Guess Who Has Another Bad Idea?

This weekend's Hartford Courant had a story on the Connecticut's interest in taking lessons from Massachusetts's restrictions on teen driving. It's one of those hot topics in the news that seems to me to be an appropriate topic for discussion. Here's an instance where government can take action in the interests of keeping the roads safe. Graduated licensing policies, restrictions on teen driving, and more severe penalties for conditionally licensed drivers all seem like good ideas to me, or at least, ideas worth discussing.

But trust the New York Times editorial page to take a good idea and ruin it. According to the Times, we don't need the states making all sorts of haphazard laws about driving- We need Congress to come up with uniform national rules for teen drivers.

States have a duty to regulate driving on public roads and part of that regulation is to consider means of making our roads safe for everyone using them. But the idea that there's one correct way of regulating teen driving is just asinine. Even in a small state like Connecticut there's a lot of room for discussion as to what methods are most effective and the state's should be free to experiment with a variety of regulations. And to think that driving in every state throughout the county is similar enough to require the same regulations ... I mean come on.

This is precisely what I'm referring to when I discuss the biases of the New York Times- they're all about big government, the bigger, the better. There's a world view at play in which there are no different answers, only right and wrong, and only a big federal government capable of determining what's right and wrong. I know I've said it before, but I fear New York Times world.