Filler: Keep your hands off my Four Loko

On the face of it, the "nanny state" evokes a pleasant image. It brings to mind a program providing home health care workers to bathe, towel and powder me, swaddle my body in terry cloth, and rock me to sleep on their laps. Such a program would be scrumptious, and cut down on my wife's workload.

But that's not what people are talking about when they decry the attempts of our governments - local, state and national - to create a nanny state. They're griping in response to laws restricting our behavior, and quite a bit of the time, they're talking nonsense.

While government overreach is real, ridiculous and should be fought, it's only fair to apply the term "nanny state" when the law in question protects adults from themselves.

Take, for instance, the passing of a law against smoking on the street in part of the business district of Great Neck and a proposed bill that would ban lighting up on outdoor Long Island Rail Road platforms.

The people in favor of these laws don't want to protect smokers from themselves. They want to protect themselves and other nonsmokers from having to breathe in secondhand shmutz.

They couldn't care less if the smokers in question develop cancerous lung lesions the size of yams. They just want the pollution out of their sniffer range.

For smokers old enough to remember when it was OK to light up in planes, hospitals and nursery-school productions of "The Farmer in the Dell," such laws might feel silly. Yet they are not manifestations of a nanny state.

But the recent decision to ban the sale of caffeinated alcoholic beverages like Four Loko locally is a manifestation of the nanny state, even if it seems to make more sense than the outdoor smoking prohibitions. Caffeinated alcoholic beverages are legal and contain the same active ingredients we've been quaffing in Irish coffee and rum and Coke for ages. It's not a good idea to drive, operate heavy machinery or even play a particularly vigorous game of Twister after drinking eleventeen of them, but if you just want to sit and chug Four Loko in the den in front of a "Jerseylicious" marathon on cable, it's really not society's business.

A law redesigning cars so one can't start them while legally drunk? That's not nanny state, because the point is protecting people from each other. A law against repeatedly smacking your own head with a snow shovel to appease the gods and hasten the appearance of spring? That is nanny state, because the point is protecting people from themselves.

At the core of the issue is an integral societal question: What are our governments supposed to do?

They're supposed to take on responsibilities that simply must be handled collectively, like national defense, law enforcement, building and maintaining infrastructure, education and environmental protection. They're also supposed to protect us from each other, and look out for children. They're not supposed to provide for our every need, or protect us from ourselves.

Nanny state laws are wrong - all of them - but we can't lump every behavioral statute in that class. One person's liberty ends where it infringes on another's. People should not and cannot be allowed to do things that make the lives of others less safe or even, in some cases, less pleasant.

This is, admittedly, a philosophy that leaves me without that government-funded employee to handle my bathing, powdering and swaddling, but I'm fine with that. My wife, on the other hand, has concerns.