The gov't won't even leave your toilet alone

When I built my house in Raleigh in 1986, I couldn't figure out why I had such wimpy pressure in my shower.  (This was a common Delta head, not some luxury version.)  I finally took the head apart and found there was a pressure-reducer (a glorified washer) installed as a result of government fiat.  I removed it and voilà, a normal shower experience!

Since I had my own well, it was clearly no damn business of the government how much water I used in a three-minute shower.  

But the bureaucracy didn't stop there.  When I bought my Minneapolis house eight years ago and decided to replace a worn tile floor in the master bath, I wasn't allowed to re-install the beautiful 1928 toilet!  The remodelers informed me that "If you ever take the toilet up, code won't allow you to put it back in place.  You're only permitted a 1-1/2 gallon one."

So I had to do cartwheels to find a new Kohler that roughly matched the delicate pink color and have the old American-Standard one destroyed.  (So no scofflaw could salvage it!)  

But worse —how shall we say this delicately— it doesn't do its job properly.

These incompletely-flushing toilets are such a travesty that they became the subject of a whole episode in "King of the Hill," where users had to flush the johns five or six times to finish the job.

It seems that when it comes to crap, the government giveth but not taketh.

The following is from Powerline.com

Get your hand out of my shower

Posted: 22 Jul 2010 06:10 AM PDT

Before the advent of the modern environmental movement, Bill Buckley used to assert with a glint in his eye that a liberal is someone who wants to reach into your shower and adjust the temperature of the water. Man, oh, man, was he right. The liberals' environmental agenda has brought Buckley's satirical thrust uncomfortably close to reality.

See, for example, the Wall Street Journal article "A water fight over luxury showers." Stephen Power reports:

Gene Goforth sells showerheads--big ones, like the Raindance Imperial 600 AIR. Selling for as much as $5,457, it has a 24-inch spray face, 358 no-clog channels and a triple-massage option. "You can just stand under it, and it helps your psyche," says Mr. Goforth, who has one in his home.

Now, Mr. Goforth is in a lather over the federal government's tough new line on water-hogging showerheads, part of a new effort to enforce energy- and water-use regulations. "Leave my shower alone," Mr. Goforth recently wrote in a letter to the Department of Energy.

Regulators are going after some of the luxury shower fixtures that took off in the housing boom. Many have multiple nozzles, cost thousands of dollars and emit as many as 12 gallons of water a minute. In May, the DOE stunned the plumbing-products industry when it said it would adopt a strict definition of the term "showerhead" in enforcing standards that have been on the books--but largely unenforced--for nearly 20 years.

The Journal explains in the handy sidebar to the story that the federal maximum for a showerhead is 2.5 gallons per minute, at 80 pounds per square inch.

I have a great idea for a political movement. How about a movement devoted to the restoration of limited government?