Most Americans are opposed to the federal government requiring them to buy a health insurance policy in which the terms of coverage will be dictated by the government and the cost will be dictated by the health insurance companies. But this dictate is the culmination of a trend of government dictates that has been building for years.

Liberty-loving Americans have allowed this creeping growth of government, and we are not better off because of it.

The prayer Jesus taught includes the plea, "Give us this day our daily bread." Obama's scientists want that bread to be government approved. Too much salt in the free-market bread, you know.

In California, the Air Quality Board has promulgated standards for bakeries that require scrubbers on the exhausts from ovens to protect us from air pollution caused by the smell of baking bread.

Obama's experts also want to brand sugar a toxin, and the exhaled breath of every living creature on the planet a pollutant.

In these and thousands of other ways, governments – local, state and federal – have intensified their nanny state intrusions into every nook and cranny of our lives. The ruling elites sincerely believe there is no human activity that couldn't be made better and safer by government regulation.

The government simply knows better how to live your life than you do. And the fines collected by government from regulation violators pads the budget for the swarms of government regulators in a government version of a perpetual motion machine.

I live on the beach in Southern California. Signs posted by the local city government greet visitors to the beach at every access point. The signs prohibit a long list of activities (no smoking, no dogs, no camping, no fires, no furniture, etc.) that got so long over time that the signs had to be replaced by ones with smaller print. Locals added the words "no fun" to the list, violating another local ordinance against defacing the signs.

The prohibitions are routinely ignored by longtime beach users who know to clean up after a beach party that includes a fire, some beach chairs and a dog or two.

The real purpose of these bans is to sell city licenses to waive the bans and to ticket violators with fines now ranging into the hundreds of dollars.

Los Angeles County government recently upped the ante, declaring digging holes in the beach sand to build sand castles and Frisbee tossing and football throwing on the beach to be unlawful, with violations carrying a fine of $1,000.

While we continue to accept without protest these small restrictions on our "pursuit of happiness," emboldened government agencies have intensified a regulation rampage to protect us from ourselves and all manner of other evil and risk in the world.

Are we really better off as a result of this government regulatory net?

Let me ask you: As a consumer, do you have more choices and feel more powerful buying electricity from the government-regulated public utility company or buying a new TV at a retail store? Is the consumer better treated on eBay or at the local branch of the government regulated (and too big to fail) bank?

Are we really too stupid to vote with our purchases when green-energy alternatives are made cheaper and more reliable by market forces?

The free market moved America from whale oil lamps to gas lamps to electric light bulbs in less than 40 years. Now the government wants to ban that incandescent bulb in the name of energy conservation.

No amount of government green energy subsidies, grants, regulations or requirements will produce an alternative energy future. Innovation and individual entrepreneurs will produce green products that are cheaper and better than current products are when the market demands these products.

You can bring a government-subsidized Volt to market, but you can't (yet) force the consumer to buy it.

Consider the cornucopia of free market goods and services available today on the Internet. There have never been so many choices at such competitive prices for consumers. The Internet is the least regulated part of our economy. See the correlation?

It's no mystery why Obama demands government regulation of the Internet. No authoritarian government can stand the success of freedom. The comparison invariably makes the bureaucrats look bad.

Ronald Reagan said, "When government expands, freedom contracts." Had enough government yet?