So, the Hummer is about to die…big deal! After all, President Obama bailed out GM, and with oil prices soaring once again, there is no one willing to buy the Hummer brand to continue manufacturing a known gas guzzler. C’est la vie!

Comedian Penn Jillette had a great take on this in his recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, when he said that while there would be some sadness with the loss of a business, the Hummer vehicles have added up to nothing but gas guzzlers. Jillette also pointed out that government rules are also taking away from our freedoms too.

But if any part of the Hummer going belly-up are those government rules we’re putting in on miles per gallon, or us taking over of GM, then I’m not just sad, I’m also angry. Lack of freedom can be measured directly by lack of stupid. Freedom means freedom to be stupid. We never need freedom to do the smart thing. You don’t need any freedom to go with majority opinion. There was no freedom required to drive a Prius before the recall. We don’t need freedom to recycle, reuse and reduce. We don’t need freedom to listen to classic rock, classic classical, classic anything or Terry Gross. We exercise our freedom to its fullest when we are at our stupidest.

There’s a lot of bad stupid around. Really bad stupid. But we can’t stop the real horror by stopping just-plain-stupid stupid. We’re not going to stop overseas wars by stopping people from driving big stupid cars. As long as we think that “nation building” is part of our destiny, no amount of independence from foreign oil is going to stop us from getting into meddling, expensive, immoral foreign wars. As long as we let terrorism fill us with terror, we’re not going to get our nonstupid freedoms back. Our government declaring that we need alternative energy sources, and betting our money on who might get a smart idea, is not going to give smart people smart ideas. It’s really easy to see stupid all around us, but I don’t think we want to be too quick to stop it. We need to protect other people’s stupid to save freedom for all of us.

I have to admit that Jillette’s response to the Hummer and the fact that our freedoms are constantly being destroyed by the government are spot on.