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NELSON: This once was a free country  

‘When I Was a Kid, This Was a Free Country,” G. Gordon Liddy lamented in his book by the same title. I found the book unexceptional except for his longing for a country long gone. He takes the reader through a stroll of America in its more untrammeled days and contrasts it with the constantly harried, henpecked regime we find ourselves in now.

Liddy has a few years on me, but I, too, remember freer days. Political correctness hadn’t yet completely stifled free speech, and kids with hunting rifles in their cars at school parking lots or little girls with aspirin in their purses weren’t whisked off by zero-tolerance twits. . . .

The Forum Editorial Board, which apparently never met a nanny it didn’t love, has held forth again on the evils of tobacco. Pay no attention to the subversive notion of letting people enjoy their vices in peace and privacy; nay, the new Puritans will hound smokers until the last leaf of tobacco is extinguished. The recently enacted Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act will now, under the Food and Drug Administration, further choke tobacco users and pile on more useless regulations.

You might think alcohol would be a fitter subject for nannyism, since it’s more addictive and orders of magnitude more damaging to its users and to society than tobacco could ever be. . . .

I voted against North Dakota’s Measure 3 setting aside tobacco money to help stop smoking. Not only are there better uses for all that cash, it’s blood money anyway. Extorted from the producers and users of a perfectly legal substance, it’s money we have no right to whatsoever.

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