Saturday, April 24, 2010

Keep Your Laws Off My Body

Can someone please explain to me why abortion falls under the category of "things I choose to do with my body and thus must be protected by the right to privacy" but the FDA can tell me (rather, restaurants and manufacturers) how much sodium should be allowed in the foods I choose to eat? This is why government regulation in health care is such a slippery slope - once a country makes it the business of the elected officials (and some unelected, as the case may be) to oversee the health of its constituents, the tentacles of regulation and restriction find their way into every aspect of our lives. Wait, do leviathans have tentacles?

1 comment:

  1. Abortion kills an individual person, and death in general alleviates the financial burden of the nanny state. The death of the young and the death of the old are of particular interest to the state, because these groups of people require the most care and the most money.

    So it is not incorrect to say that the nanny state loves abortion (and euthanasia and contraception) because the state has an interest in minimizing the number of people for which it is responsible.

    If you eat too much sodium, your expensive health care is the responsibility of the state and the state does not want to pay for your bad habits. It needs to reduce the money it spends on everyone, and so it has to regulate sodium consumption. But it doesn't regulate abortion because abortion eliminates the need to provide care for anyone in the first place.

    I suspect sodium is just the first in a long line of things that will be regulated. "It's for the common good!"

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