Cass Sunstein actually calls his new piece at The New Republic "Why Paternalism Is Your Friend."
Yes, it's full of qualifiers, such as a distinction between what he calls "ends paternalism" and "means paternalism," and an airing of the free-market objection to any kind of paternalism, but the end result is the same one we always here from the statists: There are some people who just can't hit their own backsides with a yardstick, and need government to lead them by the nose into a life of healthy and wise choices.
Sorry, pal, but what you fail to do is assuage anybody's concern about a slippery slope. These "nudges," as you call them - fuel standards, label warnings and such - will never be a stopping point for the likes of you and kind. Your model presupposes bodies of "experts" - either in the direct employ of the government or serving in an "advisory capacity" - getting paid taxpayer dollars to sit around and determine what's safe and healthy and prudent for the unwashed masses to include in their lives.
That's not the role of the federal government, and we can't afford it.
I hope this one gets a lot of smackdowns this week.
Paternalism is bad? What about your beloved Ronnie's and other Republican despotism which has been ongoing now for decades?
ReplyDeleteThe Reagan administration saw drug tests as essential for cracking down on a population largely outside the reach of law enforcement: people smoking pot in the privacy of their own homes. “Because anyone using drugs stands a very good chance of being discovered, with disqualification from employment as a possible consequence, many will decide that the price of using drugs is just too high,” read a 1989 White House report.
And, once created, the industry developed a life of its own, spending lots of money to buy votes to keep drug testing profits flourishing.
In the meantime, several Republican lawmakers in Congress have pushed hard for the mandatory drug testing of anyone, anywhere, applying for welfare. Leading the charge in the Senate is Orrin Hatch, longtime conservative stalwart from Utah, who received a $8,000 campaign contribution in 2012 from the political action committee of Laboratory Corporation of America (LabCorp), a behemoth in the drug-testing industry and a Hoffmann-La Roche spinoff. Hatch has also received $3,000 from another political action committee to which LabCorp contributes—the American Clinical Laboratory Association PAC—as well as $4,000 in campaign contributions from the PAC of another company with major interests in drug testing, Abbott Laboratories. GOP Congressman Charles Boustany is among those pushing welfare drug testing in the House. In the 2012 campaign cycle, he received $15,000 from Abbott Laboratories’ PAC.
Read more at http://www.thenation.com/article/173654/gops-drug-testing-dragnet?page=0,0#
Ah, back to the effort to try to make dope-smoking into some kind of noble human activity, I see.
ReplyDeleteHere's a bit of news for you: marijuana gets you high. Your mental state is different after smoking it than it is naturally. A lot of folks with whom I agree on most issues agree with you on this one and think pot laws are too draconian. I'm inclined to put myself in that group, actually. But others have deep concerns, not only about safety in particular situations, but about the overall cultural implications of bringing pot above board in our society.
Now, that said, the most important fact to state here is that the pot controversy is apples-to-oranges of a different kind as well as order from government telling car companies how fuel-efficient to make their products, or telling restaurants that they have to disclose nutritional information about their offerings.
The free market would resolve the drug-testing issue quite elegantly, like it does everything else. You don't want to be screened? Don't go into occupational fields where it's required.
ReplyDeleteOnly assholes want to check your piss. Reagan was no freedom lover is my point. Even his children thought he was a dick for a father.
ReplyDeleteHey, your degree of intellectual rigor and reliance on a set of core principles just gets keener with every comment!
ReplyDeleteAnd actually your last comment fuels my argument. Who wants to work for an asshole?
ReplyDeleteI'm curious. Why is the legal status of pot at the top of your public-policy concerns?
ReplyDeleteOnly you say it is at the top of my public policy concerns. Health Care and foreign policy are by a long shot. I have to always bring it up, though, when you lambast the alleged freedom haters. You cannot dance around it, Ronnie really wrecked his reputation as a freedom lover (oh sure, he took on the Commies, well, why havent they gone away? I know, I know, more guns baby, a continual fight like that with radical Islam). Your so-called freedom lovers can't win wars where they invade others' freedoms. It is immoral to do what has become legal and customary in our society since the Reagan administration: piss testing. For the experienced toker a joint gets you no higher than one cocktail and you know it.
ReplyDeleteYour own words here:
ReplyDeleteYour model presupposes bodies of "experts" - either in the direct employ of the government or serving in an "advisory capacity" - getting paid taxpayer dollars to sit around and determine what's safe and healthy and prudent for the unwashed masses to include in their lives.
Apparently state workers in Florida have to work for an asshole who was freely elected, well it wasn't free, he spent more of his own money on the campaign than anyone before in the history of the state. But when he very early on proposed to piss test all the workers he had a fight on his hands and he lost. Fight assholianism everywhere!
ReplyDeleteHe has the ability to make statements that are so far outside the parameters of logic that they leave you speechless. Patti Davis (formerly Patricia Ann Reagan) talking about her father, The Way I See It
ReplyDeleteJohn D: Surely you're not saying that a nation's government's policy on marijuana tells you everything you need to know about its take on basic human freedom. Also, surely you're aware that there is a worldwide jihadist threat to our way of life. Also, Yes, I know where you stand on health care, and it's in diametric opposition to the fostering of human freedom.
ReplyDeleteAnonymous: The reason pot policy is different is, as I say, that pot gets you high. And, no, I am not drawing any kind of direct line to a position of "therefore, it's automatically bad." But bear in mind that pot has a distinct cultural history. The whole hippie ethos of "The world would be a better place if it were more stoned." That's still the impetus behind most pot advocacy, and one thing we all agree on is that if it prevailed, it would change the nature of our culture in profound ways.
The fox, as has been pointed out by more than one philosopher, knows many small things, whereas the hedgehog knows one big thing. Ronald Reagan was neither a fox nor a hedgehog. He was as dumb as a stump. He could have had anyone in the world to dinner, any night of the week, but took most of his meals on a White House TV tray. He had no friends, only cronies. His children didn't like him all that much. He met his second wife — the one that you remember — because she needed to get off a Hollywood blacklist and he was the man to see. Year in and year out in Washington, I could not believe that such a man had even been a poor governor of California in a bad year, let alone that such a smart country would put up with such an obvious phony and loon. Christopher Hitchens, "Not Even a Hedgehog: The Stupidity of Ronald Reagan", Slate, June 7, 2004
ReplyDeleteJohn D: Then don't work for the state of Florida.
ReplyDeleteWell, fasten your seatbelt for a journey towards your percieved oblivion because half the populace is now in favor of legalization of marijuana. Who are you to tell us what is medicine and what is good for what ails us? You are a hypocrite (phony).
ReplyDeleteJohn D: You invite "your-ignorance-is-breathtaking" responses with a diatribe like that. We all know about his speeches against socialized medicine going back to the early 60s. His friendships with the likes of William F. Buckley and other National Review editors. His self-penned "Time for Choosing" speech in Oct 64. His self-penned weekly radio addresses in the late 70s on the core principles of conservatism. And, of course, the way he dealt with Gorbachev and precipitated the end of the Soviet Union.
ReplyDeleteThe charge of phony? One word for that: ridiculous. He was as out-front a conservative and champion of freedom, dignity and human advancement as there has ever been.
Dont work for the state of Florida? These state employees were in their jobs before their "deliverer" was elected. What part of he was defeated in his paternalistic (asshole paternalism) effort to piss test all government workers did you not get?
ReplyDeleteAgain, you are doing a poor and crude job of trying to refute me. I didn't take an absolute stand on pot policy one way or the other. I merely pointed out the most pertinent aspect of pot - that it gets you high - and pointed out that a lot of thoughtful people have concerns about that.
ReplyDeleteThey can leave those state jobs and go into other fields. No one is stopping them.
ReplyDeleteIt pays to stay well-informed about one's occupational field. If one works for government, one ought to consider that administrations come and go and may institute policies different from those in place when one was hired.
ReplyDeleteThe atheist Christopher Hitchens was mourned in a post here when he died.
ReplyDeleteWhy should the Florida state workers quit their jobs? Because phony Rick Scott comes in and wants to piss test them all randomly? They did not quit, they challenged him in court and he lost which all indicators are that he will lose his governor's mansion big time in 2014 because of crap like this. Freedom lover? Not by my definition.
ReplyDeleteFlorida Gov. Rick Scott (R) is obsessed with drugs. Since coming into office, he signed a law requiring welfare recipients to undergo drug tests — a law that was subsequently halted by a federal court — and he issued an executive order mandating random drug tests for state employees. This executive order has now been declared unconstitutional by a George H.W. Bush-appointed judge:
ReplyDeleteMiami U.S. District Judge Ursula Ungaro Thursday morning ruling that random, suspicionless testing of some 85,000 workers violates the Fourth Amendment ban on unreasonable searches and seizures also raises doubts about a new state law quietly signed by Scott this spring allowing the governor’s agency heads to require urine tests of new and existing workers.
“To be reasonable under the Fourth Amendment, a search ordinarily must be based on individualized suspicion of wrongdoing,” Ungaro wrote in her order issued this morning, citing previous U.S. Supreme Court orders which decided that urine tests are considered government searches.
Read more at http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/04/27/472594/gov-rick-scotts-drug-testing-regime-for-state-employees-declared-unconstitutional/?mobile=nc
You deny that pot policy is your number-one policy concern, but it's clear that it is. You never fail to steer any conversation about a real threat to freedom into an arcane pissing match about drug laws in various states. But you routinely fail to even attempt to refute the charges that begin the conversation - in this case, Sunstein's advocacy of governmental "nudges" that actually encroach on private organizations' ability to make products the way they want to.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteWhy should FL state workers quit their jobs? Because they don't like the new piss-test policy. It's not like they have a right to those jobs.
ReplyDeleteThe constitutionality of the practice is a separate issue. I would wager that further scrutiny by courts will be forthcoming. After all, Judge Ungaro's decision would have broad national implications in both the public and private sector.
ReplyDeleteChristopher Hitchens was a very interesting thinker. He publicly changed his positions on various issues throughout the years, and, in any event, he had an exquisite ability to express himself in both essay form and live debate. That said, he remained dead wrong on many matters to the end of his days.
ReplyDeleteThe term Freedom Haters for your opposition, Reagan lover, is misplaced. Yet I realize you are a champion of corporate freedom, not individual freedom. Defending the indefensible with your continued support of marijuana prohibition and drug testing.
ReplyDeleteAre you an advocate of hair testing which can catch many more who partake in privacy of their own homes since it remains there for 90 days? Slippery slope we all got shoved down by Ronnie the great icon of freedom in your book. Hogwash!
Freedom Lover, my buttocks!
ReplyDeleteIn consultation with Dr. Carlton Turner, President Ronald Reagan issued Executive Order 12564. In doing so, he instituted mandatory drug-testing for all safety-sensitive executive-level and civil-service Federal employees. This was challenged in the courts by the National Treasury Employees Union. In 1988, this challenge was considered by the US Supreme Court. A similar challenge resulted in the Court extending the drug-free workplace concept to the private sector. These decisions were then incorporated into the White House Drug Control Strategy directive issued by President George H.W. Bush in 1989. All defendants serving on federal probation or federal supervised release are required to submit to at least three drug tests. Failing a drug test can be construed as possession of a controlled substance, resulting in mandatory revocation and imprisonment.
Source: Wikipedia
Freedom Lovers my Buttocks, Part Deux
ReplyDeleteI realize you will not be there in front of your television tonight watching because this is one of your so-called Freedom Hater productions.
PBS Airs Documentary on the Failed 'War on Drugs'
The 32-year initiative hasn’t been successful, but it has destroyed millions of lives and contributed to a graying prison crisis. It tells a complex, unsettling story, but its tagline reduces the problem to nine simple words: “The War on Drugs has never been about drugs.”
Written, directed and produced by Eugene Jarecki, an award-winning filmmaker (Reagan, Freakonomics, The Trials of Henry Kissinger) and executive-produced by Danny Glover, Brad Pitt and Russell Simmons, the documentary is a gritty look at the frightening legacy of President Richard Nixon’s war on drugs.
Jarecki’s film takes an unblinking look at the causes and consequences of this “war,” focusing on the destruction of lives, families and communities, as well as future generations. While it doesn’t condone or excuse drug abuse, it goes far beneath the surface to explore issues of human rights violations and the creation and maintenance of, as the press sheet says, “a vast machine” of law enforcement “that largely feeds on America’s poor, and especially on minority communities.”
And, another unforeseen and unprepared-for consequence: The failed war on drugs has fueled the "graying of our prisons" problem.
Read more at http://www.nextavenue.org/blog/pbs-airs-documentary-failed-war-drugs
If this drug thing were one of the top twenty most pressing issues facing America, I might consider doing a post about it.
ReplyDeleteYou lost me at Danny Glover.
ReplyDeleteYeah, that's probably why Rand Paul is wasting our time introducing legislation to overturn your beloved Ronnie's mandatory minimum sentencing laws in regard to mj offenses and why his recent statement on Fox News that Bush & Obama were lucky they had not been arrested for their indiscretions is all over the web.
ReplyDeleteLook, America in the late 60s when Dutch was governor, and even as late as the 80s when he was president, was really wary of the growing prevalence of marijuana use. What makes you think Dutch or any other public official federal state or local should have been so enlightened as to immediately embrace a wheee! let's let everybody smoke wherever and whenever viewpoint? You're not taking a realistic view of the history of the last few decades.
ReplyDelete