New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine suffered severe injury in a car accident last week, and I wish him the quickest, most pain-free recovery possible. I feel for the friends and relatives forced to watch him suffer through his treatments as the doctors try to repair the damage. A car accident of that magnitude is a horrific trauma for anyone to go through, much less someone who must do so while under the media’s microscope.

It’s a bit crass to use a human tragedy to make a political point. But I’ve noticed no commentators mentioning the Obvious Unsaid of this case. Corzine, who governs a state with a seatbelt law and a strictly-enforced speed limit, disobeyed both. Plenty of us violate traffic laws, so I’m not criticizing Corzine for that.

When we have laws that regulate every minor detail of our lives, we break them. That’s not shocking. But having such laws in the first place corrodes the authority of all laws by encouraging disrespect for the law in general. If we assume that most people break minor laws, can we assume they will always obey major laws? And if we have a legal system that encourages us to distinguish between the laws we’re allowed to break and those we’re not, doesn’t that leave a lot of room for untrustworthy people to interpret things in a way we’d rather they didn’t?

The problem isn’t that Corzine was in a car going 91 miles an hour, it’s that the car was being driven by a member of the very police force that penalizes his state’s citizens for doing the exact same thing. And in a car going at that speed, the officer driving the car allowed Corzine to ride without a seatbelt after his state announced a “click it or ticket” crackdown on seatbelt scofflaws.

Again, I am not criticizing Governor Corzine for doing something that most of us also do at times. If he wants to drive around like that, then my biggest hope for him is that he gets home safely.

My problem is not with the governor or his actions, it’s with the Nanny State mentality that politicians like Corzine, Mayor Bloomberg and Governor Spitzer promote. Once we start giving government the power to regulate the manner in which we conduct one part of our personal lives, it becomes much easier for the next politician to argue that people should also support banning his pet irritant.

We’re already seeing that happen. First it was smoking, then it was foie gras, soft drinks, trans-fats, incandescent lightbulbs and aluminum baseball bats. The list of things politicians want to ban is growing at an alarming rate, and nothing seems to be standing in the way.

We don’t live under prohibition anymore, but the mentality that spawned it is alive and well. Today, it’s a prohibition on the margins of life, a prohibition of a thousand cuts. And for each new flag planted by the Nanny Staters, it becomes ever easier to seize additional territory.

And to add insult to injury, the people who set these rules always seem to avoid them.

That’s how we end up with politicians like Al Gore and John Edwards scolding middle-class Americans for their energy use while they occupy energy-guzzling mansions with multi-car garages that dwarf my apartment.

Hey, if they earned it, they deserve it. I won’t begrudge them their palaces if they’re willing to pay for them. But it would be nice if they took a break from acting like the enlightened ones who are going to save the world by telling everyone else how to live.

Oh, and one other thing...they can pry my incandescent bulbs from my cold dead fingers.