This makes me so angry I could just spit!

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Heard on the news yesterday than some town council in Bumtuck, NJ has voted to ban cigarette smoking inside your car if a child under 16 is present. WTF??!!*!@?? Where do I begin, to list the problems I have with this? First, when will my occasionally moronic fellow Americans wake up and accept the fact that YOU CANNOT LEGISLATE COMMON SENSE? I am so damn tired of people wanting the government to raise and protect their children! If a parent is not concerned enough for their kids' health to stop smoking around them, that is their perogative (if we live in a free country, that is.) Children of smokers very often become smokers themselves, so I imagine it would be difficult if not impossible to separate the effects of second hand smoke on long term health. The legal act of cigarette smoking generates hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenue to the same hypocritical legislators who want to ban it. I have yet to hear even ONE politician explain how they'll make up for the tax revenue lost if cigarette smoking were eliminated! There's a great deal of support for these kinds of initiatives from right wing conservatives, the very same people who claim to be anti-big government. Why don't people understand, the more you use government to control other's behavior, the larger that government must be? What about the enforcement issue? Crime is a problem pretty much everywhere, so is drunk and aggressive driving. Don't the police have better things to do? In this case, it is a secondary offense, meaning you have to be doing something else to get pulled over. It won't take long to for that to change, much as the seatbelt laws did. I don't know, this kind of myopic idiocy just really, really, pisses me off. I'm an odd amalgam of liberal and conservative tendencies - I am against big government overall, but I darn sure want it to be big enough that no American suffers from hunger or lacks a roof over their head. It makes me foam at the mouth when people and politicians get sidetracked with this nonsense, while genuine issues are ignored. It's part of the greater issue, I know, politicians lose touch with the everyday lives of average citizens because they never have to go home and live with what they've wrought. This tidbit just really, really sizzled my bacon, so I thought I'd put it out here for discussion.