Ted Cruz is right: Feds should leave us the hell alone about how much beer we drink | Opinion

Sen. Ted Cruz, who has long had a “likability” problem with voters, may have finally cracked the code and become the proverbial “guy you want to have a beer with.”

How? By defending your right to have a few cold ones from an overreaching federal government that should have much better things to do than regulate your beer intake.

The bureaucracy is at it again, this time with George Koob, director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, casually mentioning that the U.S. might follow Canada’s absurd recommendations that residents limit themselves to two drinks a week. Right now, the U.S. government graciously allows you peasants two drinks a day for men, one for women.

Cruz and other Republicans, to their credit, noticed. And as so often happens, that became the news — not that another unelected pest was casually musing about telling you how to live.

But neither is the real story here. The reality is that people simply just don’t trust government advice anymore. There’s the general decline of our institutions and, of course, our lived experience on COVID. The government’s recommendations seemed arbitrary and didn’t match people’s lived experience in avoiding or coping with the virus. And there were signs everywhere of political influence, such as the reliance on teacher unions for decisions about opening schools.

Besides, government nutritional advice has been ridiculous for decades. If you followed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advice religiously, you would cook your beef and pork to oblivion and rarely eat shellfish. On eggs — a food humans have been consuming for thousands of years — we’ve been told in recent decades that they’re bad, they’re great, eat only the whites, eat a few and eat a bunch.

Then, there’s the absurdity of the low-fat craze of the 1980s and 1990s. Government experts beat the drum about saturated fat in an effort to reduce heart disease. The problem was, they gave sugar a pass, thanks to some heavy manipulation by the sugar industry. Americans (and the big food conglomerates) loaded up on it and now, obesity and diabetes are off the charts.

Alcohol is a mixed bag, health-wise. It’s not exactly good for you, but increasingly, our overlords are trying to classify it as verboten. As in every other area, government guidelines seem designed for ascetics who are trying to live forever. Most people would rather inject a little pleasure in their lives — hopefully in moderation — and die at, say, 88 instead of 90.

But it shouldn’t matter. It’s not the government’s role to tell us which goal we prefer, and bureaucrats have proved inept at telling us how to get there anyway.

The Biden administration seems to specialize in this garbage. Often, the functionaries involved — including alcohol czar Koob — pre-date Joe Biden’s presidency. But they must sense kindred souls are running the show.

Consider the president’s obsession with forcing the world into electric cars at an absurd pace, without considering where we’ll get and store the juice to power them or how to obtain the metals for expensive batteries and the environmental consequences of the mining. It’s no wonder that some dude at the Consumer Product Safety Commission thought, “Hey, we can regulate gas stoves out of existence!” Even the White House had to walk away from that one.

The nanny state is a bad match for an era in which we can’t — and don’t — trust our institutions to keep the lights on and the bills paid. Government should focus on the basics and leave elbow-benders alone.

Fighting this nonsense is a great role for Ted Cruz in the Senate. Like all politicians, he occasionally trips. Consider his ill-advised effort to force car manufacturers to include AM radios in vehicles, something the market can easily handle.

But if the Texas Republican also stands up for moderate beer drinkers everywhere, he just might find himself with a whole bar’s worth of new friends.

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