Nanny State Nightmare

Beware the well intentioned bureaucrat. They will take away your freedoms in the name of “looking out for you” And all the moves toward obesity hysteria is worth watching out for. It’s already claimed one country.

Imagine a country where the government regularly checks the waistlines of citizens over age 40. Anyone deemed too fat would be required to undergo diet counseling. Those who fail to lose sufficient weight could face further “reeducation” and their communities subject to stiff fines.

Is this some nightmarish dystopia?

No, this is contemporary Japan.

The Japanese government argues that it must regulate citizens’ lifestyles because it is paying their health costs. This highlights one of the greatly underappreciated dangers of “universal healthcare.” Any government that attempts to guarantee healthcare must also control its costs. The inevitable next step will be to seek to control citizens’ health and their behavior. Hence, Americans should beware that if we adopt universal healthcare, we also risk creating a “nanny state on steroids”

Once you let them take care of you, they decide they own you and can dictate your behavior to save on costs. So they start intruding in every aspect of your life. This in spite of the fact that you will be paying them for this health care. Your money will be taken away in taxes to pay for it, but they will decide what you get back. In England they are already cutting off smokers, old people, the obese, alcoholics. They still have to pay into the system, but they will get nothing back.

Do not trust politicians to solve your problems. All they do is create new ones.

I warned people about this back on The Safety Valve, in discussing the intersection of the anti-tobacco regulations and socialized medicine.  I said be nice to the smokers, because the antis will be coming for you soon enough, and harder and faster when we go to socialized medicine.  The commentators openly scoffed, calling me “absurd” and “paranoid.”
Nope.  I’ve just read history, that’s all.
Find any MSM or blogosphere article on this sort of thing and read the comments.  The “skinny” folks out there write the most appallingly vicious stuff you could imagine about overweight people, often with the most dubious reasoning possible.  One guy said everyone could lose weight, because “you don’t see any fat Marines come out of Basic Training.”  So the way to lose weight is to be on a forced, 8-10 hour a day, high-intensity exercise program at the age of 18?  Yeah, I’ll get right on that.

I’ll abuse Jim’s bandwidth again and post an old article I wrote about that. I’ve removed all the links that are now defunct—permalinks were a foggy concept in 2002—but the remaining ones are okay:

I have commented before on the revolting spawn of the looting of “Big Tobacco” (translation: “smokers”—as Reagan said, “Things don’t pay taxes; people do”), those who wish to add sin taxes to things like “junk food” so that those weak-willed fat people will pay, dammit, PAY for their abuse of our saintly heath care system.  This began slowly, years ago, with seat belt and motorcycle helmet laws, but it’s really the literally hundreds of billions from the tobacco settlement that have whipped the various drooling groups of revenue-hungry government agencies, Safety Nazis and lawyer-sharks into a frenzy.  Recently the man who is likely to be the next Surgeon General has proposed a $1,000 tax credit (meaning money taken away from those who do not qualify) for “healthy people.”

Okay, I give up.  Clearly the concept that our bodies are the property of the State is being taken as a given.  The concept of “you naughty people are costing us money and you must pay” seems solidly fixed in the mind of the body politic.
Now, here’s my suggestion.  I should like to point out that bad voting decisions and regulations made at all levels of government are costing me, evil pipe smoker that I am, money.  Many of these bad decisions are made because the voters do not understand even the most basic statistical mathematics, and are apparently incapable of the most rudimentary critical thought.  When we are herded into the camps to have our body mass index measured, might I suggest another test be administered?  A simple test of the ability to understand the fundamentals of science, mathematics (with an emphasis on statistics), economics, and to reason critically?

I don’t want to tax those who fail, oh no.  “Never give money and power to government” is my rule of thumb.  My preference would be that those folks who fail such a test would lose their right to vote.  But I’d settle for this: those who pass get a waiver on all sin taxes.  The thought of reducing the flow of extorted dollars flowing into government coffers fills me with an positively unheathly degree of pleasure, I must say.

And here is an intellectual challenge to the “antis” everywhere—is there even a remote possibility you can come up with plans to save us poor ignorant sinners that don’t involve increased taxes, regulations, and expanded power for yourselves…?

Didn’t think so.

Posted by (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  on  01/12  at  01:39 PM

Toren,

Thanks for the article from your archives.  I’ve saved everything from the Safety Valve.

I stopped blogging about this stuff because I felt like I was writing the same ten things over and over again - stuff you, James, and others have already said better elsewhere.  With Tangut I feel I am going forward, even if progress is excruciatingly slow.  But as for the rest of the world, what has it learned since 2002?  Or 1962?  I recently reread Ayn Rand’s For the New Intellectual from 1961.  It could have been written yesterday.

And here is an intellectual challenge to the “antis” everywhere—is there even a remote possibility you can come up with plans to save us poor ignorant sinners that don’t involve increased taxes, regulations, and expanded power for yourselves…?

I don’t think saving anyone is the point.  The goal is power.  These people think they are “superior” and qualified to rule over us “little people.”  Salvation is just an excuse.  It is really creepy to deal with people who get visibly excited about STATE POWER!!  Particularly people who know what state power has done in the past, and don’t care.  They have learned from history, and they are intent on repeating it.  Too bad for us ...

This “cigarette cop” (via DC Thornton) symbolizes the powerlust I fear:

“I carry a badge,” Buckman said. “It’s shiny and gold. Pretty neat.”

As code enforcement officer for the community development department, Buckman is the tip of the legal spear that Belmont has enacted to break up the Peninsula city’s smoke ring.

Posted by Amritas  on  01/12  at  03:12 PM
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