by the Way . . .

There has been a flood of complaints regarding the previous post, which stated: “Government has two functions, to fund external economies and to redistribute income.” Apparently most readers consider “deciding what is good” is a very important third function, and not just a subset of the external economy function. It can certainly be the most challenging. Everyone agrees that other people’s money should be shifted to the more deserving or entitled, or used to build things for the betterment of humanity, such as the Punxsutawney Phil weather museum, but “good” often entails a fight.

Our post of June 2 detailed the valiant struggle in the California legislature over the state wine. They rightly didn’t give a fig if the scientists thought chickpea 20/20 was a more “historic” wine. The New York lawmakers have been struggling with similar issues. Horrified to find that the state insect, the nine-spotted ladybug, was extinct in their state, they had to break from their other two functions, involving health care spending and property taxes, to switch their flag to the pink spotted ladybug. The bill’s sponsor, assemblywoman Nancy Calhoun, noted “Why do we want to get something like this wrong? It would be like having a dinosaur as our state reptile.” Assemblyman Jeffery Dinowitz (no relation) sponsored the bill naming the snapping turtle the state reptile, just in case. He noted that since the state already had a state muffin, a turtle certainly made sense. And preempts the dinosaur risk. There was no change in the designation of the stripped bass (official saltwater fish), which, while pretty well fished out, was clearly not extinct.

All of this went down pretty easily compared to Fluffgate, the battle in the Massachusetts senate. State Senator Jarrett T. Barrios discovered his son’s elementary school was serving Fluffernutters. That is a sandwich made with Marshmallow Fluff and peanut butter (not to be confused with smores). When the senator moved to amend a school nutrition bill to limit the number of times per week a school could serve the sandwich, defenders filed a bill to designate the Fluffernutter the state sandwich. The fight consumed the legislature for a week, after which an uneasy truce allowed a return to considering the state budget.

On a related issue, the U.S. Senate fell one vote short yesterday on sending the flag burning Constitutional amendment to the states for ratification. Hence the revised Federalist Papers will not circulate at this time. It’s a bill of rights issue anyway.