Great article in Reason about totalitarian public health
I just received my April issue of Reason Magazine, which has a great cover article titled An Epidemic of Meddling: The Totalitarian Implications of Public Health . Unfortunately Reason doesn’t make the latest issue available on their site until a month or two after publication, so I can’t link to the article itself.
Reason is a unique magazine for me. In recent years I’ve subscribed to The Nation, The New Republic, National Review, and the Weekly Standard. I found I consistently (but not always) disagreed with The Nation and TNR (in the case of The Nation, my disagreement was often blended with a combination of horror and amusement), and I consistently (but not always) agreed with National Review and the Weekly Standard. Reason is a different kind of magazine altogether.
Each issue contains a roughly even split of agreeable and disagreeable pieces, almost without exception cogently written and rationally defensible (”because Cheney eats kittens and hates black people”, while convincing, sadly doesn’t pass the Rationality Test). Reason articles tend to be strongly anti-war and pro-choice, with which I don’t agree, but they are also firmly committed to individual liberties and the (rhetorical, political, and social) fight against tyranny wherever it lurks, be it on the left or the right.
This month’s cover article is among the better pieces I’ve read in recent years. It notes the creeping totalitarian implications as ‘public health’ departs from its historical focus on communicable disease and takes on the epidemics of the 21st century, which turn out to be individuals making lifestyle choices the public health moralizers don’t agree with, like smoking, overeating, not wearing a seat belt, consuming trans fats, playing Grand Theft Auto, owning guns, running with scissors, and generally not being safe. It’s for the children, you see.
I recall clearly my first encounter with totalitarian meddlers. When I was a child living in Colorado, a seatbelt law was enacted, requiring drivers and front seat passengers to wear seatbelts, on pain of a traffic violation. I hadn’t formed any coherent libertarian philosophy at the time, but I recall how ridiculous the law seemed to me then, just as it does now.
It’s only gotten worse since then, with big cities like New York City (which is, to paraphrase Mike Bloomberg, the least free big city in America) and Chicago vying for bragging rights to various food and smoking bans. Just recently here in VA our benevolent masters gave us HB2422, which bans smoking in restaurants and bars that don’t explicitly permit it with prominent signage.
It’s quite disheartening to see our country take this turn. The Supreme Court can scour the emanations and penumbras of the Constitution to discover heretofore-unknown rights to privacy, abortion, sexual freedom, and (in the near future) same-sex marriage, but can find nothing in the Bill of Rights that proscribes the McCain-Fiengold First Amendment Reduction Act, the forcible taking of private property by eminent domain for private development, or the interference with or outright prohibition of individual lifestyle choices like smoking and eating trans fats and driving without a seat belt.
Make no mistake; totalitarian meddling won’t stop of its own accord. The same strained logic that allows the state to ban trans fats and make you wear a seat belt can compel you to exercise, take away your video games, restrict your entertainment options, monitor and coerce your food choices, ban your beer and whiskey, outlaw your religion, crush dissent, sterilize ‘high risk’ groups, and subjugate citizens to the benevolent tyranny of the state. If it gets really bad, they might even fuck with American Idol.
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