Hey Congress, ban Narcissm

Normal thought processes would tell you that you cannot pass a law making narcissism illegal nor should you. But since our Congress acts on all sorts of things they should not, why not give it a shot?

They propose taxes on excess profits for oil companies. The obvious questions here that have none or just bad answers are: What are excessive profits and if the companies make less in profit than the government extracts in taxes shouldn't the government also be slapped with windfall profits?

How about this one, since gas prices are high because of inadequate supply to satisfy demand, wouldn't saying we can't drill our way out of this be, well stupid?

You don't want to talk about oil, OK how about this? Since national health care has restricted access to health care treatments everywhere it has been tried, why exactly would instituting it here be successful?

The answer is narcissism. The elected representatives believe they can implement it efficiently even though it hasn't been done anywhere else. Their thinking has their own plans at the center of everything.

Of course this isn't just limited to Congress or even elected representatives. In the run up to the Supreme Court decision about the Washington D.C. gun ban I heard a grieving widow say that governments need to be able to keep their citizens safe. If that actually happened when guns were banned I would agree. Putting results aside (which we should never do) the idea that because her husband was murdered by a gun wielding animal then we should be able to ban guns for everyone. I would not seek to diminish her personal suffering, and I do empathize with her. Narcissism explains this. Personally I would want the animal who killed her husband to meet the same fate, but a law biding citizen in some inner city hell should be able to defend himself by owning a gun if he so chooses.

In the dissenting opinion (Find it here) page 157 Justice Breyer states that "
The Court would have us believe that over 200 years ago, the Framers made a choice to limit the tools available to elected officials wishing to regulate civilian uses of weapons,
and to authorize this Court to use the common-law process of case-by-case judicial lawmaking to define the contours of acceptable gun control policy."

Admittedly I cannot expertly argue law with a Supreme court justice but I do remember from my high school government classes that the first ten amendments known as the Bill of Rights all limited the power of government not individuals. Additionally this decision does not take away a local governments' ability to regulate gun ownership, just ban it. They have the obligation to keep guns out of the hands from known violent offenders, criminally insane, etc. They do not have the right to keep them from private law biding citizens. Once again the Supreme court, the minority in this case shows its narcissism.

This is of course a hypothetical essay. No one can or should ban something as un-quantifiable as narcissism, but they also should not try to involve themselves in our lives as deeply as they do. Windfall profit taxes, etc should be just as silly to try to impose as a ban on narcissism.