"Honey, Why Do the Towels Smell Like Crap?"

From almost the very moment we purchased our glistening new, top of the line, attractive-looking front-loading washing machine, the ever ravishing Mrs. Baseball has offered up a consistent, disheartening critique...it sucks. I was confounded. Seriously? European engineering, latest (expensive) technology...all that and it still sucks? Perhaps there is some intricate feature or potential issue of user error that might be over the little Missus's head? Nope, it just doesn't get the clothes clean. I should have known.

Rand Paul's rant the other day in Congress may seem like pettiness, but the larger point is much more important - we're not free when bureaucrats and busy-bodies tell us what we can and cannot buy and innovation, the driver of America's economy for decades, will wither when said bureaucrats tightly proscribe what is acceptable in the marketplace. The sagas of my washing machine and Rand Paul's toilet are a metaphor for your freedom and America's economic dynamism. And it's getting pervasive, lightbulbs, cars (Chevy Volt), debit cards, bank accounts, home loans. Do-gooderism is creeping ever further into our lives turning dynamism and a world of ever-increasing convenience into a world of Soviet style mediocrity and frustration. Sure the budget deficit and the debt are important we ought to address those, but these small things that touch our lives everyday are of similar importance. They show us that things work, that we've gotten the basics down so we can move on the bigger things, that no small need should go unmet or no petty thing cannot be improved upon. This is where we feel the dynamism of America most viscerally, where we can literally smell the promise of the future and be inspired to get on with it. If we can't get clean, fresh smelling towels right (from a washer that works properly) how the hell are we going to produce the next iPhone or the next steel mini-mill or the pervasive wireless network or any "21st century" anything for that matter?