Most would say, "Oh, I'm sorry about that. Please, I beg your pardon for being a nosy nanny. Go on about your business."
That is, of course, if you are a bureaucrat institutionally vested in the regulatory state, a vote-catching demagogue politician, or a preening intellectual desirous of imposing through the coercive power of the government your vision of reality onto the rest of us poor unenlightened proles. In any of these circumstances deciding for individuals what one believes individuals are incapable of deciding for themselves is lauded as "progressive" and mindful of some nebulous notion of "social justice" and the common good.
The more government takes it upon itself---and we as a society ask it to take it upon itself---making decisions we individuals are best suited to make ourselves, the less free we become as a market economy, and society. From price controls to excessive regulation to protective tariffs, every choice that is removed from individuals acting freely and cooperatively interacting within a free market is a choice made on our behalf using coercion.
In a free society the consumer controls 100% of the market through free exchange; in a socialist state central planners control the market through the use of force. One is voluntary and the antithesis of everything a control freak would abide; the other is arbitrary and made to order for a control freak holding the regulatory reigns of power.
From Thomas Sowell's Intellectuals and Society
: "The fundamental difference between decision-makers in the market and decision-makers in government is that the former are subject to continuous and consequential feedback which can force them to adjust to what others prefer and are willing to pay for, while those who make decisions in the political arenas face no such inescapable feedback to fore them to adjust to the reality of other people's desires and preferences."
If only we could make those control freaks in government feel ashamed at being, well, control freaks over our otherwise free lives.
