I have a few questions for all you folks who screech about big government and over regulation.

How would you like your eggs? Sunny side up?

Worried about turning on the gas stove to heat those babies up?

Planning a trip to the Gulf of Mexico any time soon? Don’t forget to bring the Borax to scrub away the oil and other grime — from your fish.

How’s the bank account? Anything left in there after Big Business finished vacuuming your vacation and retirement funds?

Still think the government over-regulates?

Only a chump could live through the revelations of the past few months and believe that.

I dislike regulation too. I yield to nobody in my disdain for local governments that tell you what shade of ochre to paint your house or how big a sandwich board you can plunk onto the sidewalk to sell your corned beef on rye special.

But I’m not talking about that. I’m talking state and national regulations. Or lack of same.

Every day brings some new revelation of how regulators looked the other way or were in cahoots with the industry they were supposed to regulate. These outrages happen all over the country, but they touch all of us, including those of us on the insular Central Coast.

For example, you may have been sickened, as I was, at the testimony out of Washington last month about nauseating conditions on some of the farms our eggs come from. It raised the age-old question, which came first, the chicken or the salmonella?

The regulators did not do their jobs in that case. Nor have they been doing it in the Appalachians, as a parade of dead miners and their widows can attest.

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