If a law currently up for vote in the Virginia House passes this week and is signed by Governor Bob McDonnell, it will require many women seeking an abortion to be raped.

No, you didn’t misread that.

The bill, which is similar to laws passed in seven other states, requires women to undergo an ultrasound procedure before an abortion is performed.  The ultrasound is not medically necessary; it has not even been rationalized as such by the bill’s defenders.  It is simply another tactic adopted by anti-abortion crusaders to humiliate women, in the hopes that they may change their mind about going through with the procedure.

But since most abortions are performed in the first trimester, and abdominal ultrasounds are not able to produce a clear image of the fetus in most cases, Virgina’s law mandates the use of transvaginal ultrasound – that is, a probe must be inserted in the women’s vagina to view the fetus.  Women cannot refuse this if they want to get an abortion, and the law does not allow for any exceptions such as rape or to protect the woman’s health.

I can’t even imagine what a rape victim who has become pregnant might think of this, after having already been violated once, and then being told by arrogant politicians that she must be violated again in order to undergo a commonly available medical procedure.  It also forces her doctor to perform a procedure that is not medically necessary, and violates their oath not to cause harm to their patient.  As one Virginia House Delegate pointed out, the bill may actually require doctors to sexually assault their patients, as it is a crime to vaginally penetrate women with any object without their consent.  (To add insult to injury, the woman must also pay for this state-mandated procedure.  Where’s Obamacare when you need it?)

It’s not even cognizant of the doctor-patient relationship that is generally so well-respected – except when women’s medical choices are involved.  Then it’s absolutely imperative that the government asserts jurisdiction over a women’s vagina, to ensure she’s actually making the best medical decisions for herself.  It’s not just humiliating; it is paternalistic in its very worst sense.

Note that I haven’t even addressed the issue of abortion itself.  That is because regardless of where one stands on abortion – if one considers it murder, or the right of a woman to make decisions regarding her own property (i.e., her body) – this intrusion by the state into private medical affairs, which would not be tolerated under virtually any other circumstances, is simply not justifiable.  And perhaps anti-abortion crusaders are aware of that, and are adopting these tactics to set up a constitutional challenge that leads to a Supreme Court review of Roe v. Wade, hopefully this time to overturn it for good.

Regardless of the anti-abortion camp’s motives, their degrading and humiliating tactics are despicable.

Yahoo News reports the death of a motorcyclist during a protest ride against New York’s helmet laws. While it is certainly tempting to simply cite this as a case of someone “asking for it” and getting it, consider the specifics of this case: Philip Contos was riding without a helmet at this place and at this time specifically because he was protesting against the state. Whether or not he normally wore a helmet, even, is irrelevant. He would not have been riding there and then if not for the state. The sad truth is that protesting laws against risky behavior unfortunately requires actually engaging in risky behavior. I, a nonsmoker, despise anti-smoking laws. How could I protest against these laws, however? By engaging in the banned behavior is the most obvious way. So, too, with helmet laws.  At minimum, Contos’s death, whenever it would have happened, would not have happened at that time at that place, under those circumstances, except for the meddling of the busybodies who claim the right to decide what is best for a 55 year old man.

Reason’s Matt Welch criticizes Rand Paul for Paul’s assertion that the right to healthcare implies slavery. While it is true that in minds of many, the term “slavery” specifically refers to chattel slavery as practiced in the United States prior to the end of the American Civil War, the term itself is not so limited. And this is not the first time that a prominent person has used the term in regard to employment restrictions: Curt Flood was well known for saying “A well paid slave is nonetheless, a slave.” The same applies here. Indeed, I have compared modern attitudes and events to slavery myself, more than once. Of course, there are critical differences between Rand and Flood and myself, with melanin levels likely being the most important one. But just as Flood’s comparison in the past was apt, so to is Paul’s comparison in the present an accurate description. It is easy to see that there have been far worse tortures in the past than waterboarding, or even beatings, but I would certainly still call the latter “torture.” So, too, would I call forced labor of any sort “slavery.” Wearing a smock rather than rags does not change the name.

Of all the arguments favoring the coordination and control of the healthcare industry by the central planning agency of the state, the healthcare-is-a-human-right argument seems to be the most convincing one, even to those who may favor a free market approach to the problem of coordination of scarce health resources. How can we as a society possibly deny healthcare to someone in need? Shouldn’t the state assume that task?

Gabriel E. Vidal is the chief operating officer of a hospital system in the United States. He has a BA in politics, philosophy, and economics and an MBA in finance.

Read the Full Article by Gabriel E. Vidal

Afterwards, discuss it below.

So….the Republicans have put out their Pledge to America. Is it any good?

Jeffrey Tucker sums it up pithily by juxtaposing short quotes from it and the Declaration of Independence:

Declaration of Independence (1776): “That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it…”

A Pledge to America (GOP, 2010): “Whenever the agenda of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to institute a new governing agenda and set a different course.”

If this goes on, related fellow TLS blogger Daniel Coleman to me, in another 100 years it will be “Whenever a subpoint of policy within a government agenda becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to organize a committee to change those subpoints of policy and replace them with better subpoints.”

Liberty Central, the Establishment’s attempt to co-opt the Tea Party, has a poll asking us to grade the Pledge. Head on over there and tell them what you think of it. Fellow TLS blogger Jacob Huebert has a couple of good posts on LewRockwell.com about Liberty Central, the Tea Party, the Pledge, and Glenn Beck.

The Liberty Central poll only lets you grade the Pledge as a whole. Here is a quick graded breakdown of important aspects of the Pledge, with short reactions by me in parentheses:

Jobs

• Stop job-killing tax hikes — Grade: A. (It’s a start, but better to abolish taxes.)
• Allow small businesses to take a tax deduction equal to 20 percent of their income — Grade: A. (Ditto.)
• Require congressional approval for any new federal regulation that would add to the deficit — Grade: C.  (How about no new regulations period? Better yet, repeal all existing ones.)
• Repeal small business mandates in the new health care law. — Grade: A.

Cutting Spending

• Repeal and replace health care reform law — Grade: Unknown, probably B or lower. (Replace with what?)
• Roll back non-discretionary spending to 2008 levels before TARP and stimulus (will save $100 billion in first year alone) — Grade: B.  (Should roll back more.)
• Establish strict budget caps to limit federal spending going forward — Grade: B, maybe C.  (How strict? Will these caps be lifted periodically like the national debt ceiling?)
• Cancel all future TARP payments and reform Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — Grade: Unknown, no higher than a B. (Reform Fannie and Freddie how? Better to abolish them.)

Reforming Congress

• Will require that every bill have a citation of constitutional authority — Grade: C. (Won’t stop Constitutional-but-still-bad bills, and the Constitution is a “living” document anyway.)
• Give members at least 3 days to read bills before a vote — Grade: C.  (Little impact; they still won’t read them.)

Defense

• Provide resources to troops — Grade: F. (Get troops out of foreign countries. Cut the military and intelligence budgets.)
• Fund missile defense — Grade: F. (Worthless boondoggle.)
• Enforce sanctions in Iran — Grade: F.  (Act of war.)

Overall: F. The military provisions outweigh the good things. How about ending the War on Drugs, rolling back the surveillance and police state, and ending aggression against immigrants? In any case, put not your faith in campaign promises.

I think I’m being generous. What do you think? How would you grade the Republicans’ Pledge to America?

~*~

Cross-posted at Is-Ought GAP.

Ronald Bailey, over at Hit & Run, asks, “Should a person who is dying of an incurable illness be allowed to donate his organs before the disease kills him?” This strikes me as a very odd question to ask, especially given who is doing the asking. Hit & Run is the blog for Reason Magazine, a publication I have been led to believe has some libertarian bent. Yet, oddly, it seems they are still mulling over the most fundamental principle of libertarianism: self-ownership.

Once it is recognized that the fellow from the story, Gary Phebus, is a self-owner, the answer to Bailey’s initial question becomes blindingly obvious – a resounding yes. What would it mean to be a self-owner but be unable to use one’s body and its parts as one wished? Surely, any libertarian must recognize the right to commit suicide and the right to donate one’s organs after death, which is all this amounts to. Why the struggle?

But maybe what Bailey meant to ask is “should a person who is dying of an incurable illness donate his organs before the disease kills him?” Note the difference between these two questions: the former asks whether we should restrain someone by force from donating their organs, while the latter asks whether someone should choose to donate their organs.

On this question, I must part ways again with Bailey who says,

On the one hand, it is certainly wrong to take a vital organ, even if given voluntarily, from a healthy person. On the other hand, Phebus is not healthy. In any case, harvesting organs from Phebus would violate the medical ethical principle: “First, do no harm.” Phebus’ generous impulse moves me, but I fear that honoring it would create dangerous precedents.

First, I am not sure it is certainly wrong to take a vital organ, if given voluntarily, from a healthy person. What if a healthy, 60 year old grandmother has a 10 year old granddaughter who needs a new heart to survive, but the line to get a new heart is so long (thanks to government prohibition of organ markets, of course) that she has only a slim chance of surviving? Would it be certainly wrong for the doctors to take the grandmother’s donation to her ailing granddaughter? I cannot see why. Indeed, I would think that the grandmother is not only acting in a permissible manner, but in an admirable manner, and a doctor who refused to allow this would seem to be cold and cruel.

But this case seems even more in favor of the donation going through given the point that Bailey himself acknowledges: the donor is not healthy. He suffers from an incurable disease that will cause him to painfully waste away for the remainder of his shortened life. This is a case where even mainstream thinkers can often justify euthanasia, yet Bailey is balking at someone throwing in that he will also donate his organs? What’s going on here? How can adding beneficence and charity to the act harm the case in favor of euthanasia?

The last two sentences seem to take a swing at answering that, with an appeal to the principle of nonmaleficence and the “dangerous precedents” involved in breaking it. I think, however, even on his own terms, this should be permissible. I do not see what harm is done by the doctors in accepting the donated organs; this seems beyond question. What Bailey is really referring to is the ethics of euthanasia, a topic far too in-depth and complex for a full treatment in this blogpost. I will make one point on this though: it does not follow that by shortening someone’s life, you do them harm. Few people believe that we should extend our life at any cost and I doubt very much that Bailey is one of them. If one can live a shorter, more virtuous and happy life, that is preferable to living a longer, more vile and miserable life. So it cannot be said that a doctor who gives his patient the ability to choose the former over the latter does him harm, indeed, it would seem that a doctor who prevents his patient from taking that course is the one who does harm.

Finally, it would seem to me that the most dangerous precedent of all that can be set in this case is to prevent Mr. Phebus from doing with his body what he pleases and thereby denying the essential right of self-ownership.

My wife and I have a great doctor. She has a small clinic nearby with a few other doctors, who are also all very good. Our doctor has a waiting list for people who want to be her patient. We have over the years recommended several people, even some who live 20 miles away, to her. She is very nagging–in a good way. She makes you promise to get a physical, eye exam, etc., intervenes to get you an appointment with a specialist if you need one, etc. Follows up by phone, and so on. She is great.

She recently announced to us that she is moving to some kind of “concierge” service–she figures she basically provides that kind of above-average service already, and this is a way to reduce her patient load (from about 4000 to about 400), and escape some of the regulatory burden that Obamacare is going to impose. So she’s picking a select group of her current patients–about 10% of them–and they will be allowed to remain her patients–for $1600/year each. Now, we love our doctor, so will probably do this. And 3600 of her patients will now lose their favorite doctor. Thanks, in part, to Obamacare.

So, you can see what’s coming. The affluent will have to pay more–in our case, $3200 a year more–but for even better service than we already get. And others will have increasingly slim pickings. Case in point, I mentioned this to some friends, and my TLS co-blogger Brian Martinez noted: “This is what my wife’s doc did, too. Went to a concierge system. Unfortunately we couldn’t justify the extra expense and pay for health insurance for the rest of the family. So my wife had to leave her doctor of 10 years and find a new one, and she hates to switch doctors.”

Expect to see more of this. I had never heard of it before and am still waiting to hear the details from our doctor (some information will be mailed later), but a google search revealed that this is indeed a growing trend; see Health care reform laws prompt surge in ‘concierge medicine’, Are Concierge Medical Services on the Upswing?, and Royal Pains: Can Concierge Medicine Coexist With Obama’s Healthcare Plan?

So, Obamacare will only exacerbate healthcare “inequalities,” and diminish the quality of care of many people. The government will then use this as an excuse to bash “greed” and “inequality,” and clamp down further, driving us closer to outright socialized medicine. As one of the articles above noted, ”Critics say boutique medicine will only exaggerate the health insurance crisis. Many doctors may leave traditional family practices — widening the gap between the affluent and the poor.” As Martinez noted to me, “You know all the good doctors with wealthy patients will follow this route and as you say it will prompt the regime to crack down on this ‘greedy’ practice. [expletive deleted] Obama.”

The real problem with the American healthcare system is that prices are continually rising, making healthcare unaffordable to an ever-increasing fraction of the population. And recent healthcare legislation has addressed none of the causes of high prices.

Read the Full Article by Vijay Boyapati

Afterwards, discuss the article below.

[The article is also available at Mises.org]

A schoolmate of mine, a Christian conservative, once insisted that the reason our public school teachers informed us about Eskimos leaving their aged on the ice to die was to prepare the way for doing something similar to our oldsters.

That seemed like quite large dose of paranoia, to me. After all, also in public school we learned that Aztecs cut the hearts out of those they sacrificed to their gods. The pyramid steps of Teotihuacan ran red with blood. We were told this, I thought, because it was true. Could there have been an organ harvesting agenda behind the history lesson?

Seemed unlikely.

Before asserting a major conspiracy, it strikes me as worth addressing, openly, all aspects of the problem that might give birth to such concerns. Was euthanasia of the elderly in the future? Probably only when I get old, I thought, darkly. But seriously, why would it be considered?

Because of the expense, of course.

But whose expense?

This is lightly touched on in Thomas Sowell’s recent column, “A ‘Duty to Die’?”

This is how Sowell begins:

One of the many fashionable notions that have caught on among some of the intelligentsia is that old people have “a duty to die,” rather than become a burden to others.

This is more than just an idea discussed around a seminar table. Already the government-run medical system in Britain is restricting what medications or treatments it will authorize for the elderly. Moreover, it seems almost certain that similar attempts to contain runaway costs will lead to similar policies when American medical care is taken over by the government.

Sowell then goes on to regale the reader with the heart-warming tale of his “Aunt Nance Ann,” who, penniless, moved from relative to relative in the days of his youth, without ever once being left on an ice floe.

Poor as we were, I never heard anybody say, or even intimate, that Aunt Nance Ann had “a duty to die.”

Sowell goes on to say that he only heard such talk years later, “from highly educated people in an affluent age, when even most families living below the official poverty level owned a car or truck and had air-conditioning.”

Sowell ends his column on a moralistic note, and though it is not completely out of whack with my sentiments, there is something missing in his analysis. Something important. What could it be?

Sowell is an economist, so it may come as some surprise to his readers to realize that what Sowell does not venture on the topic is any economic insight whatsoever. He makes a historical comparison but without drawing on the relevant forces at work.

Something has changed since the time of his poor Aunt Nance Ann. Expenses of medical care have gone up — way, way up — and the expectation that every person must be given the limit of medical care possible is now a dominant, almost unshakeable notion.

And, surprise surprise, government intervention is largely responsible for both developments.

The institutions of the state have taken over paying for medical care for oldsters, since the inception of Medicare in the ’60s. This apparently “free good” (little or no cost at “time of purchase”) has increased the demand for medical services, and with this increased demand costs have risen. None of this is shocking to an economist. But you might think it worth mentioning in a situation where costs must be borne.

When the Aunt Nances of yesteryear experienced, say, a failing kidney, and expensive treatment was briefly mentioned, how many relatives pooled their resources together to get that $10,000 treatment, considering that she was due to die “any year now anyways”? In the house I grew up in, two sets of great grandparents expired in the bed downstairs. A number of years ago, my mother died not in that same bedroom, but in the hospital. Why? Because she was on Medicare, and it was just a natural thing to do to send her to the hospital. The price tag for her last week of life was many thousands. (I’ve blocked the exact figure out of my mind. I remember writing out one check in installment payment for my father to sign, and then his never receiving another bill. This is how many huge medical expenses are handled in America: By writing them off, without ever even seeking legal recourse.)

The issue is not a “duty to die.” The issue is the keeping of failing people alive at gargantuan expense. Withholding major expenditures from one’s relatives was treated as a matter of course when economist Tom Sowell was a child. Nowadays, granting major expenditures without thinking of the costs is the matter of course.

In the old days, if you didn’t have money, you didn’t demand the expensive services. Nowadays, people without money are routinely given services without talking much about expenses.

But the system cannot just go on having hospitals eating costs (“writing them off”) and the government writing blank checks (“Medicare” and similar programs). Somehow services purchased must be paid for.

No one seems to want to confront this as a major problem. The people talking about a “duty to die” (I’ve actually never heard an intellectual really and honestly advocate such a duty, by the way) are at least confronting an economic issue. Thomas Sowell is not.

I’m sure he does elsewhere . . . for Thomas Sowell is an honest man.

But still, this column of his bugs me. It makes cheap moralistic points while ignoring huge swaths of reality.

It also neglects to place the blame for the development of the current situation squarely where it lies: at government, and political demands for same. Worse yet, it plays into people’s idiotic expectations of freebie care. We hate intrusive government! said in the same breath as Politicians are taking away our Medicare!

Ridiculous brain-dead Republicanism at its worst. And Sowell seems to be fanning the flames.

Innocent people should not be foisted with “a duty to die.” The right to life means, for adults, a right to liberty, which protects them from people with knives who wish to take away their lives.

But, to balance the point, this right to liberty prevents one from claiming the wealth of others to keep one’s life going. If one hasn’t prepared (by savings or insurance or a combination of both) to pay for future needs — for, say, end-of-life medical maintenance — then maybe you have a duty not to demand services. At most you may beg. Others may offer, but a beggar wouldn’t want to stretch the budgets of his or her benefactors.

Trouble is, this looks an awful lot like the duty to die that Sowell excoriates. But this sense of duty-not-to-ask-too-much was a given, an understood notion before Medicare. And because medical care was so primitive then — and the expectation that the service provided to millionaires would not be offered to aging people two steps up from mendicant — kept this moral sense just below the surface, just below the gaze of young Tommy Sowell’s attention.

But we’re adults here, right? Today, the live question is this: Is there any chance this ethos can be reinstated in a society that now demands everything but liberty and responsibility?

Not if thinkers like Sowell won’t confront it, and continue to feed the frenzy of those who still refuse to face reality.

It is odd, perhaps, that just as the federal (read: national) government moves to take primary responsibility for our medical lives, the several states are moving in the other direction. The right to self-medicate is, increasingly, being seen as important. First medical marijuana — a slap on the face to federal nannies — and now recreational use, sees advocacy and advance at the state level.

Any advance in taking full responsibility for medicine, on the part of citizens, individuals, goes against the grain of our collectivist age, and sparks some hope.

Of course, in a sense, it seems 35 years behind the time. For me, anyway.

One of my first contrary political opinions to develop was that liberty rights should include sexual activity and drug use. I must’ve been 15. I disliked politics. I had just spent a summer watching the Watergate hearings, and though I liked Sen. Sam Ervin’s no-nonsense pose and Barbara Jordan’s measured cadences, this did not turn me into a Democrat, or any kind of partisan. I remained skeptical of the whole enterprise. The Vietnam War weighed on my mind. Politicians had mired the nation into that fiasco, and seemed at a loss how to get us out. I didn’t trust them.

No wonder, then, that I approved of rights. They seemed bulwarks against grandstanding politicians who too often proved eager to send people to prison camps and wars.

And so it struck me that, when Gore Vidal suggested that prostitution should be legal, and drug use, too, it made perfect sense to me. It flowed naturally from the ideas of free speech, or religion. Now, unlike most teens, I had no extreme personal interest in “deviant” sexual or medicinal activities. My attitudes to extreme pleasure were rather puritanical, though I had just become a voluptuary of music. Seeing things in terms of a pleasure/pain trade-off put me in a vaguely utilitarian camp. And the utility of rights struck me as paramount.

Drug legalization thus served, in my view, as a test case of principle. The freedom principle, to be exact. When my elders blanched at the idea, I took from their reluctance a fear (on their part) of freedom. They really had little confidence in it, as an organizing principle of society, so to speak. They saw it mainly as an anarchical principle, by which I mean and they meant CHAOS.

I tried to hold the thought in suspension. I certainly knew little of social theory or economics. So I began reading. Could freedom work?

Freedom seemed, to me, as a check upon government abuse, at the very least. Governments went to war. Citizens, at worst, committed murders. It’s hard for normal folk to get together and kill a lot of people. Abe Lincoln said that government existed to help people do together what they couldn’t on their own, separately. No wonder I began reading about anarchism, for the one thing government allowed people to do was kill, kill, kill. It seemed very efficient in channeling human energy — and getting around pesky moral and sentimental notions — to enable everyday folk to support and engage in mass slaughter.

When it comes to drug prohibition, the weirdness of government action exhibits itself starkly. We fear that some people — growing numbers of people — will ruin their lives on drugs. So, government steps in and ruins their lives! And not merely the lives of addicts and pushers, the lives of casual, responsible drug users, too.

The logic of this utilitarian calculus never made much sense to me. If fear of lives being ruined is the motivation behind drug prohibition, ruining lives in an ever-expanding scourge of terror seemed, at least, counter-productive.

A few years after adopting a handful of heretical libertarian thoughts — these included allowing the Amish to educate their kids how they wanted, and the suspicion that mandatory Social Security participation was illiberal and unjust — I finally adopted a general libertarian outlook. I simply could no longer accept as reasonable the many arguments I’d heard for some adults to run other adults’ lives. (Further, a universal, basic right to liberty solved a few problems that politics-as-usual caused, namely the problem of value diversity and interest sacrifice.)

And yet running other people’s lives still receives a fair amount of support in our society.

It has nothing to do with liberty, of course. They say it has everything to do with making the world safer and nicer.

I doubt it.

On The Lesson Applied, a new blog devoted to applying the basic lessons of economics to current affairs, I recently wrote:

The reasons for treating one’s own medicinal use as a right, and the costs of said exercise of the right as one’s own responsibility, are the same here as regarding speech. . . . Each person has the greatest incentive to learn from his/her mistakes, to make the best search for knowledge and advice, so it is almost natural and commonsensical to leave such decisions up to each person, not to “each other.”

This is the chief reason for what I like to call “the division of responsibility.”

Adam Smith helped us understand the division of labor — how people working separately can specialize and, through market exchanges, co-operate to make us all better off. The labor is differentiated. Varied. Politicians’ typical demagoguery regarding “unity” is the very opposite of what serves to make us all better off, at least when it comes to prosperity. We do not want to “come together” in some grand scheme of hand-holding and explicit (communist) co-operation. We want, instead, to celebrate our diverse actions that co-ordinate through the subtle workings of supply and demand.

Hayek played off this idea when he coined the phrase division of knowledge. Knowledge is distributed throughout society, in individuals, and — because often tacit, and not explicit — resists being corralled into any centrally planned scheme of unity.

The next step in understanding the logic of liberty is to understand the importance of the natural division of responsibility. This is “natural” in the sense that the division of knowledge is natural. Human beings are separate persons. It takes a lot of effort to get people to engage in straight-forward co-operation beyond, say, groups of 150 or so. (See the writings of Malcolm Gladwell on this.) Each person has separate judgment. Each person acts separately, with brain tied by nerve to muscle, muscle tied by tendon to bone. Even a hundred men marching in lockstep time requires a special explanation for their apparent unity, since that unity is artificial, a contrivance. All attempts to hijack the division of responsibility into coalesced groups, with some people having more responsibility than others, requires special argumentation.

I repeatedly come back to drug use because, in mainstream culture, it seems to be an anomaly, a problem for the division of responsibility. Drug abusers become less responsible. Therefore, it is said, others must step in. Take their responsibility away, for a time — excusing it, like AA does; hobbling their freedom, like institutions do — in order to fix them, allowing them to take responsibility again.

This point of view suffers from some problems. One is, of course, the oft-underlying notion that with some drugs or with some people (commonly, both, together) there is no difference between “user” and “abuser” of drugs. That is, the drugs lead ineluctably to irresponsible addiction.

The evidence overwhelmingly suggests that this is not true of most people about most drugs. And yet, many of these drugs — including one of the most innocuous of all, cannabis — remain proscribed. The freedom of responsible users is sacrificed to the alleged “needs” of irresponsible “abusers.” Further, to help abusers, responsible users’ lives are ruined, or severely harmed. This is the typical “sacrifice” scenario that politicians engage in. Harm some to help others. The nobility of this seems hard to demonstrate.

Holding people responsible for their actions is sometimes difficult — especially when sympathy often nudges us to extend mercy. This is fine and good, unless the irresponsible have caused much harm, such as running over a child on a bicycle, or Stephen King jogging down the highway. Those who engage in risky activities (such as drinking alcohol or taking downers and then driving, or parachuting over a power substation) that can negatively affect others not unreasonably deserve to be treated as something more than as a target for a tort claim. Being lenient with those who have adopted irresponsibility as a way of life seems dangerous, in the long run. Irresponsible itself.

It should be remembered, though, what John Stuart Mill explained, years ago. The irresponsible still have their uses. The public service that a drunk, lying in a ditch or toddering around, soiled, wetting himself, performs for the rest of us, though incalculable, is nevertheless real. The modern method of unequal responsibiilty, of professional oversight, etc. may seem to some as “humane.” What it does is treat adults as children, and robs actual children of object lessons: “See Mr. Slobovo there? Smell him? He’s a drunk. It’s dangerous to drink too much. You could end up like that.”

Indeed, the modern re-distribution of responsibility serves, most, to hide from public eyes the distress of those who have failed to take responsibility. We do not want to see failures. They bother us. It is hard to tell them to go away. (And yet sometimes we must do just that: Go away, I cannot help you; you have gone beyond the point where I have anything to do with — you are as poison.) So, through the help of the state, we round up the drunks and put them in “homes” where they can spend their remaining days of degradation away from sensitive souls and shaded eyes.

I am sorely tempted to say that much of the modern welfare state is, in effect, little more than beautification program for those who do not want to see or think about the bad choices of others.

The “liberal” proponents of the system, in fact, seem to exist in their own beloved state of denial: Choice has nothing to do with it, they say. It’s disease. It’s genetics. It’s . . . blankout. By taking away expectations of or demands for responsibility from some obviously irresponsible individuals, they undermine the very notion, and provide a salve for their salvation-obsessed souls. And, in practice, make sure that more people become irresponsible (having reduced the costs of irresponsibility) while making them feel good about themselves (surely a “drug” in and of itself — one, today, much abused).

Finally, the division of responsibility according to the separateness of persons needs defense in this realm, especially, for reasons I wrote on my blog last night:

I defend the freedom to self-medicate not only because I believe people — users and non-users alike — would be better off with the right, and exercising their personal responsibility. I also believe that servility on one issue will provide precedent and rationale for further erosions of freedom into other realms of life. If you can win an argument about drug freedom, other freedoms should be pieces of “cake.”

I confess: Lack of interest in this issue by some libertarian economists puzzles me. It is such a paradigm case issue. It resonates on so many levels. It strikes me that if you cannot get a right-winger to adopt the position, the person cannot be trusted on much of anything. And if a left-winger has no interest in the position, there is probably no hope for him to adopt liberty on other issues, too.

Freedom to self-medicate, then, remains a strong test case for liberality in political attitude, a chief indicator whether a person is ready, truly, to push for the division of responsibility in other realms of life, too.