'Health Prevention' Can Slide into 'Health Crimes Against Society'

[Guest guest]

[What an interesting take on government healthcare and the resultant

intrusion into everyone's life, and subsequent loss of freedom. This

makes perfect sense, and it's scary.]

From a Los Angeles Times Book Review:

Much of this, as Reason magazine's Sullum has long argued, stems

from the " totalitarian " temptation inherent to seeing healthcare as a

sub-category of politics and policy.

When government picks up the tab for health costs, it inevitably feels

it is responsible for curtailing them through " prevention, " which can

often elide into compulsion. As Faith Fitzgerald, a professor at the

UC School of Medicine, put it in the New England Journal of

Medicine: " Both healthcare providers and the commonweal now have a

vested interest in certain forms of behavior, previously considered a

person's private business, if the behavior impairs a person's

'health.' Certain failures of self-care have become, in a sense,

crimes against society, because society has to pay for their

consequences. "

But there's another factor at work as well. We are seeing a return to

the idea — first championed by social planners in the progressive era

— that government can and should play the role of parent. For

instance, Gerson, once a speechwriter for President Bush,

advocates a new " heroic conservatism " — an updating of his former

boss' compassionate conservatism — that would unleash a new era of

statist regulations. On the stump, Hillary Clinton refers to her book,

" It Takes a Village, " in which she argued that we all must surrender

ourselves to the near-constant prodding, monitoring, cajoling and

scolding of the " helping professions. " Clinton argues that children

are born in " crisis " and government must respond with all the tools in

its arsenal from the word go. She advocates putting television sets in

all public gathering places so citizens can be treated to an endless

loop of good parenting tutorials.

Mike Huckabee, who represents compassionate conservatism on steroids,

favors a nationwide ban on public smoking. Everywhere, from Barack

Obama to McCain, we are told that our politics must be about

causes " larger than ourselves. " What we used to think of as individual

freedom is now being recast as greedy and selfish.

We've seen this before. The original progressives — activist

intellectuals, social reformers, social gospel ministers and other

would-be planners in the late 19th and early 20th centuries — touted

" social control " as the watchword of their movement. One reason the

progressives supported World War I so passionately was not because

they supported the aims of the conflict but because they loved

domestic mobilization. Dewey, the American philosopher and

educator who sang the praises of the " social benefits of war, " was

giddy that the conflict might force Americans " to give up much of our

economic freedom. ... We shall have to lay by our good-natured

individualism and march in step. "

The progressives believed that people needed to be saved from

themselves. Journalist and commentator Walter Lippmann dubbed average

citizens " mentally children and barbarians. " " Organized social

control " via a " socialized economy " was the only means to create

meaningful freedom, argued Lippmann, Dewey and others. And by free,

the progressives meant free to live the " right " way.

A similar dynamic defined much of Nazi Germany. Nazi Youth manuals

proclaimed that " nutrition is not a private matter! " " Gemeinnutz geht

vor Eigennutz " — essentially, all for one, one for all — was the

rallying slogan of the Nazi crackdown on smoking, the first serious

anti-tobacco campaign of the 20th century. The first systematized mass

murder in Nazi Germany wasn't of the Jews but of the " useless

bread-gobblers " and other lebensunwertes leben ( " life unworthy of

life " ). The argument was that the mentally ill, the aged, the infirm

were too much of a drain on the socialist economy.

Now, nobody thinks anything like that is in store for us these days.

But we can come far short of that and still overshoot the mark of what

is desirable by a wide margin.