Prohibition Returns!

Reason Magazine's cover story this month is about the new prohibitionary movement gaining momentum across the US. They lead off with a story about a woman who was pulled over in DC after having a single glass of wine. Her BAC was .03, or less than half of the level of intoxication. She was arrested and ordered to attend a 12 week alcohol counseling course. When she refused, her license was suspended. Then the tale of a man in Pennsylvania who had his license taken after he told his doctor that he drank a six pack of beer a day. "State law requires doctors to report any of a patient's physical or mental impairments if the doctors think it could compromise his ability to drive safely" He had no convictions, his work attendance record was good, he had exhibited no history of anti-social behavior except drinking. From the article:

Neoprohibitionists aim to muddle the distinction between drunk diving and driving after drinking any amount of alcohol. Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) endorsed the idea at a Senate Environment and Public Committee hearing way back in 1997, contending that we "may wind up in this country going to zero tolerance, period." Former MADD President Katherine Prescott concurred, in a letter to the Chicago Tribune, where she stated "there is no safe blood alcohol, and for that reason responsible drinking means no drinking and driving."

I highly recommend reading the whole thing, especially the part about police in Fairfax county VA asking a woman in a restaurant who had just finished dinner and was enjoying her first drink to come outside and take a sobriety test.

I can only stress that as our government takes over our decision making process and becomes responsible for more of our lives, they will only continue to become more meddlesome. Already people justify these kinds of actions by saying that "we" pay for the hospital bills of people injured in accidents, so "we" have a responsibility help prevent drunk driving. As the state assumes new duties, it will use them to justify new powers.

British Cancer Survival Rates

Apparently, while I was gone, some fun figures came out about British health care. This is the best summary I have seen in my collection of feeds, and it contains some nice links to other stuff. From the Telegraph:

Cancer survival rates in Britain are among the lowest in Europe, according to the most comprehensive analysis of the issue yet produced.

England is on a par with Poland despite the NHS spending three times more on health care.

Survival rates are based on the number of patients who are alive five years after diagnosis and researchers found that, for women, England was the fifth worst in a league of 22 countries. Scotland came bottom. Cancer experts blamed late diagnosis and long waiting lists.

In total, 52.7pc of women survived for five years after being diagnosed between 2000 and 2002. Only Ireland, Northern Ireland, Scotland, the Czech Republic and Poland did worse. Just 44.8pc of men survived, putting England in the bottom seven countries.

And soon our government will be bringing the same quality care to our shores. Hooray!

Update: Just found a report that most senior NHS doctors have private insurance, thus avoiding themselves what their patients must undergo.

N.J. Senator Proposes Toy Gun Ban

This article would lead you to think that he only wants to ban realistic gun replicas (AKA the cool ones) but in the comments page for the Fark headline, the submitter claims that in a television interview the Senator claimed his bill would ban even the see-through plastic toy guns.

I can't even begin to express how stupid this idea is. To again cite Fark,"American history has shown that children with toy guns are bombs waiting to go off. I remember all the school shootings of the fifties fondly."

First Trans-Fat Statewide Ban?

Guess which state (or should I say Commonwealth) is moving towards banning those delicious fatty foods?

Hint:

Undercover Cops Monitor When Your Trash Goes Out

Via UPI

A local council in London is paying plainclothes officers £30,000 pounds ($60,000) a year to track down homeowners who take out their trash at the wrong time.
. . .
Citizens say city government is being too heavy-handed in its approach to trash collection rules.

"We are living in a world where everything we do is watched and regulated," said Christine Melsom, founder of a group that campaigns for council-tax reform. "George Orwell has arrived. If you go to work early it is difficult to get it right with the rubbish."

HT Reason

Woman Gets 27 Months in Jail For Buying Alcohol For 16 Year Old Son's Party

Apparently she lied to the parents of the other guests at the party, but she also collected keys at the door and no one drank to the point of legal intoxication. The prosecutor called it "the worst case of underage drinking he has had to deal with in 15 years."

As Radley Balko says, "Really? A party where not a single person was drunk, and not a single person drove home after having a drink, is the "worst case" he's dealt with in 15 years?" Some of the quotes from MADD and others are hysterical, in the literal sense. These people are nuts. Read the whole thing for a frightening look at how these people are demonizing alcohol. Get ready for this to be the target of the next public health crusade, as it already is in the UK.

The FDA and Tobacco

Multiple media outlets (USA Today, FOXNEWs, etc.) reported yesterday that a governmetn advisory panel has advised that the FDA should regulate tobacco:

"A government scientific advisory panel proposed sweeping changes Thursday to reduce the health burden of tobacco, which claims 490,000 American lives a year.

"The report from the prestigious Institute of Medicine calls on Congress to allow the Food and Drug Administration to regulate cigarettes as drugs and control the way tobacco is marketed. Authors from the IOM, a panel of independent experts who advise the government on health policy, say they aim 'to reduce smoking so substantially that it is no longer a significant public health problem.'"

The report suggested several specific steps to reduce tobacco use:

• Requiring all insurers — including the Medicare and Medicaid programs — to cover smoking-cessation programs.
• Licensing retailers that sell cigarettes, just as states issue licenses to sell alcohol.
• Raising cigarette taxes as much as $2 a pack, an effective way to reduce smoking.
• Dedicating $15 to $20 per capita annually of the proceeds from higher taxes or other resources to fund tobacco control efforts in each state.
• Banning smoking in all non-residential indoor areas.
• Limiting tobacco advertising and promotional displays to text-only, black-and-white formats.
• Launching additional efforts aimed at curbing youth interest in smoking and access to tobacco, including bans on online sales of tobacco products and direct-to-consumer shipments.
• Requiring new, large pictorial warnings on the harmful effects of smoking -- similar to those required in Canada -- on all cigarette packs and cartons.

So, the purpose of these changes would be to "reduce the health burden of tobacco." The question occurs to me: on whom is the burden? The individual or society? If the health burden of tobacco is on the individual (and assuming no one has forcibly detained the individual for a significant portion of his or her life, forcing them at gun point to smoke a pack or more a day), then it is a self-imposed burden.

One must ask, therefore, why society should try to "save" people from themselves.

{tangent}

As soon as one asks that question, however, it seems to me that they have a problem: that's no what anti-smoking activists want to do. They never say "we want to regulate this product to save people from themselves" rather, they say "we want to regulate this product to save people from the harmful effects of a product that is aggressively marketed by powerful corporations who control powerful lobbyists in Washington."

Anti-smoking campaigns seem to go to pain to gloss over the fact that people choose to smoke. Rather, they focus on everyone except the person who has actually chosen the activity (and the burden): the company that sold them the product, the government that allowed it to happen, etc.

I suspect that at least one reason for this tactic is that, generally speaking, people do not sympathize with people who get themselves into trouble (especially knowingly) and then want others to get them out.

{/tangent}

If someone has freely chosen to accept the consequences of their actions, why should others be taxed, or forced to pay higher insurance premiums, or not allowed to use their property in the way in which they wish, etc. in order to "make up for" the mistake of the individual?

If however, the health burden is on society (for example, in the form of increased health insurance costs or taxes on everyone in order to pay for the subset that smokes), then one must ask "why?" Why does society bear the burden of an individual's heath problem that was brought on by an extremely long series of decisions to smoke a cigarette? Perhaps a better way to discourage smoking (whether or not that in itself is a good end) would simply to shift the burden back to the individual by allowing insurance companies to offer people plans that do not cover smoking cessation programs nor smoking related health problems. The fact that these plans would be cheaper (and, therefore, attract a lot of eligible people away from other plans) would raise the cost of the plans that cover smoking - thus increasing the cost of smoking to the smoker.

In any event, it seems to me that this series of recommendations aimed at reducing smoking is another example (others being proposed bans on fast food and proposed bail outs for defaulting sub-prime mortgagees) of a mentality that the individual does not (or should not) bear the responsibility of their actions - rather, that responsibility is shifted to society (or the government), especially when, by "responsibility", we mean "burden".

This seems to me to be a variation on the theme of socialism (both in the economic and political senses) - mistakes are not punished, achievements are not rewarded. Everyone bears the burden of everyone else's problems (even when they are self imposed) and everyone gets to consume the fruits of everyone else's labor.

I Am Proud To Be A Marylander, But...

I would like to point out that I am from Anne Arundel County, not Montgomery County.

Study Shows That No One In My Family Will Ever Binge Drink

The BBC is reporting on a new study that finds teenagers drinking at home with their parents are less likely to binge drink. According to the study 75% of 14-year-olds had tried alcohol.

The question is: are they learning to drink from their parents in a socially responsible environment, or are they learning behind some bushes in the park, or in a bar where they should not be in the first place?

"The chances are if they are in the latter position they are learning to binge drink, they are hiding their drinking, they can't talk to their parents about it.

"Drinking in the home environment, if it is done properly, can teach young people respect for alcohol, and how to consume in moderation."

This leads to disagreement with an earlier call for Britain to prosecute parents who let their kids drink. If drinking at home decreases binge drinking (which for now is the kind of drinking we hate, until it becomes drinking in front of kids, or in public, or at a bar) then in the name of preventing binge drinking should we punish parents who allow it?

The researchers do, however, call for increasing the price of alcohol to prevent underage drinking. Which makes sense, since if there is one thing we can all agree on, it's that kids today have no way of getting their hands on controlled substances without buying them from properly licensed tax-paying stores, and it should cost more for mature individuals like me to have a night out. With your mom.

Blades Banned In England. Rakes and Hoe's Future Uncertain

Little known fact of the day: The UK, where handguns are illegal, is being swept by a wave of bladed violence.

One Brian Seaton spent nine months and £10,000 trying to clear up the legal mess created when he was arrested for carrying a Swiss Army Knife in public, a knife he received as a retirement gift after 20 years as a police officer.

Startled by this heinous crime, the UK government is trying to ban the sale of swords. When swords are outlawed, only outlaws will have swords, making outlaws that much cooler.

They claim that there have been over 80 serious crimes involving swords in the last four years. I find this hard to believe. After all, it is illegal to carry a sword in the UK. It would seem to be very hard to commit a "serious" crime with a sword without carrying it. I suppose you could mount the sword to, say, the front of a car, but that seems more hilarious than serious.

Resources Wasted on Taxes

Americans wasted 6.65 billion hours on their taxes this year. That is about 760,000 years. I say wasted because those hours did not produce anything of value. At all. It was a dead weight on society. This is one (and only one) of the reasons I dream of having one of those "taxes on a post card" plans implemented.

Of course all government spending is a dead weight on the economy. Some expenditures may be necessary (I am a libertarian, not an anarchist), but that does not make them productive. A police force may protect private property (when not confiscating it) and allow free interactions in a more organized and efficient way than would be possible in a dystopian, post-apocalyptic society, but other than the similar services provided by the justice system and military and maybe a few others, government expenditures are always a transfer of resources from those who own them to those who don't, usually with the result that they are used less efficiently than they would have been, and always with the overhead costs of government bureaucracy. Unless we evaluate those costs against the benefits program, we will continue to waste ever more of our efforts, resources, and time feeding monster that is our government.
HT Club for Growth

More of the UK Nanny State

From this FOXNews article:

Some of Britain's most socially incoherent families are in danger of being plucked from their homes and dropped into 'managed properties' that will teach them the values of being good neighbors, according to government housing plans announced on Wednesday."
...
"The 'respect agenda,' an effort introduced by Prime Minister Tony Blair in 2005, will set up 53 'managed properties' across the country. Their occupants will be identified as apathetic parents, rowdy ruffians and petty criminals. They will be allowed back into their communities if social workers from the Home Office determine they are fit to do so."
...
"They will be monitored by 'supernannies' who will conduct daily patrols on families and offer parenting advice and support.

I personally find this incredible. Perhaps there are many details of which I am unaware. Going simply off of what was in the article, it sounds like the idea is "let's find all of the worst people in terms of neighborly civility we can find, put them all in one place (referred to as "projects", no less), and wait for them to get better. Oh, and since it probably won't be an automatic phenomenon, let's through in some TV-style 'supernannies' to tell grown people how to act."

It seems to me that, for this project to even have a snowball's chance of working, there would have to be some compelling incentive for these people to "improve" or some compelling deterrent for them to remain the same. I don't really detect mention of either one of those in the article. Oh sure, they will be forcibly relocated, but I would guess that they're actually going to end up in nicer places that those which they left. No incentive/deterrent there. Again, I might not have all the facts, but there is also no mention of what happens if/when people don't "shape up" in a given amount of time. Are people confined to their supernanny's care indefinitely? Could they spend the rest of their lives there? Will the public continue to house them at no cost?

Oh wait, there's an incentive! Oh, darn, but it's an incentive for the wrong end. Oh well, we're the government, unintended consequences are part of our charter.