Our hyperactive, grasping federal government has inserted its wasteful, probing fingers into just about everything these days.

I hadn’t been to an eye doctor in a while, and so when I went recently I was surprised to be presented with these two forms:

The first form claims that electronic transmission of prescriptions “helps protect the privacy of your personal information.” That strikes me as plainly false—an old-fashioned piece of paper with my eye information couldn’t get hacked on the Internet or wouldn’t be sent to the government. The form lists the supposed benefits of e-prescribing to the patient. On net, the benefits may indeed outweigh the costs—but then we wouldn’t need a federal mandate to bring it about.

Like many Americans, I find the second form regarding race rather offensive. It would be one thing if university researchers were surveying a sample of patients for such information in order to study eye diseases that may vary by personal characteristics. But reading between the lines on this form, the government appears to be collecting the information not for medical research, but essentially for socialist planning purposes.