A recent proposal showcases the lawmakers’ ham-fisted attempts at psychological manipulation.

Imagine the average functioning adult. Now picture her day: She rolls out of bed in the morning, one she presumably purchased, in a residence she either rents or owns. She engages in basic hygiene rituals with products she has chosen from a range of competing offerings. Maybe she makes herself a coffee or a bowl of cereal before heading out to work — all of which are priced according to market signals and bought following a deliberative process on her part. She hops into some mode of transportation that is optimized for her needs and her budget. Let’s say it’s a personal car. Now, let’s locate our heroine in Colorado. There, she will soon pull into a local gas station where, despite all the cumulative and informed decisions that got her there in the first place, she will soon be confronted with the degree to which her government thinks she is a drooling ignoramus.

If Colorado’s Democratic lawmakers have their way, state residents will soon have to fork over their tax dollars to support an initiative aimed at warning drivers that their avaricious gasoline consumption habits are harming their neighbors and killing the planet. At least, if a house-passed bill clears the state senate, that’s what a new sticker soon to adorn their local gas pumps will blare.

The Cool Down has the details:

The proposed sticker would read: “WARNING: Use of this product releases air pollutants and greenhouse gases, known by the state of Colorado to be linked to significant health impacts and global heating, respectively, pursuant to section 25-5-1603, C.R.S. Tampering with this label is a violation of section 18-4-510, C.R.S.”

Gas stations that fail to comply with the new regulation will face the prospect of fines for violating Colorado’s statutory proscriptions on deceptive trade practices and false advertising. That’s right: If the government doesn’t force private businesses to inform consumers that the combustion of fossil fuels produces by-products such as carbon monoxide and CO₂, Colorado lawmakers assume the public would be ignorant of their own recklessness.

Now, it’s not impossible that Colorado’s Democrats genuinely believe that their state is populated by a mob of baleful idiots who cannot navigate the elementary features of daily life without a government minder holding their hands. We can’t rule that out. But it’s even more likely that this is just another effort by Democrats to make the choices consumers make marginally more expensive so that they will engage in other behaviors that Democrats do like. As the bill’s sponsors confess, the warning labels “may encourage consumers to reduce their consumption” of gasoline and “to use alternative products when appropriate.” Toward that end, forcing fuel retailers to purchase, affix, and maintain those labels and pass on the man-hour and material costs to the consumer, however minimal they may be, couldn’t hurt.

The ham-fisted attempt at psychological manipulation is grating enough. This tendency is, however, rendered even more obnoxious by the extent to which the people who engage in this sort of surreptitiousness think you’re too stupid to notice it.

Regardless, Coloradans should have more self-respect. There will be plenty who convince themselves that initiatives like these are aimed not at them but some ill-defined contingent of morons whose bad decisions the rest of us need to be protected from. If that is your supposition, you are precisely the sort of person this order is aimed at.

As I wrote in a recent issue of National Review:

Those who think they can work you like a marionette are possessed of an abiding belief that they are a better class of operator — smarter, cleverer, and more intellectually nimble than the average American. And they receive reinforcement for this view from their allies on social media, who, for reasons that are entirely elusive, seem to believe that they have sorted themselves into American society’s upper castes.

“If you are truly convinced that everyone else is dumber than you, it is you who have succumbed to a delusion,” that piece concludes. “It’s an unfortunate consequence of that misbelief that you’re also likely to be the last one to know it.” If Coloradans hope to be spared the overweening contempt of their elected officials, somebody ought to buy them a subscription.