Whenever a proposal is advanced to expand government oversight over activities such as child rearing, education and health care — and this includes subjects like euthanasia or family abuse — those who want to leave major choices to individuals or families, despite the fact they may sometimes or often do the wrong thing are described as uncaring, and ‘regressive’. In contrast, those who wish to shift the power of decision to government are characterized as “compassionate”, “enlightened” or “progressive”. And since there are often cases when government does better than individuals the substance of the decision can be argued back and forth.
One of the arguments for centralizing power in government is that it reduces variance. People get ‘standard’ care, which is ‘equitable’ and predictable. This is contrasted with the wider distribution of outcomes when the same decisions are left to individuals. In the health care debate for example, there are people who obviously get great health care and others who get relatively bad insurance. Wouldn’t it be better if the variance were reduced by a government program?
Left out of this argument is the idea of systemic risk. Leaving decisions to individuals makes it unlikely that they will all get it right but it equally implies they almost never get it all wrong. Society based on individual choices has a diversified portfolio of outcomes. In contrast if a government gets it wrong, it goes spectacularly wrong. Let’s forget about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for a moment; turn our eyes away from Barney Frank and look across the Atlantic to the UK’s ironically named Office of the Public Guardian.
A secret court is seizing the assets of thousands of elderly and mentally impaired people and turning control of their lives over to the State – against the wishes of their relatives.
The draconian measures are being imposed by the little-known Court of Protection, set up two years ago to act in the interests of people suffering from Alzheimer’s or other mental incapacity.
The court hears about 23,000 cases a year – always in private – involving people deemed unable to take their own decisions. Using far-reaching powers, the court has so far taken control of more than £3.2billion of assets.
The cases involve civil servants from the Office of the Public Guardian (OPG), which last year took £23million in fees directly from the bank accounts of those struck down by mental illness, involved in accidents or suffering from dementia. …
The organisation has 300 staff, costs £26.5million a year to run and is headed by £80,000-a-year career civil servant Martin John, a former head of asylum and immigration policy in Whitehall. It prepares reports for the Court of Protection, based in a tower block in Archway, North London.
This anonymous bureaucracy was set up to protect the elderly from their relatives. There are almost certainly a considerable number of no-good, low-down and grasping relatives who are raiding their impaired parent’s estate. But there were also a great many relatives who acted honorably and even self-sacrificially to care for their aging relatives as well as possible. As the article notes that “opposition politicians said the system, set up by Justice Secretary Jack Straw, needed to be overhauled to take account of the fact that most people were ‘honourable and decent’ and had their loved ones’ best interests at heart.” By creating a bureaucracy to handle what was formerly a family affair the UK did away with variance and replaced it with standardized, soulless and allegedly shabby treatment. The progressives spread the good news that we’re all going to eat the same dinners. The bad news is that it may uniformly be gruel.
The problem of process haunts every “progressive” proposal, especially life and death matters because ultimately “death panel” and euthanasia orders have to be written out by bureaucrats just like the guys you have down at the DMV or the Post Office. And while you probably might prefer to trust the clerk at the DMV over some of your relatives, if you are parent of loving children you will be S.O.L. if the decisions over your welfare are taken from your son and daughter and handed over to the bureaucrat, who might decide your fate on a Monday while eating coffee and donuts, hung over from the weekend. Once upon a time people feared giving the government power over their lives. They insisted for example on extensive due process before you could condemn a Charles Manson to death — and he wasn’t. But today compassion can give the government power over granny that we would never give it over a suspected terrorist in Guantanamo Bay.
One can make the argument that government should act only in cases of compelling public interest and not when someone makes the argument from putative reasons of ‘compassion’ or good feeling. Too little law is often a bad thing. That’s why Wyatt Earp was hired back in the Wild west. With respect to reducing the scope of choice to one bureaucratically mandated process, too much law may be a bad thing too. When we put all our eggs in one basket be ready to make a big, big omelet.
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This fits nicely with a recent post at Powerline by Paul Rahe. He discusses the fact that it is due to federal law that universities cannot inform parents of their students about anything of the student’s condition.
The originator of this law was WF Buckley’s brother, James Buckley, libertarian.
The idea was to tie federal funding to “privacy” protection: so if a college receives federal funds, they can disclose nothing about the student to anyone.
But is such a law really libertarianism when it uses the federal government to strongarm schools or parents? Yes, the federal govt has a right to say what happens with its largesse, but since it cannot be kept shackled small enough to not invade all levels of life, we find that even here, a supposed attempt to be libertarian was really a way to invade the autonomy of schools and the autonomy of families.
Society is crowded out everywhere the state steps in, even if that state steps in to “protect your rights”. (The revent Voting Rights stories fit this well, too.)
Inside the university, the damage is great. Even for “a good cause” of “more liberty” for the student, what’s been created is a set of perverse incentives where guardians cannot intervene if their college student child is in trouble; where universities cover up legion of student problems and where they eventually take on the role of surrogate parent, also without informing the actual parents, when their own reputations or endowments are at stake.
can the clock be turned back? Not in Britain, it seems. Not in education here in the US, either.
Sigh. The link to the powerline post is here.
“Please Sir. May I have some more?”
There is no innovation without variance – and on both tails. This is the hallmark of any system that generates a large number of outcomes, and chooses the best (or worst) among them, showing the way for others to advance. It’s just as important to have failure as success, because that shows what NOT to do just as surely as success shows a better way. Biology, economics, and warfare are all examples of this model. The most spectacularly successful organisms on the planet are bacteria or viruses that reproduce fast and mutate often: many, if not most, of them die quickly, but every so often, you get a spectacular success that paves the way for future generations. I supsect that a hazy notion of this is what lies at the heart of liberal platitudes about why “diversity” is good, but in the liberal world, “diversity” is just another excuse for failure, not an experiment in success.
Lack of variance is useful when certainty is at a premium. It is a must for starting full-scale production of any manufactured item: a single bad example of a product can destroy the reputation of the entire line. It’s necessary when you want to mass-produce and you don’t care about innovation anymore. But it occurs at the tail-end of development: the life-cycle of any product ideally starts with free-wheeling innovation and ends with no innovation being tolerated at all. It’s an End of History formula. Variance is dynamism, and dynamism leads to improvement. Lack of variance is stagnation, and is only permissible when there is no expectation of competition. Eventually, it means extinction.
All of life is an arms race. You stagnate, you die. Dynamism may be hard on individuals, but it’s good for communities. Stagnation may be good for individuals (for awhile), but it’s hard on communities, and eventually, it’s really, really hard on individuals, too.
Two words:
Watch “Brazil”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xNnRBksvOU
So then, do you Mr. Wretchard think the Australian government should butt out of the affairs of Australia’s aborigines and allow them to continue doing what comes naturally — smoking and drinking themselves into early graves, beating their women and raping their children while doing so?
It boils down to whether one trusts one’s own judgment or whether one trusts an expert opinion over one’s own judgment. The centralization of authority is inherently elitist; it presumes that the judgment of an administrator is superior to that of individuals. It is quite ironic how Marxist ideologues create repressive centers of power in the name of seeking the overthrow of repressive centers of power. Marxists would talk of seeking the “withering of the state”, yet under Marxist leadership the state never withers but grows instead.
If the Obama admistration were smart, it would point out how private insurance companies have already appropriated much of the power of socialized medicine and that government control would merely change the bureaucratic machinery. However, it is becoming increasingly obvious that a hidden agenda is at work. The present “health care debate” looks less like an attempt to seriously reform the health care industry and more like a hatchet job on the health insurance industry on behalf of the car insurance industry. Has anybody noticed how the Obama administration isn’t pushing for a “public option” for car insurance? Has anybody noticed how we aren’t hearing complaints about how car insurance corporations are making huge amounts of money? (And certainly not on MSNBC…) Given the prominence of executives from Progressive and Geico in the Obama coalition, this should not be a surprise.
Isn’t this precisely the question? Hobbes might say we need lots of government to keep mankind from hurting each other in the “state of nature.” Rousseau might say that government is precisely what is spoiling the state of nature that allows for the “noble savage.” Locke might say that with the consent of the governed a happy medium may be found. But Hayek might say that the governed will consent to more and more hand-outs and gradually consign themselves to a modern form of feudalism, with the central government playing the role of provider and turning citizens into serfs.
The genius of America was to trust no one and everyone. But the concepts in the Declaration and the rules in the Constitution have been eroding for at least 75 years, and at an accelerating pace over the past dozen. Now we have elected a truly radical administration that appears to me to believe that the humility and caution and balance the Founders tried to create is some combination of unfair and inefficient.
We need more of these sound discussions to illustrate why the drift to centralization and anti-individual algorithms will lead to ruin despite their initial seeming attractiveness.
We also need to accept that there are gaps and side-effects of all systems. Variance permits creativity. And there are great ironies in history.
For example, Chartres was built because the funds that supported its construction were NOT distributed equally to the peasants. And the beautiful parks in London were preserved and are available to us today because the Kings of England wanted nearby places to hunt and did not permit the poor to build houses there. Equality is a good virtue. Uniformity is not. The former gives everyone a chance. The latter destroys it.
Great medical advances were made because creative physicians and other scientists rejected the uniformity of the algorithms of their day. See Ludwik Fleck’s masterpiece, “Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact.”
A great math professor I know once began a lecture by showing a picture of two watches, one analog and one digital. He pointed out that the wearer of the digital watch only knows what time it is RIGHT NOW. The wearer of the analog watch is aware of past, present, future, and the perspective of how the immediate time relates to them. Partly out of the digital orientation of Generation X and Y, partly as a result of such subversives as Eckhart Tolle, partly from the incompetent way history is taught in schools, partly because traditions (including all those “dead White European males”) are regarded with such contempt, we have lost the ability to think deeply and with wide perspective.
Social policy is made to fix something right now, and damned be the consequences. Except of course, if a myth can be made up about the future (eg. Global Warming) that allows for the dismantling of the economy and thus the limitation of freedom for the individual.
My guess is that aborigines would act like normal Australians if they were treated like them. A former minister of aboriginal affairs told a dinner audience I attended that an aboriginal elder, who was his personal friend, took him aside one day. They went off somewhere and the aborigine told the minister, “you know, why don’t you treat us like white fellas?” And the minister replied more or less that “I want to but I can’t”.
If you spend most of the time telling a human being he is an “aborigine” instead of “Frank” or “Bill” he starts acting like this stereotype instead of like Frank or Bill. Frank and Bill want to grow up to be doctors or airline pilots. An aborigine is supposed to do something else. There’s nothing genetic about human behavior. We are almost completely reprogrammable. I met a Mexican who grew up just across the fence in Laredo. He didn’t leave the house much and watched the same TV programs as people across the fence on the US side. He told me that he was ten before he realized that he was a Mexican.
I remember laughing idiotically at the story. It was the funniest thing I heard in my life. He probably felt he could tell me this, and I would understand. I suppose I did. Another time a European friend told me how he was taken to a fancy restaurant when he was just coming of age. They expected him to order wine. He wanted a Coca Cola.
The saddest thing in life, I think, is to be a European aristocrat and to want a Coca Cola; the next saddest thing is to be an aborigine and want to grow up to be an airline pilot.
This UK Office of the Public Guardian appears to be no guardian at all. This so called guardian office appears to be The Sick and Elderly Tax Agency. It could be even described as a confidence game.
I would hope someone would stop the big 0 from implementing such a “guardian agency” in the USA. Power corrupts. Absolute power absolutely corrupts.
A pity sir, he gravely said
Your mum is round the bend
She’s acting queerly in the head
Who knows where it will end
She’s just a little dottie now
But in a few short years
She’ll try but she will know not how
And burst in bitter tears
I’ll care for her like she did me
Spoke up her loving son
I love her, sir, why can’t you see
I’ll do what needs be done
Ah no the Guardian did smile
We’ll take care of your mum
She’ll stay with us for little while
For just a tiny sum
We have her welfare in our hearts
I’m sure you will agree
That families care in fits and starts
With us your time is free
Think of us as a family jewel
Your mum will be just fine
We’ll need her assets so if you’ll
Sign on the dotted line
We’ll get her off into our care
With others of her kind
And like them all she’ll sit and stare
We’re sure that you won’t mind
And when her time on earth is done
She’ll leave us with a smile
You may be sure, devoted son
We’ll send her off in style
Dear Wretchard,
I love the way you think. Please keep up the good work!
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
- Juvenal
England’s “Green and pleasant land” was going to be “a land fit for heroes.”
The problem with bureaucracy is that as an organization grows it must devote an increasing proportion of its energy to regulating itself. The dysfunctional burrow in and know that they are less likely to be held accountable in a large organization than if they were personally responsible. The most dysfunctional find the safest place to be is in setting and administering the rules for everyone else so they gravitate to the Human Resources department and control the organization through a network of Equal Opportunity, speech codes, and benefits programs. If the organization did impose controls so draconian as to ensure efficiency over the workers, if Brazil’s Mr. Kurtzmann was able to keep staring at his teeming mobs, the process would be executed but then there would be no capacity for the Manager to focus on the purpose of the procedures. Think of the agency as being like a great ship that needs both motive power and direction. Managers can provide the former through the staff or the later but not both.
In a Democratic Republic with a free market the people choose representatives, who receive constant feed back and information about the conditions they are supervising, who provide direction and the power to get things done for the good of all is provided by individual labor motivated by Smith’s Invisible Hand. In a Totalitarian Collective direction is provided by a self replicating authority that is increasingly ignorant of what social conditions really are. If Stalin only knew. Activity, like in the Red Army, substitutes for achievement of a focused goal.
This problem becomes most extreme in a government setting because there is no market information providing corrective data that a manager could use. The only inputs into the system that are considered are very belated political consequences of failure and ambiguous reports of the scope of the problem that are normally used to justify the expansion of an agency that was expected to reduce a condition that has instead expanded under the bureaus watch.
The problem does exist in private agencies. General Motors, US Steel, Railway Express, the Pennsylvania Railroad, all failed because they could not prove nimble enough to adapt to changing conditions.
Hopefully evolving technology will increasingly empower the ability of people acting as independent entrepreneurs to provide services so that managers will be able to focus on the Why? question and not be distracted by personnel administration. The expansion of government is a rear guard effort by those who thrived under the bureaucratic model to choke off the threat of an alternative and more promising economy.
Well, since some here are waxing philosophical over bureaucracy’s ills I’ll add my bit. As a (now retired) DMV mid-level manager I can affirm the further downstream one is from the “hub” or “headquarters”, the better – or more equitable – the individual outcome. But “hub” staff fight this tendency tooth and toenail. They see no value in “equity”. “Uniformity” is the flag they salute!
God pity the nation that chooses the DMV to administer it’s health care.
Eleven years ago I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. My disease was moderate, requiring only low level medication, excercise and dietary changes. I saw my doctor once a year, had blood tests performed, got my prescriptions and went about my life.
A few years ago the doctor told me I had to be seen twice a year and needed much more extensive blood tests each visit. When I asked doc if my condition had changed she said no but that the insurance companies demanded that all type 2 diabetics be treated the same as the severely diseased. She had to practice “check box medicine” where the insurance companies defined testing and treatment based upon symptoms presented. She had no latitude in my treatment regimen. Needless to say, my annual treatment costs have doubled as a result. Modern medicine is geared towards the average just like education…and we are poorer because of it.
Greifer with repect to the Buckley student privacy issue the student may wave the restriction and if you are paying the freight or a significant portion thereof you certainly have the moral right to insist that they do.
Parent and students were clearly informed of both the amendments restrictions and the waiver clause at my son’s orientation a few years back and parents were encouraged to insist their sons and daughters sign it.
In our particular case my son was attending with a substantial merit scholarship (OK this is really secondary price discrimination by a vendor looking for a particular clientele that would enhance the vendors marketability but merit scholarship sounds better) and the scholarship required he maintain at least what we called in ye olden days a “Gentleman’s C”. OK that’s not too hard to do especially at todays colleges and universities even at a noted party school but still it was a standard a number of wouldbe sophmores didn’t manage to muster after seeing Bourbon St one time too many. I simply turned to my son and said, “You don’t need to sign the waiver. I don’t care what your grades are its your life and your scholarship, but if you lose it you will be back in my basement, in the military, or relying on “the kindness of strangers” so fast it will make your head spin.”
He laughed when I said that but apparently when he saw his mid-term grades he became monkishly devoted to his library carel. Ever after he determined that the stress of the second half of that first semester wasn’t worth the candle. He is in Law School now. He still likes to party and still on occasion burns that candle at both ends but doesn’t lose sight of priorities. I am lucky I have such a son. Not everyone does and some don’t mature as fast or aren’t as gifted or are pain unlucky. As parents or guardians our job is to figure out when they can swim in the deep end without waterwings and it is not the same time for every child.
The Buckley law is OK but if you are paying the bill you know your kid and have a right to insist you be informed and there is a waiver.
Being an American who doesn’t know much about things Oz, what’s the problem for an Aborigine who wants to grow up to be an airline pilot?
The problem is generated by the contradiction between wanting to keep the aborigines as they are “on the land” — as is where is — and the consequences of policies which tend to integration. Attempts to integrate the aborigines are regarded by some as a kind of genocide because that would effectively wipe them out as a culture. This reached a culmination with the “Stolen Generations” idea, which saw the removal of aboriginal children from the community as a terrible crime.
But the as is where is policy also has its drawbacks, largely the creation of welfare-fueled reservations in which horrible rates of drunkenness, crime and degradation occur more or less regularly. They are terrible ethnographic museums sustained by the tragedies of history, white guilt and left-versus-right politics. So if you happen to be non-aboriginal then you can, as a practical matter, aspire to anything. But on the other hand, if you happen to be aboriginal, then a terrible weight of historical baggage falls on you.
On the one hand, there is the duty to keep the culture alive — but this often comes at the cost of stasis. On the other hand, you can turn your back on the whole thing and just become Bill or Frank. It’s a false choice in my view. The biggest lesson anyone can learn from it is never to let politicians and demagogues define you. Once you let the pols bin you into categories like “black”, “white”, “aboriginal”, “asian” or anything else then you are royally screwed. You’ve lost the number one attribute of freedom, which is to define yourself.
The real cost of racial politics is that it lets the demagogues make a football of skin color. They’ll play you for a fool in exchange for a few nice phrases and a fistful — and not a very big fistful — of dollars.
Josh:
Its the same as a “Native American” or “American Aborigine” growing up to be a neurosurgeon. It just isnt done. They are in the care of a just Government because they are, by government definition, incapable of competing in the wider society. They are taught this from birth and it is constantly reinforced. That’s why they are on reservations. Some say its to protect their “way of life” (which is really Miller High Life) but its really to keep them as wards of the state.
The race industry has a role in this as well, but set that aside for the moment.
Now in a truly just society, they would be forced to assimilate into the larger herd and compete. But that would be hard on those who havent the coping skills, they’d fall by the wayside and prove the govt definition above. So the govt protects the most vulnerable and ruins those who might otherwise succeed.
Most people see the circularity of the structure of governmental compassion, but some who do cannot bring themselves to countenance the pain necessary to break the pattern.
Wretchard said it better’n me.
Wretchard – affirmative action as practiced in the United States isn’t a good alternative either in government giving a push to the disadvantaged to allow them to a chance to become airline pilots. What you end up with is a bunch of 100%-scoring Asians who are pissed off, a bunch of bemused white folks mostly shrugging and getting on with it, and a separate track for black people from the time they enter school until they die which allows them to *always* go to the head of the line no matter how abysmal their scores or performance.
I think affirmative action with a cut-off date might not be a bad idea; say 30 years from inception in 1960. The trouble we’re hving here now, however, is that although everyone consistently votes against AA programs, the bureaucracy is so entrenched that it keeps on happening.
It amazes me, though, that Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton haven’t discovered that they could export their victim-grievance agenda to Australia and start “helping” the aborigines to more power and influence (if not exactly equal opportunity). Or that the aborigines haven’t discovered the benefits of gaming and casino’s as our Native American population have done.
I see everyone went right to the point, in the US we’d have an affirmative action quota, firmly denied by everyone but even so, for Aborigine airline pilots.
Say what you want about the concept, but at least if an Aborigine wanted to grow up to be an airline pilot he/she would have a chance at least as long as the quota wasn’t oversubscribed, in fact he/she’d have a mob of government bureaucrats trying to find kindergarten Aborigines to implant the desire into.
If Oz lacks affirmative action, well, shame on them! LOL
As a specialist in human genetics and ethology, I find the assertion “There’s nothing genetic about human behavior” only partially true. As individuals, we can be “reprogrammed” on the level of norms and ideals: this is called socialization and performed in every human generation. But government policy has little to do with this, since it is made in families and local communities. Primitive cultures exist up to now as they were in Neolithe Age exactly because of this. But there are also issues of character and temperament, which are genetically determined. Two thousand years of Christian culture did not “reprogrammed” Italians into Germans or Sweden, and never will. And if we are discussing chances to “reprogramming” a society, it is also possible: compare Vikings(Danes) of 11th century to the citizen of Christiania of 17th century: the most cruel sea robbers turned to the most pacifist nation of Europe, less than in 2 centuries. This is what missionaries do, sometimes with a huge success. But it is not a government intervention, it is substitution of parental authority with authority of the Church. There is a reason why Catholic priests insist on being addressed “Holy Father” and calls his parishioners his “children”, and why the Church itself insist to be thought of as a “Mother”. And missionaries effectively liquidate native cultures and replace them with universal Christian culture (or at least try to do so).
I suspect that in the long term, freedom will always lose to Leftists, simply because the latter can always appeal to the sympathetic impulse that most good people have.
No American wants innocent children to suffer, regardless of the cause. So Leftists can always win popular (and legislative) approval for their programs by claiming “it’s for the children.”
The same argument works for programs that keep Aboriginals and Native Americans on the government dole. No evidence Conservatives introduce can convince Leftists that such programs do far more harm than good, because Leftists always argue that if dependency programs are ended, the culture in question will disappear.
Perhaps the best approach would be to conduct all nanny-state business openly, giving each “protected” party the option to leave the reservation, so to speak.
Wretchard, it is not “politicians making a football out of skin color.” Rather, it is a group of people who make a lot of money wanting to play ethnic politics in alliance with “minorities” to make war on the populist, White middle class.
OF COURSE Aborigines must be treated as a living ethnic museum, so that they can be used to bludgeon the White middle class into giving up power for the elite.
Just in the same way, the White middle class CANNOT be trusted to take care of granny or Mom/Dad, and must be usurped by the Government, not the least of which is lots of government positions to manage that staffed by wealthy elites and non-Whites in open alliance. Also, don’t forget that women indeed love this — having the Government take care of relatives (and kids) allows women peace of mind to pursue “Fabulous” lives without the messy, ugly compromises of family care, responsibility, and so on that inform their lives otherwise.
Most of Western politics can be understood as Wealthy Yuppie Elite (think Bill Ayers) in alliance with identity politicians who are non-White (think Barack Obama) and women (think Maureeen Dowd, Jodie Evans of Code Pink, and Naomi Wolfe). All aimed at taking power and control of their lives from their mortal enemies: the White Middle Class and ruling as a hereditary aristocracy. Note: there is nothing women love more than aristocracies, and nothing men hate more, for obvious reasons.
This is a problem of greed, nothing more. The West is filled with wealthy people who are profoundly dissatisfied with their wealth, and want “more.” Either to be poor but ruling as absolute lords (as correctly identified by the Dead Kennedys in “Holiday in Cambodia” or “California Uber Alles”) or exalting some non-White group as a living ethnic museum.
While I probably have vastly different viewpoints than the Dead Kennedys, their diagnosis of West Coast Hippie-dom morphed into Yuppie power remains remarkably insightful.
If the U.K Gov’ts Office of Public Guardian costs 26.5 million pounds to administer 3,200 million pounds of assets, that is only 0.8%-much less than many individuals on Wall street “earned”. 15 years ago I was acquainted with a man who who had “power of attorney” for his father (well off professional), who was in a medical facility, with Alzheimers. He used this power to indulge an extravagant lifestyle and justified it by saying that otherwise his sister would get more money. Why anyone who was acting immorally would confide this to me, seemed odd-but he was not very clever at all.
People who are afflicted by ailments (coma, dementia, alzheimers) that render them incapable of directing their financial affairs, IMHO NEED a disinterested authority to oversee their affairs. Certainly there are hazards in this being the gov’t, but I think the community has an interest in seeing that these vulnerable people are protected from the greed, jealousy, and neglect of children whom they may have mistakenly given a power of attorney to.
Methinks this problem is likely much more prevalent than the rate suggested in article (about 40 per 100k). There are too many laws for most citizens to understand, but someone needs to care for these, our most helpless, and against the bad people.
It used to be that government took care of bad people using the technique of management by exception. You were innocent until proven guilty. You were free to choose until you disqualified yourself. Government intervened only when there was a compelling public interest. In other words the default position of government was to be absent. It was present only when called for. The perfect expression of this model is emergency services. The fire department is nowhere to be seen until someone reports a blaze.
Today that remit has moved to a prior stage. Governments are now able to manage by prevention. Pre-emption may have given GWB a bad name, but it did nothing to tarnish the reputation of those who want to penalize people for engaging in potentially bad behavior (the food police), prevent global warming (precautionary principle), or who engage in pre-crime (hate speech). It moves in to protect the “vulnerable”. And this is all justified in the name of saving money. But the strange thing is that governments which operate according to this doctrine of pre-emption have the bigget budgets of all. They are not saving the public from taxes, so what are they saving them from? They saving the public from itself.
Now some cultures may prefer to enter into a relationship of dependency with the state. That is their affair. They may regard this as “civilized” and “progressive”. But that is a matter of judgment not one of self-evident fact. In fact they have traded freedom for a reduction in variance. That is their preference and they are welcome to it, but it is not progress towards an inevitable state of nature nor written in the stars.
Isn’t what’s-Her-name blind? Rue Britannia.
>>> “Walking through his yard”?
…-
“Naked Justice: Arrested for Nudity in His Own Kitchen
Pajamas Media ^ | Oct. 25 | Michele Catalano
You’re standing in your kitchen making coffee. You are naked, but no one else is home. It’s early in the morning and you are in the privacy of your own home. All right, so maybe you’re a little bit odd, and maybe not everyone makes coffee naked. But your house, your rules, right?
That’s probably what Virginia resident Eric Williamson was thinking last Monday morning as he made himself coffee while dressed in nothing but his birthday suit. Unfortunately for Williamson, he wasn’t quite as alone as he thought. Walking through his yard were a woman and her seven-year-old son, on their way to the son’s school. The woman — a wife of a police officer – saw Williamson’s naked torso through his window and called the cops. Williamson was arrested and charged with indecent exposure. ” (More …)
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2370619/posts
Wretchard: You are always good but this is one of your best. Commenters too. I grew up in Yukon Territory with Indians (oops, Native Peoples, or is “First Peoples”? the PC fashion is hard to track) who were being “mainstreamed” (kids whose families were trapping in the bush, were taken off to live in hostels on Government dime, taught White Folks’ curriculum). Some of them got on with it, some of it hated it. That gave way to new model with autonomy, own land, reparations, apologies. Sound familiar? I think the problem with the first model was Government: people had no choice, the kids had to go to White Folks’ school. I think the problem with the second model is Government: race hustlers intimidate bureaucrats (in Tom Wolfe’s famous phrase, “mau-mauing the flak catchers”) in a kabuki of grievance, guilt, gold. The losers in both situations are the individuals who are never allowed to sort things out on their own.
But you said all this much better. As for the mathematics and evolutionary biological points, could not agree more. Reality is not well modeled by a system that one constrains to be “pretty” by excluding the outliers. As Taleb has pointed out well (“Fooled By Randomness,” and “The Black Swan”) the outliers are often full of information.
Whiskey,
Life’s a bitch, ain’t it? And you do mean “bitch”.
The problem in this argument is getting into the benefits and hazards of the policy. The clear statement is: the State has no moral authority to assume control of a person or his property except in cases of criminality clearly defined as such. The possessing of one’s own body and property are human rights.
The policy as outlined above is merely State theft: how can one sanely argue that the state should seize control and confiscate (steal) a person’s possessions simply based on the argument the the relatives , in a few cases, might steal them?
A slightly different take on the larger issue—
Lots of arguments right now about euthenasia, a coming thing in the US, looking at Oregon, the NHS in UK, and the inevitable consequences of Obamacare.
Used to be, before the lawyers and the law got involved, that the individuals involved, their families and their doctors just quietly dealt with those kind of end-of-life issues, in their own way, the way that worked best for them. But once you make it a matter of State interest, whether as a regulator or a libertarian, it is beyond the power of the people actually involved, and will be decided by bureacrats or judges who don’t have a clue.
And I daresay we are all much poorer for that.
“”"”" >>> “Walking through his yard”?
…-
“Naked Justice: Arrested for Nudity in His Own Kitchen
Pajamas Media ^ | Oct. 25 | Michele Catalano “”"”"
Agreed. The first thing that struck me about that story was that this woman was walking through this guy’s yard, and therefore technically trespassing. On the other hand, was this guy visible from the street in such a way that anybody passing by couldn’t possibly miss him? My latter point is that he is being a “public nuisance.”
Either way, not too much should be made of the incident by the authorities.
Five years ago, the Fire Department showed up to demand I change the plans for the house I was building to include a circular driveway large enough for a firetruck to turn around in. Of course, that meant a larger driveway which pushed the total amound of “impervious” surface over the limit and required a more significant surface water mitigation plan including retention ponds which forced the plan to cut down several “significant” trees which would require an exemption from the local environmental agency because the previous owners had logged the property seven years earlier…
We ended up buying an existing house and nobody got paid any money to build the new house. The property still has the old rotting double-wide trailer on it that was there when we bought it.
JMH,
Anybody suggest plan “B” to them, as in they buy equipment that fits in the roads and driveways of the community that they have been hired and sworn to protect? Tail meet dog, now wag.