Preferences Masquerading as Science
Tuesday 26 March 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized
The culture war dressed up as SCIENCE. Nick Gillespie at Reason:
On a recent episode of Fox News Channel’s Geraldo at Large, Ann Coulter squared off against Nanny State enthusiast MeMe Roth regarding New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s crusade against just about everything. It’s an interesting segment, not least of which because Coulter is totally right (!). Here’s a partial transcript courtesy of Mediaite’s Andrew Kirell:
[. . .]
When Roth made the claim that bans on various unhealthy activities are warranted because “we pick up the tab” for other’s bad habits, Coulter countered that “I think you’re going to have to do something about the gay bathhouses.”
“AIDS is very expensive, and if I’m paying for it, how about discouraging that behavior?” she explained.
Later, while clarifying that she doesn’t actually want to ban homosexual activity, she told Roth, “If you’re argument is ‘Smoking: we all have to pay,’ then why not ‘Sodomy: we all have to pay.’” She told Roth that a consistent position on “nannying” would require her to be “anti-bathhouses” in addition to anti-smoking.
For her part, Roth sticks to the point that because of socialized medicine, we’re all picking up the tab for other people (she ignores data suggested elevated health risk factors for gay men). Coulter goes out of her way to say that she doesn’t want to ban anybody from doing anything – she wants to de-socialize health-care systems so these sorts of things are not political issues.
[. . .]
The logic of the nanny staters should compel them to target all sorts of behaviors to which they give a pass – really, why not ban skiing if you’re against activities that cost the rest of us money? That nanny staters routinely focus things such as smoking, drinking, gambling, TV watching, weight issues, and the like strongly suggests an implicit class bias in which relatively wealthy and politically connected elites are simply enforcing their preferred lifestyle choices over the less powerful. It has nothing to do with “public health” or helping people. As I suggested earlier today in regard to Bloomberg’s soda ban -which would do absolutely nothing to slim waistlines in New York – it’s about elevating personal preference to the status of scientific decree.
They aren’t concerned about waistlines or health issues; they’re concerned about forcing their predilections on the masses through the force of government. The answer is not to force or ban certain behaviors on people in order to minimize our burden in paying for their health care, but to not be forced to pay for their fucking health care. Socialized health care is not about “taking care of each other”, but about gaining more control over society in the name of minimizing costs.
2013-03-26 » madlibertarianguy