned an accounting degree from Penn State and then a law degree from Villanova. He went on to become one of the most important names in labor union politics.
Richard Trumka Jr., now a Biden-appointed CSPC commissioner, previously served as the general counsel and staff director of the U.S. House Subcommittee on Economic and Consumer Policy. During his tenure, he investigated Juul and mounted the evidence that would eventually lead to a proposed total ban.
Like Trumka Sr.’s efforts in labor law, Trumka Jr. doggedly pursued Juul in the name of protecting people. The difference is in who is supposedly being protected. Coal miners are a real demographic, working an unforgiving job that regularly endangers their lives. They live in a certain region and have a certain culture. As a union leader, Trumka Sr. ostensibly answered to them.
But who are Juul bans meant to protect? The congressional hearings focused on deceptive marketing practices that targeted children. But the 2020 flavor restrictions and most recent proposed total ban only serve to protect adults from making a choice for themselves. These so-called safety regulations are actually a strong-handed tut-tut from Washington to every person who has decided the simple joy of a nicotine buzz might be worth whatever eventual health effects it comes with — quite the departure from efforts to make sure coal miners leave their work sites alive.
But as the attack on Juul unfolded, no one cared. The initial regulations came from a Republican administration, and the latest Democratic addition hardly stirred a national fervor to defend civic liberties. It should be no surprise then that Trumka Jr. took his win and pushed on.
In a Jan. 9 Bloomberg article, he suggested the CPSC would look to ban gas stoves. “This is a hidden hazard. … Any option is on the table. Products that can’t be made safe can be banned,” he said. Finally, he had everyone’s attention. Centrists, conservatives, and libertarians reacted with concern and confusion, or, as the Washington Post would frame it, Republicans pounced. Liberals pretended both that this is a nonissue and that it has been an obvious issue all along. Nearly every reasonable person was left wondering how gas stoves became a political dividing line overnight.
But it didn’t. It began with a sympathetic idea to improve the lives of men and women that make the infrastructure of this country possible. Then slowly, as the inclination to regulate risk disconnected from real people and their problems and began to exist only in abstraction, it became one man’s dream to make cooking a pain in the ass.
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When our government sees the public as merely an idea and not a definable people, it no longer has anyone to answer to. Instead of addressing real challenges, it regulates away little sparks of lived variance to check off baseless agenda items.
Frivolity, idiosyncrasy, and charm can’t survive the cold, calculating march of safetyism that has no sense of what risks people are happy to take. No more nicotine, no more gas, no more joie de vivre. Endless, insatiable progressivism, based entirely on abstraction without the annoying hindrance of reality, can and will devour whatever curious joys it finds.
Katrina Hutchins is a video editor and mother from Indiana. She formerly worked for the Daily Caller as an associate editor and AOC impersonator.