Written By : Dave Blount

Our insatiably greedy Nanny State rulers can’t inflict any more damage on the tobacco industry without driving it completely out of business, which would cut into tax revenues, so it’s time to look for new victims. Companies that provide us with cell phones make a lot of money; bureaucrats could seize a fat cut of it by pretending that phones cause cancer too. The groundwork is already being laid:

A Maine legislator wants to make the state the first to require cell phones to carry warnings that they can cause brain cancer, although there is no consensus among scientists that they do and industry leaders dispute the claim. …

A similar effort is afoot in San Francisco, where Mayor Gavin Newsom wants his city to be the nation’s first to require the warnings.

Maine Rep. Andrea Boland, D-Sanford, said numerous studies point to the cancer risk, and she has persuaded legislative leaders to allow her proposal to come up for discussion during the 2010 session that begins in January, a session usually reserved for emergency and governors’ bills. …

The San Francisco proposal would require the display of the absorption rate level next to each phone in print at least as big as the price. Boland’s bill is not specific about absorption rate levels, but would require a permanent, nonremovable advisory of risk in black type, except for the word “warning,” which would be large and in red letters. It would also include a color graphic of a child’s brain next to the warning.

As we saw with cigarettes, mandatory warning labels prepare the way for massive looting. Once you’ve forced phone manufacturers to proclaim right on their product that it’s lethal, portraying them as sinister corporations in need of pillaging is child’s play.

It’s a good thing the country wasn’t always run by liberal lawyers and their pseudoscientific enablers, or no doubt railroads would have been found to cause cancer in the 19th century, and automobiles in the early 20th.

On a tip from Wiggins. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.

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