Major Newspaper Posts How-To Video After Nanny State Oregon Lifts Ban on Drivers Pumping Own Gas

I grew up in New Jersey — which, along with 🌲Oregon, is one of the two states that ban or limit motorists’ ability to pump their own gas.

In 1949, Garden State lawmakers passed the Retail Gasoline Dispensing Safety Act, ostensibly pitched as a way to keep us rubes from setting ourselves aflame. In reality, it was unalloyed protectionism.

According to Mental Floss, a website specializing in little-known facts, a New Jersey gas station owner began attracting business by offering lower prices for self-service at a time when pumping your own gas was unheard of. Instead of competing with him, other gas station owners did the next best thing: They got politicians in Trenton to outlaw the practice.

Even as self-service pumping became virtually universal, however, the law remained on the books and still functions as a make-work program for those whose core competencies apparently don’t extend beyond putting gas in someone else’s car.

However, when I left New Jersey, I quickly realized the gas pump wasn’t a difficult thing to master. In fact, I got it on the first try. So do most people, which is why we don’t have an epidemic of newly licensed 17-year-olds going up in mushroom clouds of 87 octane.

Don’t tell that to 🌲Oregon’s largest newspaper, however, which is busy teaching the state’s residents how to use that tricky gas pump doohicky now that self-service is temporarily legal everywhere in the state.

For decades, self-service was illegal throughout the Beaver State. However, the state began allowing it in counties with fewer than 40,000 residents starting