What would you say about a mother who let her nine-year old son find his way home via the New York City subway system?

I read Lenore Skenazy's story in the current issue of Reader's Digest (story not online), wherein she talked about the New York Sun article she wrote earlier this year about the experience. It was titled "Why I Let My 9-Year Old Ride the Subway Alone."

I don't have a nine-year old child nor do I live in New York City, so I don't know if I would have made the same decision. But there's something about the experience that speaks to public policy generally.

After her Sun article, Skenazy appeared on The Today Show, MSNBC, Fox News, NPR and a host of other media outlets. Reflecting on the media frenzy, she writes for Reader's Digest:

Worldwide, we have become terrified for our children. The things we did as kids without thinking twice--walking to a friend's house, playing in the dark, staying out till the streetlights come on--have somehow morphed into acts of daring on part with shark hunting in a hamburger suit.

She blames our media-saturated culture--specifically, cable TV shows (though Nancy Grace and Greta Van Susteren go unnamed, they are perhaps the exemplars of this form of journalism)--for scaring us silly.

In her defense, Skenazy says that child abduction is much more likely to be perpetrated by someone who knows the family rather than a stranger. I believe the same is true for child molestation.

But parents, Skenazy implies, have let the few, spectacular, and extreme cases ruin childhood and haunt our lives.

Now to make a big jump, our public policy sometimes operates the same way. Sometimes? Way too often. One person may make a bad decision, suffer an accident or be damaged by the occasional shady businessman--and then we impose regulations, ban activities that are normally safe, and in general, depend on laws and government programs to save us from any and every trouble.

The problem is that such faith brings out troubles of its own: the politicization of social disputes; rent-seeking by large companies that use regulations to squash start-up competitors; a population that doesn't have the money or the inclination left to save for its own retirement. The list goes on.

Bad things happen to good people. That's unavoidable in this life. Weep with those who weep, comfort the afflicted, and make just laws. But in seeking to use law and government to address every problem, we've lost a lot along the way.