Big Government Bullies vs the Little Light Bulb

How many incandescent light bulbs can I stockpile before 2014 and where should I store them all?  Boy, you can bet I will be!

Via Memeorandum, this Washington Post story about the closure of the last GE plant in America to make incandescent light bulbs.  Two hundred workers will lose their jobs.  The jobs will go to China:

What made the plant here vulnerable is, in part, a 2007 energy conservation measure passed by Congress that set standards essentially banning ordinary incandescents by 2014. The law will force millions of American households to switch to more efficient bulbs.  The resulting savings in energy and greenhouse-gas emissions are expected to be immense. But the move also had unintended consequences. 

That was a Democratic Congress, by the way, pinning their hopes and dreams on AlGore's global warming fantasy.  

By 2014 all incandescent bulbs will be history and you'll be forced to use those squirrelly CFL bulbs filled with mercury and made in China that don't light worth a darn and cost three times as much.

Professor Jacobson is taking predictions on a Mexican light bulb cartel while Althouse is also planning to stock up on the good stuff.

Mark Krikorian at NRO has the best summation:

We can complain about this among ourselves all we want, but Republican candidates need to actually run on this sort of thing — acknowledge that it’s just a light bulb (or shower head or whatever), but that a government big enough to tell you what light bulb to use is a government big enough to take everything you have.

It's not JUST a light bulb, of course.  It's the ruling class telling you how to live your life.  Krikorian is absolutely correct that before you know it, the government will be so big and so powerful they'll tell you what kind of car to drive (oh..wait....) or how much water you can use, how much gasoline you can consume, where you must buy that gasoline and the exact chemical makeup of that gasoline.  Heck, before long they'll even be telling you what doctor you can see and what you can see him for and whether or not you can have that prescription regardless of your own ability to pay for it.  They'll even be telling you we can't be innovative and search our own oil reserves.  Worse than that, they'll try to tell us we can't tap those reserves even though we know where they are because, you know, we might kill a caribou in Alaska or offshore drilling could possibly be *gasp* dangerous.

Oh wait.  Well.  Of course they can tell us what kind of light bulbs to use.  They're in control of everything else already, aren't they.

Damn.