In his piece on the Drogas laundry soap odor menace (TBT #415), your Baltic exile columnist jumps from conclusion to conclusion without once touching down to a fact: Household products smell bad to him, so breathing them through their packaging on drugstore shelves must be dangerous to health.
Drogas' staff wear orange shirts, so the management didn't have time to think about more important matters. Businesses are arranged hierarchically, and some people have body odor or are boorish, so certainly we need more government regulation.
But tell me, is there any evidence at all that breathing soap-scented air is a menace? That there is a better way to structure human enterprise? That regulations against BO, boorishness or bad bosses would be useful? That the bureaucrats needed to enforce such laws would be, or could be, effective? That there would be anything worthwhile gained from such a drag on economic activity and expenditure of your tax-lat?
