Op-Ed: How a Seinfeld Episode on Shower Heads Convinced me that Government has gone Astray
By Steve Levy
In one of the most classic of the brilliant Seinfeld episodes of the 1990's, we saw Kramer and Jerry in their unwashed, slimy hairdos conspiring to locate a high powered shower head on the black market after do-gooder politicians banned the product in a virtue signaling, but totally useless, effort to save the planet.
Watching this true to life episode play out confirmed to me how far off course government has veered from common sense, reality, and the wants and needs of the people.
A 1992 federal rule limited shower head water flow to a meager 2.5 gallons-per-minute, as a maximum flow rate. The Biden administration just stymied a measure by the previous administration to bring back our more robust showers.
Life can be downright frustrating at times, and there’s often nothing better than a short block of time each day to disappear from it all with a nice, hot, powerful shower. It’s a time to meditate, contemplate, plan, or just pretend you’re singing at Carnegie Hall.
But not if you’re freezing your behind off because you’re running from side to side to get enough drops to hit you.
Yet that now happens way too often, because decent shower heads have been prohibited, thanks to political morons trying to save the world at the expense of our daily joys.
I’m not saying that water conservation is a bad thing. Limit the watering of a person's lawn, if you must. But getting a good hot shower in the morning is not wasteful. It’s essential to getting us up and going so that we can be productive members of society and contribute mightily to keeping the world going.
Few things are more debilitating to an economy than having a bunch of greasy, irritated, moping folks around who are mad at the world because they didn’t get their cup of Joe in the morning - or a good hot shower.
Everything in politics - and life in general - is a cost-benefit analysis. We now know that the cost of shutting down schools during Covid was not worth whatever de minimis, or even phantom, safety they might have provided to kids under 12.
We have now, hopefully, learned that shutting down pipelines and preventing Americans from drilling for the gasoline and oil we need to run our cars and home heating systems is not worth the doubling of prices we now pay for these products.
We know that keeping a speed limit saves lives, but lowering it down to 40 miles an hour, while possibly saving more lives, would disrupt our way of life to such an extent that we won’t tolerate it.
So why are we passively allowing these activist politicians to take away our ability to have the daily pleasure of a forceful hot shower.
I’m all in with those who say to the government: “Keep your hands off my body and out of my bedroom.” And while you’re at it, keep them out of my bathroom as well.
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Steve Levy is President of Common Sense Strategies, a political consulting firm. He served as Suffolk County Executive, as a NYS Assemblyman, and host of "The Steve Levy Radio Show." He is the author of “Solutions to America’s Problems” and “Bias in the Media.” www.SteveLevy.info, Twitter @SteveLevyNY, steve@commonsensestrategies.com