Thank you, Combest, for linking to this. I can’t believe I’ve been missing out on this excellent blog from the Southeast Missourian. Today, Brad Hollerbach writes about license plate redesign and the waste it entails:

I’ve had the same personalized plates for almost 20 years. This will be the third set of plates I’ve had to get because the bureaucracy in Jeff City thought they needed spruced up.

You know, like adding a squiggle that symbolizes the Mississippi River and changing the color scheme. Real mission-critical stuff.

Is license plate redesign the #1 irresponsible use of state resources? No, but little things add up. We’ve got to point out the waste that nobody cares about to make the case for lower government spending, or at least diverting the money to better uses.

Speaking of little things that matter to me but not to many other people, as soon as I wrote that last post about how getting calls from strangers is a great source of information, some scammer starting calling my cell phone and asking for my relatives to call their 800 number. When I inquired what the call was regarding, I was told they can’t discuss it because of “privacy laws.”

I still think legitimate telemarketers are a good, but maybe we shouldn’t have all these complicated regulations for the fake ones to hide behind.