Who Banned Common Sense?
By Repair Man Jack Posted in Archived | Spotlight Blogs — Comments (30) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
Promoted from the Diaries
Something has happened to freedom in modern America. There seems to be less of it, and we don’t all seem to know how. There certainly has been a slight but undeniable Osauma Bin Ladin tax; levied against our individual rights, since the attacks of 9/11. However, the people keeping us down today aren’t from the Middle East, don’t speak Farsi, unless they came by it from their family, and are not oppressing the masses in hopes of imposing Sharia.
They do it for the children. They do it because they care. Anything that might hurt an ordinary American gets reflexively banned, or at least self-righteously demonized. This has become the chic way for an American political figure or public intellectual to demonstrate how much more than the rest of us they care.
Caring, in and of itself, is of a noble virtue. No one likes a pouting little kid who walks around griping. “I don’t care!”
It’s just that there is a right and a wrong way to care.
Read on.
The right way to care is painfully boring and requires an exhaustive weighing of the benefits versus the costs of an action before we go crusading athwart the windmills. One thing that not even Hans Guderian was a smart enough Nazi to ban was The Law of Unintended Consequences. Wise leaders and smart consumers of democratically elected governance understand this. That’s why I believe it was a good thing that the USEPA deliberated carefully before banning lead-based paint and gasoline.
This style of actually caring isn’t in vogue. Meryl Streep couldn’t stay awake long enough to do the analytical science necessary to decide whether or not banning Alar would help the planet. It was far more helpful to her lust for fame to testify ignorant before Congress. Perhaps she was merely doing as the Romans.
If The Republican Party ever wants a majority of Libertarians to view The Democrats as the Evil of Two Lessors, the GOP needs to stuff a plug in Mayor Bloomberg. His term in office has rendered a cogent argument on behalf of banning government bans. Jonah Goldberg presents an exhaustive list of one year’s catalog of Bloomberg Bans. Judging from Goldberg’s article, it’s fortunate no has offered him the idea of preventing forest fires by banning oxygen.
The government at all levels should sparingly use its power to ban things. The Nanny State can’t protect us all. The first time any of us get anywhere, some children are going to be left behind.
The consequences of stupidity can only be partially assuaged, and the temporary forestalling of natural consequence always comes at a price. A price that someone else, generally not engaged in stupid behavior, will usually wind up paying.
In our rush to ban the bad, we also lose our discriminatory capabilities that empower us to truly judge the good. The Elois are not protected, but rather fattened up some more for a future barbequing, when the Moorlocks have them over for dinner.
Government fiat will never permanently preserve us from individual consequence. It smacks of tyrannical overreach to even try. Our overly protective leaders, judges and legislators cannot ban negative outcomes. The only thing they seem to banish permanently is common sense.
The ACLU can only spot iniquity when approaches from one direction.
Praise the memory of Gerald Ford.
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Internet member since 1987
Member of the Surreality-Based Community
Someone has said that liberals want a "Mommy" government to take care of us and make us wear our mittens, while conservatives want a "Daddy" government to discipline us.
Libertarians, I guess, want Mommy and Daddy to go away and let us grow up.
... that we want every pregnancy to result in a being that lives to be 95. This is the downside of that expectation.
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We would also like to know your advice for somebody like my daughter, who's going to graduate in two years, advice that you would give a young person.
SEC. RUMSFELD: Advice for a young person. Study history.
That someone bears the label "Republican" and presides over the worst Nanny City in our country's history should make us all shudder.
Excellent points, but your writeup reminds me of the 1975 movie "Network," with its news anchor starting a nationwide trend by urging us to stick our heads out the window shouting "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore!" We were free to insert our own definition of what "it" is, and they often contradicted each other.
I dislike intrusive, paternalistic government moves, whether they're made in the name of our health OR in the name of homeland security. Here's for more conservative libertarians who oppose both the Nanny State AND the SWAT State.
That quote from Will Rogers was in the Patriot Post email I read this morning. Then I pop out to this site, and see this blog entry. It fits well, don't you think?
I am a smoker of those nasty things called cigarettes. They just banned these in all public places, and within 25 feet of any entryway, or window, or vent to the building. This for the purported reason of preventing that killer "second hand smoke" from entering the building. Yet nothing has been said about the automobiles, exhaust pumping out their tailpipes, sitting within five feet of those very same entryway, window, or vent. Indeed, common sense has left our elected officials.
Chuck
"Do not separate text from historical background. If you do, you will have perverted and subverted the Constitution, which can only end in a distorted, bastardized form of illegitimate government." --James Madison
"Living Documents" suffer this distortion.
Every generation of do-gooders in America begins from the premise that life right now is miserable and could be perfected if only there were enough laws, enough state intervention, enough programs to help people with every problem they encounter in life, enough self-help books to read, and enough empathy to make it all happen.
Each year, our colleges receive a new generation of young and idealistic, naive people who are on the cusp of rebelling against their parents and who go on to be taught and instructed by people who have largely lived their adult lives in the cocoon of a socialist state-within-a-state (if you don't think that's what higher education is, you are wrong.) And every new liberal politician needs to have an agenda and a list of accomplishments and programs they've spearheaded in order to get elected. Robert A. Hahn (pity he's not around these parts any more -- I'm missing him again) referred to this as the "ratchet mechanism" of government -- in which basically each election cycle under liberal governance we move one more click toward socialism and the Republican/Conservative intersticies serve only as a pause in that relentless ratcheting mechanism toward state totalitarianism.
The odd thing is that you're right -- without knowing how much they're losing, Americans are philosophically libertarian but operationally Statist. When it comes down to it, they *want* the government to take care of them, even as the other major dominant theme of our recent political experience has been distrust of government. It is at once our nemesis and our savior. Bill Clinton was the modern master of tailoring government to take care of every hangnail anyone in the country could ever have. If you read his State of the Union speeches and listen to him on talk shows, you'll see that his overwhelmingly compartmentalized mind really does "feel the pain" of everyone in America -- from the truck driver who doesn't have a nice enough seat in the cab to the single mom who has to juggle her kids and a job -- and he had a government program that would help.
Americans have become accustomed to that, and it's very tough to stop.
Has been technology, especially as it is becoming applied by law enforcement. The new model of law enforcement, as it is being applied in our large cities, is preemption of crime by making it impossible through continuous surveillance. Of course, there is a strong argument that this isn't making life any better or more civil -- because the foundation of individual ethics is the ability not to do wrong even though nobody is "looking." Instead, in many ways we have decided that ethics isn't worth teaching, and instead we need a nation of lawyers and continuous surveillance to effectively stop everyone from doing anything "wrong."
In 30 years, you won't be able to leave your house in America without literally every move you make and every breath you take being monitored by the government, regardless of where you live. It's almost that way in Britain already, but here's the question:
Are people any happier? Are they really more "free?"
My considered opinion is that the people who support these measures out of hand realize that the answer to both questions is actually "no." However, they support them because it gives them enormous POWER.
DNA markers will be taken from all newborns and put in a crime database. Just think how much safer we'll be. Someone commits a crime, leaves trace DNA and the deal is done. Makes police work effective, reduces the probability of arresting the wrong guy, etc.
People will jump on it like a duck on a june bug.
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If "pro" is the opposite of "con", what is the opposite of "progress"...
"In 30 years, you won't be able to leave your house in America without literally every move you make and every breath you take being monitored by the government"
Worse, the majority of the population (yes, including you and me), will find it scary, random and anarchic that just 30 years ago, people were able to wander -- just ANYWHERE they felt like without being monitored by the government's omnipresent machines. They'll tisk tisk about such a dangerous state being allowed. Sort of the way we react today to drunk driving.
It's becoming much more of a crutch for people than it should be.
And BTW that's exactly what I've thought regarding the future: imagine in 30 years you leave New York City and take a trip to Montana and suddenly, for the first time in your life, you realize that you're not being monitored every moment of every day.
And yet, we're rushing headlong into that in all our major cities. It's almost unstoppable because liberal mayors know that modern human beings are really fundamentally no different from the people who used to want to live in walled cities, except that now instead of the potential invaders, they're worried about each other.
It's more than a little sick.
... in 30 years it won't matter if you're in NYC or Montana. We'll all be required to wear subdermal transmitters the size of a rice grain that shows where we are 24/7. (Electronic monitoring of parolees today has done a good job of softening us up to the idea)
What -- you have a problem with that? You must be one of those wingnut/survivalist/criminal sorts! If you're doing nothing wrong, why should you have a problem being tracked constantly by the government? (sarcasm off)
They make the "dog-collar" set ups that get put on parolees. I tend to think the next big thing in hacking and sub rosa IT activity could be called "stealthing". That is, electronic warfare for the common man, so that Big Brother won't be able to spy on us and make sure we all chow down on our solyent green.
Harry Reid is to ethics reform what HIV was to free love!
I guess it won't be lon before they bring back Lead-based paint...
"The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal comfort... has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself."
--John Stuart Mill
And this is a very brief thumbnail sketch, but this is also why multiculturalism is really a mechanism for transferring power and individuality and freedom of choice away from people and to the elites: because in a multicultural society everyone is continuously more or less at odds with everyone else who believes "differently" and guess who the only people are who can arbitrate between them are? Again, it is the <1% of the population who "understand" each different cultural interpretation.
If you've never seen a Dean of a law school mandate that a leftist Constitutional Law professor change his exams. so that they're less offensive to lesbians, you don't know what I mean. Basically the idea behind multiculturalism is to require everyone to admit that no way of thinking or believing is better than any other way, sand off all the rough edges between different "cultures" and let the elites arbitrate between them. That's the plan.
Conservatives understand that if you don't have the freedom to fail you really don't have freedom.
Liberals just don't understand freedom.
Veritas magna est et praevalet.
Between the philosophies, perhaps. The difference between the people who follow said philosophies is less stark:
The Liberal looks at people and says, "What a bunch of morons! We must protect them from themselves because only we are smart enough to know what is good for them."
The Conservative looks at people and says, "What a bunch of morons! Maybe if we encourage them to think for themselves, the stupid ones will die off and we'll be left with a smarter populace."
"The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal comfort... has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself."
--John Stuart Mill
That way they could say see we told you so about evolution to the survivors.
Veritas magna est et praevalet.
I wouldn't say this is correct. Conservatives are generally not in favor of legalizing recreational drugs, while liberals are. I was under the impression that liberals made the argument that as long as it only hurts the user, then the user should be able to do it to himself lawfully.
Generally, Raven is right. On the issue of drug legalization though, the construct is upside down. I hadn't thought of it that way before...
And, as I'm sure you know, the conservative argument about not legalizing drugs is that they don't just hurt the user. They hurt the user's family, friends and community as well. There are huge indirect costs in lost productivity, DUI accidents, and increased medical costs due to addiction.
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If "pro" is the opposite of "con", what is the opposite of "progress"...
You could extend a lot of those arguments you just named though to tobacco though. The direct arguments are that second hand smoke hurts the community, smoking decreased individual savings, and greatly increases medical cost. Alcohol leads to DUI, loss of productivity, increased medical costs, and can be extended to hurting the community of the user. Conservatives are generally not in favor of banning alcohol or tobacco.
If you are making the indirect argument that legal drugs leads to other crimes, that sounds like a slippery slope. There are many things correlating with a higher crime rate, like a large income gap and a lack of social programs, but conservatives are generally not in favor of social programs and are apathetic regarding the size of an income gap. You could also extend your indirect arguments to having stricter gun control laws to reduce gun related crimes. Remember that even though the "bad guys" might not buy their guns legally from the stores, the guns they buy on the street corner originally came from a store. This would also run contrary to the conservative position as well.
I wouldn't say that generally Raven is right. I believe that both the general modern liberal and conservative views have inconsistencies in their viewpoints, and thus it is hard to make accurate generalizations like Raven has tried to.
Even against that argument. Could it not, easily, be argued that drugs help maintain their control over an essentially braindead populace?
"The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal comfort... has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself."
--John Stuart Mill
is that it can be used to justify just about anything. In the cases cited, who is to say that one persons freedom to smoke outweighs the freedom of those around him not to have him smoke? In a densely populated area like NYC that is not a rhetorical question, and Bloombergs actions have majority approval in most cases. That is, they are seen as "common sense".
Your comment reminds me of why I sometimes wish the US was more a Republic; and less a Democracy.
Praise the memory of Gerald Ford.
If you always find yourself arguing the exceptions rather than the rule you just might be rapidly sliding down your own slippery slope to irrelevance. -CommonCents
It reminds me about an argument I recently had about public smoking bans. My friend took a position for them, and I was against gov't (in this case, the state of South Carolina) banning it.
www.fairtax.org
Sick of Government Expansion? libertarian-Minded Republican? Check This Out... Republican Liberty Caucus!!!
www.rlc.org http://www.republicanliberty.org/
Unfortunately, people in the US seem to want to be cared for. Isn't it interesting that we never hear a word from the civil liberties crew about Bloomie and the Bans. The left doesn't want us to protect national security by intercepting international communications, but they seem to have no problem with banning "foie gras; pedicabs in parks; new fast-food restaurants in poor neighborhoods".
Don't expect it to stop any time soon.
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If "pro" is the opposite of "con", what is the opposite of "progress"...