Pharyngula

Posted by: DGKnipfer | May 15, 2009 2:20 PM

I always hate when these ignorant idiots cling to their stupidity. Go Judge Rodenberg. It's good to know there's some reason and mental capability in our courts.

Posted by: littlejohn | May 15, 2009 2:21 PM

I hate to see coercion on what is partly a religious matter, but the judge did the right thing. But five bucks sez the whackjob parents defy the order. They'll say they're obeying a "higher authority," or some similar claptrap.

Posted by: MScott | May 15, 2009 2:25 PM

Could still turn out to be an ugly situation. From all I've read, the kid has been saying that he will physically resist any attempt to treat him, and the doctors have been talking about having to strap him down, forcibly anesthetize him, the ethics of doing so, etc.

If the kid actually carries through on those threats, it won't be pleasant, and they'll probably be a lot of nastiness and accusations directed at the people trying to help him if he aggressively resists being treated.

Posted by: Jody | May 15, 2009 2:29 PM

I only hope the decision has been made in time. I lost a friend to the same illness because treatment was delayed, tho in his case it was a misdiagnosis because the doctors didn't want to perform the more expensive test.

Posted by: Brownian, OM | May 15, 2009 2:34 PM

Good thing religious beliefs are harmless and atheists are just cranky assholes, or this might be happening in real life.

Posted by: jrock | May 15, 2009 2:41 PM

Government agencies have been taking kids from neglectful or abusive parents for years. Hell, even kids whose sole problem is being "extremely obese". At least this kid gets to stay with his family if he goes to treatment. As far as the kid being a "medicine man" and "eldar" in some religious nonsense...a crock of shit dressed up in religious terms shouldn't influence the courts. Good job to the judge.

One question though, does anybody else think that if this family said they were Christian Scientists that they wouldn't have even been a story, much less gone to court?

Posted by: stompsfrogs | May 15, 2009 2:45 PM

"Court filings also indicated Daniel has a learning disability and can't read."

:'-(

Posted by: Benjamin Franklin | May 15, 2009 2:47 PM

You too can become an elder and medicine man in the Nehenhah Band

Simply fill out this convenient application:

http://www.nemenhah.org/internal/spiitual_adoption.html

Through this application I declare that (1) Natural Healing comprises part of my Spiritual Orientation; (2) I will First Do No Harm; (3) I will diligently study the Sahaptan Healing Way and strive to become a Sahaptan Guide, Carrier and Shirt in due course, understanding that I shall receive my training from Chief Cloudpiler, or by whomever he assigns to assist for purposes of my training as a Medicine Man or Woman of the Nemenhah Band; (4) in accordance with the Constitution of the Band, which I have read and to which I subscribe, I covenant to generously donate out of my surplus so that my gift may help to support my Mentor and my Band, beginning with the suggested donation of $250.00 which accompanies this application and going forward each month thereafter as the Spirit dictates.

Oh, and don't forget to send your $250.

Posted by: James Cook | May 15, 2009 2:48 PM

To be honest guys, whats the big deal? If the kid die we have a better future to look forward to, if he lives he can indoctrinate and destroy His or Others children as well.

Religious people are like a virus, it needs to be stomped out. The death of religious people is something good, and the death of this kid would make the world a better place as he can not infect others with his defective genes.

A better world if he dies, thats all. Thats just my logical view atleast. I Want to live in a good world, not a violent self-centered one. This is an american kid, right? Then its even more obvious whats good for the world.

Posted by: stompsfrogs | May 15, 2009 2:54 PM

What would obviously be the absolute best thing for the world would be for there to be less James Cook in it.

Please tell me you're a Poe.

Posted by: jenl | May 15, 2009 3:03 PM

But five bucks sez the whackjob parents defy the order.

and on a side-note... the parents' claim that their son is an "elder" in their made-up tribe is painful. does that word not mean anything anymore?!

Posted by: Anonymous | May 15, 2009 3:06 PM

@James Cook

That has to be one of the nastiest sentiments I've read here. And that takes some doing given the trolls that sometimes happen by.

You're talking about a kid with cancer. Have a heart.

Posted by: Phillycook | May 15, 2009 3:08 PM

Sometimes the law is not an ass. This is one of those times.

Posted by: violet | May 15, 2009 3:11 PM

Regarding “the deluded pseudo-Indian religious kooks he has for parents,” I've occasionally wondered (typically when some friends are going on about the wonkier diet-focused bits of Ayurvedic or Traditional Chinese Medicine) what sort of bullshit I, as a brown person, could spew, and still have sorta-newage-hippyish white people believe it.

(It's also immensely irritating and more than a little racist that view of traditional Indian medicine that's popularized in the west just so happens to be the bits that align with a sort of vague nom-these-herbs-and-align-these-chakras new-ageyness. As opposed to, for example, traditional Ayurveic surgery.)

Posted by: stompsfrogs | May 15, 2009 3:13 PM

The state protecting a living child from his parents and himself is somewhat different from the state protecting a clump of cells. The establishment clause of the second amendment is trumped by the child abuse that is happening here. You can't say that you are a priest in "the church of killing dudes for fun" and get away with murder.

Posted by: Noadi | May 15, 2009 3:14 PM

Charles: So by your logic the court that removed my mother from her family when she was 3 for being neglected and given liquor in her bottle to shut up her crying was wrong? Foster care was rough but she's now a great special education teacher and did a good job raising he and my brother. Compared to the 3 siblings of hers who were left in her biological parent's care who are all alcoholics and one is spending a good long stretch in prison for molesting his daughters.

Sorry, I don't see much difference between a parent neglecting and abusing their child because God tells them to and the parent who does it because they're an uncaring bastard. Both harm the child and should have repercussions.

Posted by: amphiox | May 15, 2009 3:17 PM

Raven #23:
Sadly, by the time his cancer gets so advanced and painful as to compel him to change his mind, it will most likely be too late to do anything about it.

Posted by: Jadehawk, OM | May 15, 2009 3:19 PM

charles, religious adults can off themselves in droves; it's their right. however, children do not have the ability to discern these things for themselves yet, especially when those controlling their lives won't let them form an opinion; neither are children property, to be discarded at will. nobody has the right to kill another individual; the same goes for parents and their children: they. too, do not have the right to murder.

abortion is a completely different animal, if only because the fetus cannot be "taken away"; if it can't physically survive without its host, it's not an individual.

Posted by: Matt | May 15, 2009 3:22 PM

A better world if he dies, thats all. Thats just my logical view atleast. I Want to live in a good world, not a violent self-centered one.

You're an asshole. You say you don't want to live in a self-centered world, but you advocate the death of a 13-year-old as a means of improving your own life? How does that work?

(Is it just kind of assumed that James Cook is an Xtian who spouts horrible things here in an attempt to get atheists to agree with him so he can feel morally superior? Seems that way. Or he actually believes this stuff and should be pushed down a flight of stairs.)

I can't say what I would do if I were closer to the situation, but I can't shake the idea that the child should be an unfortunate and tragic casualty of religious idiocy.

So, Charles, you're volunteering a cancer-stricken 13-year-old kid to be a martyr to your own cause? Sweet of you.

Posted by: Shoggoth | May 15, 2009 3:27 PM

"One question though, does anybody else think that if this family said they were Christian Scientists that they wouldn't have even been a story, much less gone to court? (jrock)"

That worries me, too. How much did the "pseudo-Indian" nature of the parents' kookery contribute to this decision? Were they 'authentic' Indians or a more established religious type (like Christian Scientists) would the judge have found differently even though their kid was in just as much danger?

Posted by: raven | May 15, 2009 3:30 PM

It said in the article that this kid has a "learning disability and can't read." WTF!!!

Kids with learning disabilities learn to read all the time. It may take them longer and they may always have a bit of trouble but most do so.

Can't tell from the article but he might be "mentally slow" (I'm being polite) or just as likely, his parents "home schooled" him which might be "no schooled" him.

Hmmmm, looks llike another case of Xian morality in nonaction. This happens a lot.

PS And yes, the longer he waits for treatment, the lower the success rate. Hard to say where the point of no return is. We may find that out.

Posted by: Epinephrine | May 15, 2009 3:36 PM

So, my bet is that James Cook is another one of these religious folk who impersonate atheists to discredit them. Like that pastor a while back?

On the off chance that he's serious:
James Cook ludicrously opined:

To be honest guys, whats the big deal? If the kid die we have a better future to look forward to, if he lives he can indoctrinate and destroy His or Others children as well.

Dead children don't make a better future. You have no reason to assume that he'll indoctrinate others; while that's a possibility, it's a possibility for anyone. Even if religion were correlated with shooting people randomly, we don't live in a society in which one can opt to punish people for crimes they might someday be predisposed to commiting.

Religious people are like a virus, it needs to be stomped out. The death of religious people is something good, and the death of this kid would make the world a better place...

There is some accuracy in viewing religion as a virus (of the mind), but the people are simply carriers. The death of people isn't a good thing. I'd like to see the virus itself disappear, though.

as he can not infect others with his defective genes.

Religion is decidedly non-genetic, moron. And you don't "infect" people with your genes. "Ack! Stay back, you have blue eyes, and I like mine hazel!" Idiot.

A better world if he dies, thats all. Thats just my logical view atleast.

Define logical. I see no trace of logic in your babble.

I Want to live in a good world, not a violent self-centered one. This is an american kid, right? Then its even more obvious whats good for the world.

Umm, what now? I fail to grasp what you are saying here. You want the death of others, but want a good, non-violent world? And are you suggesting that Americans are particularly deserving of the fate you would wish on others?

I call reverse-Poe. Nice try, cretin.

Posted by: Jud | May 15, 2009 3:40 PM

Were they 'authentic' Indians or a more established religious type (like Christian Scientists) would the judge have found differently even though their kid was in just as much danger?

Nope. In fact, testimony regarding the authenticity of the child's religious belief was offered and the judge refused to hear it. Smart judge. The precedents are clear and he is on solid ground with his ruling. Inquiries into the authenticity of belief would just have got him into entirely unnecessary trouble.

Posted by: Adam | May 15, 2009 3:44 PM

If they find a doc to administer the chemo, I hope he has his insurance paid up. Live or die, these kooks will find a reason to bury him in lawsuits. What a horrible situation all around.

Posted by: Matt | May 15, 2009 3:50 PM

@ Benjamin Franklin #16
I'm a little confused...

[Colleen Hauser] also testified that Daniel is a medicine man and elder in the Nemenhah Band.

Posted by: Emmet, OM | May 15, 2009 3:54 PM

Just a note to express agreement with those who think James Cook's #18 is beneath contempt.

That is all.

Posted by: Shoggoth | May 15, 2009 4:07 PM

"Maybe there's more to life than what appears in peer-reviewed academic journals."

If you have proof for the efficacy of an alternative treatment, I'm keen to see it - as, in fact, are the medical scholars and scientists who publish those journals.

Posted by: kamaka | May 15, 2009 4:22 PM

Wow, this site is a whack job.

3...2...1...

Posted by: stompsfrogs | May 15, 2009 4:25 PM

Charles.

He's a kid. He can't chose to smoke. He can't chose to drink. He's not allowed to enter into any legally binding contracts. He's just hit the age where he's allowed to have a MySpace page. His well-being is entrusted to his parents. If they don't do a good job, the state steps in.

If you swallow a gallon of bleach and someone calls an ambulance, they'll pump your stomach even if you carve a suicide note onto your chest. We don't even let adults commit suicide, and children are allowed to do less than adults because we have agreed that they don't know any damn better. It's pretty black and white: chance of survival with chemo = 95%. chance of survival with naturopathy = 5%. When asked, the child expressed a desire to survive. So he's not so good at math and he got the equation wrong - he should die for it?

A fetus is not a child. It doesn't get a social security number until birth. Upon birth, it is a child until it is recognized as an adult at age 18 or 21. There are different laws that apply to individuals in these three distinct stages of life. line. sand.

Posted by: Epinephrine | May 15, 2009 4:29 PM

Carlie, she capitalized it - she clearly means that a gigantic crab made of stars hasn't ever killed anyone. Or perhaps that astrology never killed anyone. After all, nobody is THAT stupid.

Please tell me that nobody is that stupid.

Posted by: Brownian, OM | May 15, 2009 4:32 PM

As someone who works in cancer surveillance, I'll rejoin with a resounding go fuck yourself, Anna, you vile piece of filth.

There's a type of extremely common cancer known as non-melanoma skin cancer (NMSC). Incidence rates of this cancer are so high and mortality rates are so low that it's generally not included in reports of 'all cancer' rates. Yet, people do die from it, almost exclusively as a result of their not seeking treatment (most instances of this cancer can be surgically excised by a dermatologist with local anesthetic). Unfortunately, many of these cases occur among the homeless and others without the means to procure (or the tendency to seek out, in Canada) basic health services.

This is just one example of why you're a dangerously deluded idiot.

I call reverse-Poe. Nice try, cretin.

I named this Brownian's Corollary to Poe's Law sometime back: "A fundamentalist theist is generally incapable of producing a convincing parody of an atheist."

Posted by: JJR | May 15, 2009 4:33 PM

"...when the alternative is taking on crushing financial debt that will cripple the other kids' chances for an education and a decent life. Maybe there's more to life than what appears in peer-reviewed academic journals."

The other kids' chances for an education and decent life are *already* fairly crippled, considering the belief system being imparted by the parents. Yes, crushing debt sucks but you can't squeeze blood from a turnip, there aren't debtor's prisons anymore (thank goodness), and there is still bankruptcy protection(s) available, as well as gov't aid programs, not to mention religious charities & food pantries, etc. The American social safety net isn't great, but it's not non-existent.

The remaining kids could all join the Armed Forces at 18 if they were desperate enough.

"Sorry, kids, we had to let your brother die so that we could afford to send at least some of you to State U. (or more likely, Bible College X.)"

I just don't buy the economic argument for alternative woo, not even in our ruthlessly for-profit medical care system.

Posted by: notam | May 15, 2009 4:39 PM

@55 & @56 ...

...Cancer is a fungus that invades the body and mutates - clings on to the DNA - it is fed with white sugar, white potatoes, and white flour...

WTF?

Posted by: Dianne | May 15, 2009 4:41 PM

I just don't buy the economic argument for alternative woo, not even in our ruthlessly for-profit medical care system.

I agree. For one thing, woo's not free: it's a strictly for profit institution and woo providers are far less likely to offer financial aid to customers than drug companies. (Who, even if they are evil money-grubbing corporations, have to put up with implicit blackmail from doctors: "Ok, I won't prescribe your drug for my patient who can't afford it...I'll prescribe drug X instead. Of course, then I'll get familiar with how to use that drug, its side effect, etc. Which means I'll probably prescribe it for my insured patients as well...")

Second, any college worth its accreditation is going to have financial aid for kids who can't pay or whose parents can't pay.

Finally, all children who are not insured and whose parents make less than a certain amount are covered by SCHIP. So I seriously doubt that finances really enter into the equation.

Posted by: stompsfrogs | May 15, 2009 4:43 PM

"cow butter?"

"parastroika?" what is that, Russian? Or is it teh stupid?

Does she really think that cancer isn't fatal? Really really? My grandfather received no treatment for his lung cancer. His lungs filled with fluid and he died of apnea. I would really call that dying of cancer. Can we kill her? Is that allowed?

Posted by: NoAstronomer | May 15, 2009 4:45 PM

"parastroika"

A Troika of Parrots?! Even if you hadn't mistyped it, it would make no sense.

Posted by: JustaTech | May 15, 2009 4:46 PM

I think Orac had a pretty good read on these people when he suggested that what really happened is that the first round of chemo scared the crap out of them, and *that* was when they decided to use the "New age psuedo-religion" excuse to not treat.

Right now he's not visibly *as* sick, so his parents feel like they're helping. They're wrong, and chances are good that he will die, but I think this is a case of using religion as a CYA in court, rather than being the defining reason to not treat.

That doesn't make it any more acceptable, but it does change the dynamics slightly.

What they all really need is some very heavy-duty counseling so that they finally understand why they should have treated him in the first place.

Posted by: Hypocee | May 15, 2009 4:48 PM

Don't worry, I know better than to reply in substance to an entity that can't pass the Turing Test - but I can't resist entirely.

"Perestroika"? "Perestroika"?!

Posted by: Rob | May 15, 2009 4:52 PM

I'm not a big fan of letting kids die, but natural selection is screaming for this kids head.

Posted by: GP | May 15, 2009 4:57 PM

It doesn't matter who's right. It should be the families right to make decisions for their own family no matter what other opinions are. I have no idea what alternative methods they are following. But I have seen alternative healing such as Traditional Chinese Medicine and such be far more effective over time than Chemo. Chemo definitely kills cancer in the short term but typically in the end it weakens the patients immune system even further. This leaves the cancer with good odds of coming back even more violent than the original on-set. If we have gotten to the point where government can force certain medical treatments on people that is very scary.

Posted by: Brownian, OM | May 15, 2009 4:59 PM

In case it's not clear, the blockquoted batshittery was from The Independent's article, not the peer-reviewed journal article in Cancer by Dr. Mac Manus and his colleagues.

Posted by: BlueIndependent | May 15, 2009 5:04 PM

"To be honest guys, whats the big deal? If the kid die we have a better future to look forward to, if he lives he can indoctrinate and destroy His or Others children as well.

Religious people are like a virus, it needs to be stomped out. The death of religious people is something good, and the death of this kid would make the world a better place as he can not infect others with his defective genes.

A better world if he dies, thats all. Thats just my logical view atleast. I Want to live in a good world, not a violent self-centered one. This is an american kid, right? Then its even more obvious whats good for the world."

While we vehemently disagree with religion on this site, we do not advocate for a "better world" by hoping the children of idiot parents are allowed to die just so we can get our rocks off. I too think you are a Poe posing as an atheist in a transparent attempt to get us to agree with you, so you can bring your theist buddies in here and splash us all over Glenn Beck's or Hannity's show. If you're not a Poe, atheist or not your immoral comment isn't welcome here, as you can see from the replies you are getting.

Posted by: Brownian, OM | May 15, 2009 5:04 PM

It doesn't matter who's right

...is always the preamble by those without evidence on their side.

"Please! Please! This is supposed to be a happy occasion! Let's not bicker and argue about who killed who."

But I have seen alternative healing such as Traditional Chinese Medicine and such be far more effective over time than Chemo.

No, you haven't. If you had, it would be written up in peer-reviewed articles.

Posted by: Sastra | May 15, 2009 5:11 PM

GP #80 wrote:

But I have seen alternative healing such as Traditional Chinese Medicine and such be far more effective over time than Chemo.

You "have seen" this? Really? You? Seen it? For yourself?

Well, then, screw science. To hell with rigorous and rational methods, peer-review, experiment, and replication. Fuck consistency and caution. We've got an eye-witness, folks, and, as we skeptics know, eye-witness testimony is the STRONGEST evidence there can ever be!!!11!eleventy-one!!1!

GP, people cannot make responsible decisions for themselves unless they are well-informed. The parents and child have been lied to, and misunderstand their situation. Choice involves having two viable options.

Posted by: 3balhorangi | May 15, 2009 5:15 PM

RE: #54
I don't question the efficacy of modern scientific medicine, and I don't for a minute believe the new-age malarkey. I believe you when you say only modern scientific medicine will save the boy's life.

Getting and paying for modern scientific medicine, however, is another question. There are people in the USA at this moment who have to decide whether they can afford the miracles of modern medicine or can take a chance and do without(I'm one of them, having been laid-off in January). That is not an academic question. Working people with families have to make this kind of cost/benefit calculation. I personally would never choose crack-pot alternative medicine over scientific medicine, but I would have to think long and hard about what to do if I needed seven or eight hundred thousand dollars' worth of treatment to save my life. The reason for my original posting was annoyance with the "ivory tower" outlook I found here. Yeah, as scientists you guys are absolutely right. Now, are any of you going to chip in to pay the bills for Daniel's court-ordered chemotherapy?

Posted by: Marcus Ranum | May 15, 2009 5:23 PM

If he dies, then he's less likely to carry on his parents' genetic legacy. Win.

Posted by: Brownian, OM | May 15, 2009 5:24 PM

Now, are any of you going to chip in to pay the bills for Daniel's court-ordered chemotherapy?

Don't look at me; I live in Canada, where we've had socialised medicine for quite some time. If Daniel were living here, then yes, I'd have already been chipping in with the chunk they take off my paycheck, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

Nonetheless, you make a valid point, or at least, one that would be valid were the parents have claimed inability to pay as the reason for refusing care. Besides, Anonymous at #61 pointed out that treatment would be paid for by SCHIP.

Sorry to hear about your job loss, however. All the best in getting back on your feet.

Posted by: Dead Guy Kai | May 15, 2009 5:25 PM

So, if the kid dies can the parents be tried for Voluntary Manslaughter, or does Minnesota have one of those disgusting "Religious get out of jail free" laws?

As usual, "religion poisons everything."

Posted by: Brownian, OM | May 15, 2009 5:27 PM

Oh, I know what Perestroika is/was. (I am old enough to remember the fall of the Berlin wall.)

What I don't know (and I suspect Anna doesn't either, given her use of the term), is what the hell 'parastroika' is, and why we're in such violation of it.

Posted by: brian | May 15, 2009 5:32 PM

Brownian,
You wouldn't change your socialized medicine for the world? Even with all the long lines, terrible waiting periods, and poor care that we are constantly being told exist by xenophobes who have only ever left the US to have sex with underaged prostitutes?

Posted by: Jeanette | May 15, 2009 5:36 PM

Hodgkins Lymphoma is almost always fatal without medical treatment. And the development of effective treatment for it is very recent, and should be appreciated. I had Hodgkins back in 1993, and the doctors told me that if I had gotten it ten years earlier, it would have been an almost certain death sentence.

That kid not only needs parents (or legal guardians) who recognize that he needs real medical treatment, but he needs ones who can be extremely supportive for him throughout his treatment. Hodgkins requires very aggressive treatment, much tougher courses of chemotherapy than for many other cancers, and there's no way for me to convey what he's about to go through in the next few months.

Posted by: strangebrew | May 15, 2009 5:47 PM

51#

Thanks kamaka ...You confirmed my feeling about this nonsense...
I know little about the spirituality of American Indians...I do know that they had a damn sight more morality and depth then is ever shown by an xian cult...although that is not hard.
I looked at the lodges page and was struck by the fact that all the names appeared as Caucasian or variations thereof...at odds with the rest of the text!
Not a smoking gun for sure but odd considering they liked the metaphysical and symbolism of 'principle stone carriers' etc

But it seemed a white man's version and not totally convincing.
In fact is reminded me of a Christian cult gone native!
For affect or because Christianity gets boring I know not...But the one 'Creator'...surely not a Native term...!

Being for the most part Polytheism incarnate.

But they mentioned WAKAN TANKA which as far as I can suss is the nearest to a single deity...certainly the nearest to an xian deity anyway.
There might well be other single deities...this was difficult to quantify seeing as beliefs even diversified between the same tribe...!

"In Dakota mythology, Wakan Tanka was a creator. He existed alone in the void before existence where he was lonely, so he decided to make company for himself by dividing into four. He made earth, and mated with her to create the sky, then he mated with earth and sky to make the sun. Afterwards creation continued to grow as the leaves and twigs grow on a tree."

Bit incestuous...and in the very best of Christian character.

I bet the genuine tribal council are not best pleased!

Read their forum if anybody gets bored...they are being right royally spanked over this nonsense.

http://www.nemenhahforum.info/

Posted by: Brownian, OM | May 15, 2009 5:49 PM

You wouldn't change your socialized medicine for the world? Even with all the long lines, terrible waiting periods, and poor care that we are constantly being told exist by xenophobes who have only ever left the US to have sex with underaged prostitutes?

I stand by my statement, though it's of course made under duress as I'm monitored by jack-booted communist thugs who ensure I never say anything against the motherland.

But a long wait for service is better than no service at all, and fucktons of peer-reviewed evidence shows that privatisation of health care decreases health outcomes and increases per capita costs overall.

We have the same fuckwads make the same arguments here. (I do live in Alberta, after all, home of the high school drop-out politician.) Funny thing is, everytime they try to privatise, everyone freaks out. Now, why would we do that if we're all actually self-interested rational actors who want what's best for us, as the Libbys like to say?

Further, everytime some MD comes out in favour of privatisation, it's inevitably because they've just secured the final investor for their for-profit hospital.

Posted by: Marcus Ranum | May 15, 2009 5:51 PM

Emmet writes:
I fail to see how the avoidable death of a child can be termed “win”.

Who gives a shit, really? You don't know the kid and neither do I. There are loads and loads of unwanted kids on the planet and - apparently - his parents don't want him all that much. Life sucks and sometimes you die early.

Posted by: Michael W Simpson | May 15, 2009 5:57 PM

Traditional Chinese Medicine is neither traditional or medicine. There's even an argument that it's not even Chinese. Why do we think that there's some lost medical practices somewhere amongst ancient civilizations that no longer exist. I'd argue if these wacko pseudoscientific medical cures actually existed, so would the civilizations.

Back on topic. I'm worried that it might be too late for Daniel, and even if it isn't, he's been brainwashed, and he may refuse treatment. I don't think many doctors would be comfortable with forcing it on him, though I argue that once he's a ward of the state, the state becomes the parents, and the physician must respect the wishes of the legal guardians.

The parents should be arrested and imprisoned for life for attempted murder. I have no proof, but I'll bet if Daniel were a dog, they would be. That pisses me off.

Posted by: kamaka | May 15, 2009 6:00 PM

Some of the shit I have read on this thread is just unbelievable.

To all of you who think this kid dying just might be OK...fuck off, like go away and just fucking die yourselves. That you would say such things about a sick, scared kid is reprehensible, even if you think you're only proving some kind of point.

Anna, you go fuck off, too.

Dammit, I just puked on my keyboard.

Posted by: Brownian, OM | May 15, 2009 6:03 PM

Nice summary Merkin Muffley, including the freedom vs. efficacy bit.

If you can convince a big part of society that we should allow parents to do with their children as they please without answering to society in case of, say the avoidable death of the child, then you can be successful. I, for one, will be betting against you.

We had that. It was called the Industrial Revolution. Kids died in factories by the truckloads. Not everyone thinks their kids are little darlings. Some think they're an excellent source of second or third incomes.

Posted by: Anonymous | May 15, 2009 6:03 PM

@ 108
Sad how you fail to see how it matters. or maybe, and stop me if I´m wrong (how could you), defense. Who other would say it like that? I belive that alot of thinking people give someting.. if not shit...

Asshole.

Posted by: Strakh | May 15, 2009 6:07 PM

@ Watchman at #95:

No fair!
Now I have to wash the coke off the computer screen! I haven't laughed so hard in ages.
That's the best answer to morons like Anna I've read yet.
Thanks for the laugh!

Posted by: Chrystal K. | May 15, 2009 6:09 PM

This is actually a very difficult situation. Obviously, if he were a legal adult, he would be able to make his own decision, but since he is so young and may not have a complete understanding of each side it becomes hard to call.

I don't think the parents are purposely "neglecting" their child. In fact, they probably feel like they are protecting him from harmful chemicals and increasing his chances of a healthy recovery.

I wonder if there are any statistics of how effective these natural remedies are on these types of illnesses. They may be effective and just unknown. Regardless, I hope Daniel is cured soon and I pray that he can be happy and healthy.

Posted by: Walton | May 15, 2009 6:16 PM

You wouldn't change your socialized medicine for the world? Even with all the long lines, terrible waiting periods, and poor care that we are constantly being told exist by xenophobes who have only ever left the US to have sex with underaged prostitutes?

Speaking as a UK resident, I can't comment on Canada's socialised healthcare, but ours is notoriously poor. (Thankfully I've had little occasion to use it myself.) It's also financially unsustainable; many of the NHS trusts over here are on the verge of insolvency. Privatisation of some services is likely to be the only realistic option in the long run.

Brownian: as I understand it (and I'll defer to your knowledge on this, since I've never been to Canada), is it not the case that a large part of the problem in Canada is due to the fact that private insurers are banned from covering treatments which are covered by Medicare? Meaning that waiting lists are needlessly long, and some are forced to travel to the US to seek private treatment? That seems like an entirely insane policy to me. I'm not saying that government shouldn't assist with healthcare costs - it does in all Western countries - but it is, IMO, immoral to deny people the right to buy private treatment, separate from anything provided by the state, if they have the money and the will to do so.

All that said, I vehemently disagree with whoever described the prospect of this child's death as "win"; and I think that, whatever one's political leaning, basic human decency requires that we provide life-saving treatment to children, at least, regardless of their family circumstances. I realise that this child declined the treatment, but I don't think that someone of his age, with the level of indoctrination he's likely to have received from his parents, can really make an informed decision. As much as I hate to endorse government intrusion, the judge was, IMO, right in this case.

Posted by: D'oh! | May 15, 2009 6:26 PM

Cancer is a fungus that ... clings on to the DNA

I'd have to say that almost as funny as Barb's claim that that the heart beats for a lifetime without an energy source.

Posted by: Kim | May 15, 2009 6:28 PM

He, can we nominate him for a Darwin Award?

Posted by: Brownian, OM | May 15, 2009 6:29 PM

Brownian: as I understand it (and I'll defer to your knowledge on this, since I've never been to Canada), is it not the case that a large part of the problem in Canada is due to the fact that private insurers are banned from covering treatments which are covered by Medicare? Meaning that waiting lists are needlessly long, and some are forced to travel to the US to seek private treatment? That seems like an entirely insane policy to me. I'm not saying that government shouldn't assist with healthcare costs - it does in all Western countries - but it is, IMO, immoral to deny people the right to buy private treatment, separate from anything provided by the state, if they have the money and the will to do so.

Since that inevitably leads to increased prices and the inability of the poor to pay for necessary treatments, wouldn't that be even more immoral?

Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM | May 15, 2009 6:37 PM

I can't be the only Babylon 5 fan here...

Posted by: Emmet, OM | May 15, 2009 6:41 PM

Speaking as a UK resident, I can't comment on Canada's socialised healthcare, but ours is notoriously poor.

[citation needed]

“Notoriously poor” by what standard? To the best of my knowledge, every international comparison of metrics of public health places countries with “socialised healthcare” way ahead of countries without, both in absolute terms and in terms of value-for-money.

Posted by: brian | May 15, 2009 6:42 PM

According to the yahoo news article: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/ap_on_he_me/us_med_forced_chemo;_ylt=AmGtxVF8CfbzHrJo_ocfoX8azJV4

The guy who founded this "tribe" once served four months in prison in Idaho for fraud related to advocating natural remedies.

Oh, and this family is apparently just catholic. I wonder if the "altrnative treatments" include cannibalism and vampirism.

Posted by: Brownian, OM | May 15, 2009 6:46 PM

“Notoriously poor” by what standard? To the best of my knowledge, every international comparison of metrics of public health places countries with “socialised healthcare” way ahead of countries without, both in absolute terms and in terms of value-for-money.

Oh, we keep hearing about how 'notoriously poor' our system is too, by the fucking illiterates in the Alberta legislature.

Here's pubmed: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez

Type in 'health outcomes privatization' and read a few abstracts. Emmet's right.

Posted by: Qwerty | May 15, 2009 6:47 PM

I was wondering the other day how the religious right (and especially James Dobson) can get so worked up over Teri Shiavo who was considered brain-dead, but not get worked up over this young child who has the potential for a much longer life.

I guess it's that conservative thinking in which a higher authority (god, zeus, jebus) overrules the state's authority.

Posted by: Brownian, OM | May 15, 2009 6:57 PM

'Kay, gotta run, so I won't be able to keep up the privatisation discussion for awhile.

Posted by: mh | May 15, 2009 7:03 PM

Walton, I live in the UK too and I have been lucky enough to use our healthcare system many times. Each time I received polite, friendly and knowledgable service. OK so it is not the most speedy system but it is fair for everyone. I am also comforted by the idea that should I be unwell, need surgery or otherwise rushed to the A&E, I and my family would not need to worry about insurance forms/costs/etc. Can you even imagine not being able to go to your GP because you could not afford to do so? I can't. And I am proud of the NHS. You should be too.

Posted by: T_U_T | May 15, 2009 7:47 PM

I might feel differently about this if the kid had been well informed and was consciously making a decision to die

Well. I would not. Letting suicidal teenagers die is as evil as letting anyone else die.

Posted by: 'Tis Himself, OM | May 15, 2009 8:29 PM

As has been pointed out many times, medical expenses are a leading cause of bankruptcy in the US. Folks like Walton apparently think this is a good thing.

Posted by: 'Tis Himself, OM | May 15, 2009 8:32 PM

but they virtually allowed Terri Schiavo to die at the hands of her husband rather than get medical help that would indeed help her.

Terri Schiavo was brain dead, as are you, you stupid fuck. There was nothing, that's NOT A THING, that could bring her back to life. Sorry if reality doesn't fit your ideology, but that's too bad. Reality has a liberal bias.

Posted by: Ichthyic | May 15, 2009 8:34 PM

they virtually allowed Terri Schiavo to die at the hands of her husband rather than get medical help that would indeed help her.

red herring.

fuck off.

Posted by: Right Winger | May 15, 2009 8:50 PM

Terri Schiavo was not brain dead. Autopsy reports did show that her brain was damaged beyond repair. That is becuase she was denied treatment for so long that her brain kept deteriroating. Of course she could have evntually went into a coma and died anyway later. She could have been possibly okay if she would have recieved proper medical treatment when she first collapsed. Instead she was denied treatment.

She was never brain dead! EVER!

The only person brain dead in this case was Micheal Schiavo. It's not too late for the family to file a crminal investigation into the relationship between Micheal Schiavo and the judge in this case.

A court battle is still going on.

What makes him so suspicious is the fact that he would not let her parents take care of Terri. Her own parents did not have a say in the whole thing. They agreed to take care of everything.

If that's the case, then if I were her parents I would surely let Mr. SChivao take care of ALL of the medical bills by himself.

I wonder if one day he will ever be in the hopital. i wonder if his new bride will pull his plug and make him starve to death while he lays back and helplessly tries to communicate but can't? I bet the media changes their tune then.

Posted by: Kseniya | May 15, 2009 8:52 PM

Right Winger

You're doing a spectacular job of living up to your name.

Posted by: BlueIndependent | May 15, 2009 8:57 PM

"Terri Schiavo was NOT brain dead. She knew everything that was going on in that room. She attempted to speak when her evil murderous husband would occassionaly let her parents into the room. She moved her eyes and head when someone brought flowers and balloons. Is that brain-dead?..."

You're an idiot. And man do you have alow standard for determining the consciousness and brain capacity of individuals. Face facts: the brain scans are irrefutable. Schiavo was brain dead. That you refer to her husband as "murderous" is annihilated by the fact that Schiavo had been in her state for many many years. It was her parents, in their display of self-righteous religiosity, who kept an already gone woman alive, against her wishes.

"...I wonder how much her husband paid that judge to make such a ruling. I wonder what was in it for him?"

People like you who relied on the *video diagnosis* by a doctor senator unskilled in the particular disorder, who had never met nor treated Mrs. Schiavo once in her life, have no credibility on this issue. Maybe it was the husband's need to not continue seeing his wife suffer needlessly, unknowingly, and expensively, ad infinitum for years and years and years. I think a better question is how much more pain you idiot conservatives caused by turning the choice of one married couple into a national issue. I thought you guys were for families and traditional marriage, BUT as usual, when it's not exactly what you morons want, it's time for government to intervene. You guys love the government when it means taking physical action against someone you don't like.

Posted by: BlueIndependent | May 15, 2009 9:01 PM

Right Winger, it's over. You lost, and for damn good reason: Because you're so blinded by your own fealty to your political group that you are incapable of challenging anything you hear or see that doesn't fall within their world frame, and are incapable of operating and understanding the world. Put succinctly, you need help to get through life. Good job abdicating your brain to the group.

I guess conservatives are kinda right: Groupthink is dangerous. Too bad its your own groupthink that's dragging you down.

Posted by: Right Winger | May 15, 2009 9:06 PM

Anna,

My mother died of cancer. You are right though. She was doing much better before thye chemo. Afterwards, she got worse.

There are other alternatives to state funded medical treatments that people view as a joke. EDTA Chelation therapy is one of them. Don't knoc it till you try it!

I made up my mind already. If I have to undergo open heart surgery or chem, I'll take my chnaces with alternatives. At least I'll die quicker and with less suffering if the alternative fails. I have already seen what open heart surgery and chemo can do to a person. I refuse to go through that and if the state says I'll have to, then they'll have to fight me to the death. I hope they bring enough ammo when they come for me cause I have enough to fight a small war. I could last a two months in that house with my food/medical/ammo stock. No government has the right to force medicine on anyone. And if they do claim that right, then dammit they should pay every dime and pay me labor for missing work and pay for my suffering. Government, that will be $10,000,000 please. I'll take mine in cash - tax free. Otherwise, stay the hell out of my business!

Posted by: Right Winger | May 15, 2009 9:14 PM

"Maybe it was the husband's need to not continue seeing his wife suffer needlessly, unknowingly, and expensively, ad infinitum for years and years and years"

----------

HMMM! I bet's that's what Mr. Schiavo told his NEW WIFE!

She was not brain dead - again!

If she were, she would not have been able to look around at people when they spoke to her. Good grief people.

--------------

Similar cases to Terri Schiavo:

Haleigh Poutre. An American child beaten into a coma by a foster parent whom the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is attempting to remove from life support.

Jessie Ramirez. An American man who suffered severe head trauma during a car accident, and was diagnosed as being a "Persistent Vegetative State". Based on this diagnosis, his wife requested that life support be removed only 1 week after the accident. His parents fought to keep him on life support despite his wife's interference and an Arizona judge ordered his feeding tube replaced. He recovered 3 weeks after the accident.

Posted by: dean | May 15, 2009 9:18 PM

"At least I'll die quicker"

That's the only correct thing you've said.

You may need to read this slowly, so your flapping lips don't block your eyes: you are old enough to choose your own care, so if you are ever in a life/death situation, you can choose the quacks you seem to favor, and not worry about the big bad government stepping in.
The case that is the subject of this set of posts isn't about the state stopping adults from choosing their own treatment: it's about the state protecting the weakest among us, a child, from people who are apparently hell-bent on keeping him from receiving the treatment he needs - abuse that could lead to his death. You can be as big an ass as you want to yourself (I'm guessing you are a pro at this), but you shouldn't be able to extend that to a child.

Posted by: skepsci | May 15, 2009 9:22 PM

This seems like the best of all possible solutions. I hope that the kid lives, grows up, and rejects his parents delusions.

Posted by: Kseniya | May 15, 2009 9:28 PM

Similar cases to Terri Schiavo:

Yes, because three weeks is "similar" to fifteen years.

Why don't you cut and paste your talking points all at once, so we can get this over with?

Posted by: Marcus Ranum | May 15, 2009 9:36 PM

Mrs Tilton writes:
failure to give a shit about the avoidable death of a child one doesn't know -- now, I can understand that, actually. It is evidence of a shallow and impoverished personality, to be sure, but it does have a certain logic.

Oh, excuse me for being honest. Perhaps you mistook that for shallow and impoverished. Whatever those are. The truth is that I don't give a shit about the kid and neither does probably anyone here. Wringing your hands on a blog is about as effective as praying for him. Is making lip-service the opposite of "shallow and impoverished"? Then save me a seat on the insincerity bus next to you, OK?

So some kids dumbass parents are trying to talk him into dying, and it (apparently) mostly worked. Until the state had to save his life - time probably better spent fixing a pothole in some road. Why protect the stupid from themselves?

That's evidence of shallow, impoverished personality stuck for ever at the level of a sixteen year old reading Atlas Shrugged and imagining it to be profound.

It put me to sleep; I never finished it. Did you?

I guess I needed to cloak my original comment in some nice-sounding social bullshit. But, seriously, this got me thinking what do we actually mean when we say we "care" about a complete stranger's fate? Do we do anything? Generally, no. Are we just concerned with appearing to be polite? Are we afraid of being called "shallow" and "impoverished" so we say the right thing in order to live up to social expectations?? I wonder if what we're doing is pretending to care in hopes that, you know, someday if we're lying by the side of the road in need of help, someone will actually be socialized enough with the idea of "caring about strangers" to stop. If only to relieve us of our wallet.

Posted by: Right Winger | May 15, 2009 9:38 PM

"The case that is the subject of this set of posts isn't about the state stopping adults from choosing their own treatment: it's about the state protecting the weakest among us, a child"

----

That's not the tune you are singing when it comes to an unborn child now is it? Where is the protection from the weakest of all - the unborn?

Posted by: Blue Fielder | May 15, 2009 9:42 PM

Folks.

Right Winger.

Poe.

Don't be gullible.

Also, Marcus? Lemme guess, you're one of those guys who regularly gets rejected by other internet communities because you're "not PC", right? Yeah, do yourself and the rest of us a favor: grow the fuck up.

Posted by: Right Winger | May 15, 2009 9:44 PM

"Chelation therapy for cancer? No, that's quackery?

-----

I did not state that Chelation was for cancer. it's for clogged arteries and artery related problems - blood pressure, high cholsterol (eat some Cherios, oh yeah, the FDA says we can't)etc.

Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM | May 15, 2009 9:48 PM

As for the case of Terri Schiavo, for the last fifteen years of her existence, she was the ideal christian.

Posted by: Jack McCullough | May 15, 2009 9:56 PM

This is great news.

http://rationalresistance.blogspot.com/2009/05/judge-to-parents-i-wont-let-you-kill.html

Posted by: C | May 15, 2009 9:57 PM

There are no words for how enraged the alternative medicine frauds make me. I just saw a kindly old man die a horrible, nasty death because he bought into the crap lies he received in the mail: Chelation therapy, "What Your Dr. Isn't Telling You", why you should only eat beet sugar and not cane sugar if you are diabetic, drink herbal tea every day and you'll never get sick. You name it, he bought it, hook line and sinker. He'd never had any formal education, grew up on a reservation (real Native American in his case), but although uneducated he wasn't stupid. He'd learned to read and write both English and Spanish, he could tear a diesel engine apart and put it back together blindfolded - but he was without any education and had been prepared for the woo by his earlier indoctrination into the Jehovah's Witnesses. Nevertheless, he loved a beer, would give someone the shirt off his back, literally, and was in all ways an interesting and funny old guy who never once preached at me or attempted to sway me from my atheistic doom.

But he developed penile cancer. Always a killer, the only cure is early and radical surgery (penectomy), unless it's caught early enough to excise it. Well, long story short, he first treated the sore with aloe vera, then he moved on to some kind of fucking mushroom powder, mitake or something like that. Wouldn't have surgery once he was diagnosed. It got worse and worse until, when he finally went to the hospital, the penis was completely gone and most of the testicles, and he had a gigantic gaping hole where all that used to be. Really, you could see intestines. Mushroom powder indeed.

The doctors at the ER at U of Iowa hospitals were white-faced with shock when they saw it. Of course, by that time there was nothing for it but hospice. And a couple of months later, he died.

Right up until the day he died, he was taking various herbal stuff along with the pain meds. No reason not to, as far as hospice is concerned, the guy was a goner anyway, and if it made him feel better, cool. He'd lie there, all 75 pounds of him, watching the birds at the feeder outside his window, and talk about how he was getting better, his meds were working, he was going to show us all.

But as sad as this is, he was an adult. He put his son through hell, watching him die, but as he was an adult it was his own damned life and he had the right to do what he wanted with it. But it had a profound effect on me; I'd always sneered at the people who wanted to "pray it away", and thought they were stupid, but had never really thought about just how evil the purveyors of quackery like this are. They prey on the credulous, the ignorant, and the poor old man had spent a fortune on their herbs and powders and "medical books" by the time he died. We're still getting these ads and pamphlets in the mail. Something really needs to be done about this, via the law. This stuff should be regulated by the FDA. However, we seem to be going in the opposite direction as a country. Insurance actually covers chiropractic now. FFS. And I worked with intelligent, well-educated people who actually think the Chinese and Indian folk remedies are magical cures, and that vaccines cause autism. I don't really know what can be done about it, but something needs to be done. It really does.

Sorry so long. This subject hits close to home.

Posted by: Sastra | May 15, 2009 10:01 PM

Right Winger #176 wrote:

I did not state that Chelation was for cancer. it's for clogged arteries and artery related problems - blood pressure, high cholsterol (eat some Cherios, oh yeah, the FDA says we can't)etc.

No, that's wrong.

You might find this relevant, and interesting, because it goes into some of the details on why:

http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2006/08/your_friday_dose_of_woo_gonna_wash_those.php

Conclusion:
"To this day, no properly randomized, double-blind study has ever shown any benefit from chelation therapy for symptoms of cardiac disease or peripheral vascular disease."

(By the way, where does the FDA say we can't eat Cheerios?? I must be misunderstanding you here.)

Posted by: Right Winger | May 15, 2009 10:08 PM

"(By the way, where does the FDA say we can't eat Cheerios?? I must be misunderstanding you here.)"

Earlier this week the FDA was getting onto Cherios becuase of their statements about lowering Cholesterol in television advertisements. The FDA told them that they could not advetise like this and that they aere advertising a "drug" since their product claimed to lower Cholesterol.

I don;t know how Cherios responed, but it should have been something along the lines of "MIND YOU OWN DAMNED BUSINESS!"

The government is trying to control ceral now. We need this government downsized tremendously. We need to take away about 75% of their powers and priviledges and money - and then make them eat Cherios

Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM | May 15, 2009 10:10 PM

Still nothing but paranoia Right winger. False advertising is a crime. Get a real argument or go home.

Posted by: wistah | May 15, 2009 10:12 PM

Okay, there's a whole new crop of nutz, idiotz, and wackos posting on this site. PZ, you need an apocalyptic purge, stat.

The State has an obligation, indeed, a vested interest, in rescuing this child from its nutbag parents as surely as it has a vested interest in protecting a child from abuse. The presumption is that a child has a right to a long and healthy life. If parents are unable to provide a setting in which such development can occur, the state can and will provide an alternative setting. It has ever been thus.

Intervene, strap the freakin' kid down, give him his goddamned chemo, save his life, and let him get on with his miserable fucking existence. And so it goes.

Posted by: anonymouroboros | May 15, 2009 10:18 PM

"Earlier this week the FDA was getting onto Cherios becuase of their statements about lowering Cholesterol in television advertisements. The FDA told them that they could not advetise like this and that they aere advertising a "drug" since their product claimed to lower Cholesterol.

I don;t know how Cherios responed, but it should have been something along the lines of "MIND YOU OWN DAMNED BUSINESS!"
The government is trying to control ceral now. We need this government downsized tremendously. We need to take away about 75% of their powers and priviledges and money - and then make them eat Cherios"

Your conspiracy theory is a bit silly; the FDA isn't trying to control cereal so much as it is trying to minimize potentially misleading advertising, as it has always done. The "lower cholesterol by half" claim was what they targeted because it had not been proven (to the FDA at least), not the cereal itself. Nonetheless, the company can still sell Cheerios, making your first claim false.

Posted by: C | May 15, 2009 10:21 PM

Thanks, Sastra. It was, indeed, very sad.

At least he had a long, full life. This poor kid is going to be very, very lucky to even get a shot at life. It makes me crazy!

Posted by: Sastra | May 15, 2009 10:28 PM

Right Winger #186 wrote:

Earlier this week the FDA was getting onto Cherios becuase of their statements about lowering Cholesterol in television advertisements. The FDA told them that they could not advetise like this and that they aere advertising a "drug" since their product claimed to lower Cholesterol.
I don;t know how Cherios responed, but it should have been something along the lines of "MIND YOU OWN DAMNED BUSINESS!"

Your explanation seems to be missing something here: anything that indicates that Cheerios really does lower cholesterol, as they claim.

If they don't have the studies and evidence to back up what they're saying, then no, they shouldn't be able to say it. There are some rather high criteria that have to be met if a product is making a specific medical claims. DSHEA ought to be repealed, because it allows supplements too much leeway.

Are you trying to imply that no, any ad should be able to say whatever it wants, and let the buyer beware?

Posted by: Dr. Dredd | May 15, 2009 10:40 PM

I'm glad that the judge came to the conclusion he did. I read the transcript of the in-chambers interview with the kid, and he really doesn't seem to get what's going on.

http://www.courts.state.mn.us/Documents/0/Public/Other/Hauser/Hauser_Transcript.pdf

Unfortunately, though, it's still going to be a horrible situation for all concerned. Daniel basically said he's going to punch and kick anyone who tries to treat him. I feel bad for the physicians, nurses, etc. who try to take this case on.

I also feel bad for Daniel himself. How DO you force chemo on someone who doesn't want it? Sedate him for months? Keep him restrained? Not pretty.

Posted by: Krystalline Apostate | May 15, 2009 11:04 PM

tight zinger @ 160:

I made up my mind already. If I have to undergo open heart surgery or chem, I'll take my chnaces with alternatives. At least I'll die quicker and with less suffering if the alternative fails. I have already seen what open heart surgery and chemo can do to a person.

I refuse to go through that and if the state says I'll have to, then they'll have to fight me to the death.

I hope they bring enough ammo when they come for me cause I have enough to fight a small war. I could last a two months in that house with my food/medical/ammo stock.

No government has the right to force medicine on anyone. And if they do claim that right, then dammit they should pay every dime and pay me labor for missing work and pay for my suffering.

Posted by: Laura | May 15, 2009 11:24 PM

First off people that use explicatives to try and make a point appear ignorant to me. I dont think I need curse words to understand passion or zealous. I think I just see a small person with little to say, at least not in an intelligent way. Why would I listen to someone who tells me to F*** off?

Secondly, I have cancer. Breast cancer. I use supplements, ALOT of supplements.

I take Taxol, 9 months of Taxol.

It wasnt until I started taking supplements and eating certain types of food that my cancer began to diminish. In fact I HAD a spot in my liver, HAD.

For those of you that want to trash someone for their food beliefs, you probably need to step back. I watch a guy eat food from McDonalds every week. Would you like to guess what kind of cancer he has? (Give you a gastric guess)

What we eat does affect how our bodies process and deal with illness. Anyone that has cancer should educate themselves on what they think is their best treatment. It may not be standard western medicine, it may be.

When a person has cancer all they have are choices. The people looking on need to support that. Dieing is a choice, not one that is very popular, but it is a choice. Alternative therapies are choices. Choices can change as well.

I love my oncologist, I think he has saved my life in many ways, but I also think that my food and supplement choices have done more for me and my health than any treatment offered to me so far. I am fortunate that I can continue with both, but at this juncture if I had to choose, I would choose the food and supplement path.

What disturbs me most about this story is how the government wants to tell the parents' and their child what to do. Although I feel that chemo in this case is a life saver (this cancer is understood) and combined with food could lead to an even better life, on principal it is wrong. Parents should have a right to parent in the way they feel is best for their child and nothing I have read indicates this family is SEEKING harm for their child.

We may not agree, you may think that a diet of McDonalds and Taco Bell is A-OK. You may think the food pyramid is actually good for you. None of that is the point. The point is, a family has made a medical decision and an outside party has decided that it isnt the right decision and has played God externally. Yes, the family is playing God too, but they are internal. The judge is no more qualified than the parent(s). The doctor is probably the most qualified, but still does he get to pick the child's path, JUST because he is a doctor?

To me this is very frightening. As a positive recipient of chemo, I hate to think that someday I would be faced with an external person that told me that the only choice I had was to treat my illness their way and that if I balked I would be forced.

Maybe though thats what we want. Sounds like a lot of folks want to believe that medicine and doctors know it all. That they are the only ones that can lead us to the path of healing and we should put our complete and total trust in the medical degree they have earned. Maybe so, but as long as I live and breathe, I am determined to pave my way and to kill every last cancer cell in my body. If I have to step over every medical professional in existence to do it, so be it.

For those of you that would rather someone else handle it for you, by all means have lunch at McDonalds, I hear Dairy Queen is good too.

Posted by: Blue Fielder | May 15, 2009 11:46 PM

Laura typed:

Sounds like a lot of folks want to believe that medicine and doctors know it all.

I saw:

WOO WOO WOO WOO WOO WOO WOO WOO WOO WOO WOO

By the way, woohead, it's "expletives", not "explicatives". I'd wager dollars to dogshit you're an outright troll, probably a Poe, but you've earned the first wave of my endless ire.

Posted by: Russell Blackford | May 15, 2009 11:51 PM

Yes, Laura, the point is that this kid is a minor. That doesn't automatically mean he can't make any decisions of consequence. If he has a good understanding of what he's doing and is capable of rational reflection on it, then he has the same rights as an adult to refuse medical treatment. That's the "mature minor" doctrine. But do we really think that the courts should just presume that he has that kind of maturity when he's only 13 and it's a matter of life and death? No.

And why should parents have the right to decide such questions of life and death for their children? Sure, as a society we delegate to parents the responsibility to bring up children and to make a lot of decisions about shaping their values, etc. But why should the parents' wishes prevail in a case like this where yielding to the parents' wishes means that the child will die? Parents don't have a right from some transcendental source to make any decision whatsoever on behalf of a child. Their rights are circumscribed. They are there to make decisions that could reasonably be thought to be in the child's interests, admittedly with quite a lot of discretion given to them, but not the discretion to make any decision whatsoever on behalf of the child, no matter how irrational or destructive to the child's interests. A point comes when society as a whole must step in, through the courts.

Where the decision being made is to refuse life-saving medical treatment, only the individual concerned should have the right to make that choice. And state paternalism is justified unless the individual is either an actual adult or a minor who, as an individual, is sufficiently mature to make an informed choice about something so momentous. That's what the law says, and I don't see why we'd want to change it.

I sometimes get into trouble with fellow atheists when I insist that some minors really are mature enough to make that decision. But we always need to be cautious about that, when a young life is at stake. It looks to me as if this was a judge who understood all this and acted wisely.

Posted by: raven | May 16, 2009 12:24 AM

Right Winger is simply lying. Terry S. had a severely and irreversibly damaged brain of 615 g. This is half human normal and not much bigger than a chimpanzee.

But a chimpanzee is orders of magnitude more functional, a smart, self aware autonomous entitity. Even a cat would be more functional.

The damage was severe in the cerebral cortex, the thinking part of the brain that makes us us.

The usual, a combination of toxic religion, lack of education, mental illness and a low IQ. He says he will reject modern medicine for alternatives. People do this and many of them die each year because of it. Not smart but we already know that.

wikipedia:

Examination of Schiavo’s nervous system by neuropathologist Stephen J. Nelson, M.D., revealed extensive injury. The brain itself weighed only 615 g, only half the weight expected for a female of her age, height, and weight, an effect caused by the loss of a massive amount of neurons. Microscopic examination revealed extensive damage to nearly all brain regions, including the cerebral cortex, the thalami, the basal ganglia, the hippocampus, the cerebellum, and the midbrain. The neuropathologic changes in her brain were precisely of the type seen in patients who enter a PVS following cardiac arrest. Throughout the cerebral cortex, the large pyramidal neurons that comprise some 70% of cortical cells – critical to the functioning of the cortex – were completely lost. The pattern of damage to the cortex, with injury tending to worsen from the front of the cortex to the back, is also typical. There was marked damage to important relay circuits deep in the brain (the thalami) – another common pathologic finding in cases of PVS. The damage was, in the words of Thogmartin, "irreversible, and no amount of therapy or treatment would have regenerated the massive loss of neurons."[69]

Posted by: raven | May 16, 2009 12:34 AM

I presume child services have techniques for this sort of situation.

Guess again. They don't. The number of cases where this happens runs around zero. If a 13 year old violently resists, it probably isn't possible to treat him for this type of cancer. He needs months of chemo, and supportive care to withstand the side effects of same. He also could just flee beyond the state of Minnesota jurisdiction and/or disappear.

The big problem in medicine isn't people rejecting it. It is that demand is far greater than money to pay for it or infrastructure to provide it.

Posted by: raven | May 16, 2009 1:03 AM

Laura:

And I disagree that I dont have the right to make decisions for my child, whether some doctor likes it or not.

So you are OK with medical neglect of kids leading to death?

How about withholding food and water from your kids?

Or making them sleep outside during the winter?

Our society considers children human beings, not property. And there are a lot of lousy parents who never wanted kids and never should have had them. Child abuse is all too common and frequently horrendous and occasionally fatal for the kids. Happens constantly and we've all seen or heard of cases.

BTW, I saw a woman diagnosed at 33 with stage 1, >90% curable breast cancer. She went alternative and died of metastatic breast cancer 18 months later. Basically she turned down a near certain cure for certain death. You do what many people do, mistake correlation with causation. " I prayed and consumed massive amounts of supplements and oh yeah, was treated with state of the art chemo by an oncologist. God and vitacost saved me."

.

Posted by: luna1580 | May 16, 2009 2:19 AM

wow, so i just checked back the comments at the last link i gave above, they are worth a read:

http://www.computernewbie.info/wheatdogg/2009/05/11/a-sad-curious-tale-of-rampant-duplicity-and-stupidity/

look what i found (i think it is legitimate):

galigo:

May 15th, 2009 at 4:55 pm

My mother died because she followed his healing advice instead of receiving medical treatment. Here is a copy of an email I sent the chief. cloudpiler@nemenhah.org

Phil Landis (AKA Cloudpiler),

Thanks to all the publicity you’re receiving from this Daniel Hauser case, I finally caught up to you. I’m sure you’ve wanted to know how things ended up with my mother, Richelle, your neighbor at Parks Place, Hideaway Valley, UT.

If your memory needs refreshed, she had uterine cancer, which is 75% to 95% survivable with appropriate (medical) treatment.

However, you advised her to use your alternative healing methods, which she did.
As you were aware, she became sicker and sicker, as she continued to do what you advised her to do. When I came to visit her, you would disappear.

When she became so sick that she needed 24 hour care, my wife and I brought her to our home in Idaho. Here, we cared for her and loved her until she died.
Then, I saw your mugshot on the local TV news, convicted of fraud.
Now, I see you’re using religion to cover your multi-level marketing scam to distribute the same healing methods that lead to my mother’s death.

To top it off, I understand you claim to have discovered and translated some ancient plates which prove you’re the chief of some lost tribe of Native Americans!

Do you have any idea how ridiculous that is? Sadly, there are people who innocently fall for your deceit. Like my mom did.

I wonder how many other people have died because of what you do.
Does it bother you?

Here’s something you should know: My wife and my dad both had cancer at the same time as my mother. Weird, huh. The thing is, my wife and my dad are still here. Cured by surgery. Perfectly healthy now. I miss my mom, and every time I think of her slow, painful, rotting, stinking death my heart breaks all over again.

You are not only a fraud, chief, you’re a killer.

I’m going to post a copy of this letter to the blogs that come up on the first search page when your name is googled.

Posted by: Kel | May 16, 2009 3:51 AM

There is a really interesting article in this week's New Scientist (I know, those creationism enablers) about the Nocebo effect. I wonder just how much effectiveness of chemo will be lost based on the boy's negativity towards the treatment?

Posted by: Walton | May 16, 2009 4:16 AM

Since that inevitably leads to increased prices and the inability of the poor to pay for necessary treatments, wouldn't that be even more immoral?

Absolutely not.

As a libertarian, I believe that mutually-beneficial voluntary transactions are inherently superior to state coercion. If A wants healthcare and can pay for it, and B is willing to provide it and needs the money, then who is harmed by their entering into a mutually beneficial transaction? Furthermore, this benefits not only A and B, but also the general public, since it takes some of the strain off the state healthcare system.

The only reason to oppose private healthcare is a dogged commitment to "equality at all costs". But is it really worth sacrificing good healthcare in favour of equality?

Note that I'm not saying that there should be no state healthcare. Some forms of healthcare are best provided by the state. For example, ambulance and emergency room care; since ambulances and ERs tend to treat anyone in need without regard to ability to pay (and, in most countries, are legally required to do so), it would be very hard to run them at a profit. (As I understand it, since the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, many US hospitals are losing money - and since many of them are run or funded by local governments, the taxpayer ends up absorbing the cost anyhow.) It seems more efficient, therefore, to have it provided directly by the state. I also think that, on moral grounds, it is right that we provide health treatment to children at public expense; after all, they didn't choose the family to be born into, and shouldn't suffer as a result of their parents' choices. Similarly, the elderly, many of whom have worked all their lives (and would be uninsurable in a private market due to their higher susceptibility to health problems), ought to get state-funded medical care; as should war veterans. And, of course, vaccinations and epidemic control must also be provided by the state, since the spread of contagious diseases is bad for everyone. So I'm not opposing all state involvement in healthcare; I'm just saying that there should, at minimum, be a parallel private market.

Posted by: Kel | May 16, 2009 4:29 AM

and as for the economic aspect... DO keep in mind that while every unnecessary appointment costs some money, every untreated or undiagnosed broken bone/festering wound/abscessed tooth/pneumonia/diabetes/cancer/etc costs a HELL of a lot more in the late stages then in the early stages... but diseases are never discovered in the early stages when people try to minimise their visits to the doctor to an absolute minimum.

Posted by: Brownian, OM | May 16, 2009 4:44 AM

As a libertarian, I believe that mutually-beneficial voluntary transactions are inherently superior to state coercion.

Yes, we know what your default position is. We don't need the state=FASCISM!!!!one!!!! argument. It's hardly compelling, given the 180 or so non-fascist non-libertarian states around the world. Try to find an existent boogeyman to shit your pants about.

If A wants healthcare and can pay for it, and B is willing to provide it and needs the money, then who is harmed by their entering into a mutually beneficial transaction?

I told you. Pubmed will tell you. Costs go up, inefficiency often goes up (read the literature) and overall quality of care goes down. Fucking ditch every political theory text you're wasting your time with and look at some empirical evidence.

Furthermore, this benefits not only A and B, but also the general public, since it takes some of the strain off the state healthcare system.

Except it doesn't. Don't fucking tell me A=B when I've already told you and pointed you to the literature that says A doesn't equal B, but C.

Yes, Some fees-for-services arrangements can take the strain off. Some outsourcing to private providers can be well-integrated within a public system. But these are all specific instances within specific systems. The only generalisable take-away message is that privatisation leads to worse care, not better.

You think that's unfair to rich people? I couldn't care less if you paid me to. The alternative is way worse and way less fair for a much larger group. If those with money are so concerned about their health prospects, they're free to hire personal trainers and chefs to ensure they eat healthily and exercise, which will have a vastly greater effect than any specialist's care. (If you doubt that, you have no business even discussing health care.)

So far all you've done is repeated rumours of 'notoriously bad care' and made some Pol Phil 201-level Intro to Libertarianism arguments. Read the lit. That's the world we're living in. You want some alternate reality? Too fucking bad. Take it up with whatever god you may or may not believe in.

Posted by: Mrs Tilton | May 16, 2009 4:59 AM

Marcus @170,

Perhaps you mistook that for shallow and impoverished. Whatever those are

It would be impossible to come up with a better rejoinder than the one you yourself provide here.

But really, you're not fooling anybody with your "Oh nobody here cares about this kid, I am simply the only one being honest". You do care about him. You care about him enough to account his death a "win". That's special.

Posted by: Faithless | May 16, 2009 5:39 AM

Parastroika:

This (for the uninitiated) is a sled which soldiers of the British Parachute Regiment use for transport within the Arctic circle.

Posted by: Kel | May 16, 2009 5:46 AM

That way I'll still be paying in the taxes when you, whoever you are, need the treatment!

Posted by: Kel | May 16, 2009 6:00 AM

Walton, your success as an individual is almost wholly contingent on the society you are in. Taxes are a means to ensure prosperity. Sure, some people pay more than their fair share and others get more than they deserve, but that's how life is. Would you really be so heartless as to give medical care as an afterthought to someone who doesn't have the ability to pay for treatment?

Humans are social creatures and no one individual can function completely without the help of others. Healthcare, alongside education and welfare are basics that any society needs in order to flourish. Yes, there are some scenarios where resources are wasted, where money is going towards paying for unnecessary treatments. But that's how it goes, you aren't going to get 100% efficiency no matter what you do. And when it comes to what are considered fundamental aspects of society, then surely you can appreciate that paying to maintain another's health is mutually beneficial. If you were incapacitated, who would pay for your medication? Should they just let you die, or keep you at a quality of life that meets the bare minimum of human needs because it is more cost effective? Are you so withdrawn from human contact that you have lost all empathy for the suffering of your fellow man?

Posted by: Kel | May 16, 2009 6:16 AM

In my defence: I regularly give money to homeless people. And, as I noted on another thread, I have also been campaigning against my college's plan to make some of the housekeeping staff redundant in order to cut costs. I care about other human beings.

I just have moral qualms about being generous with other people's money.

Posted by: windy | May 16, 2009 6:38 AM

Nobody in history has ever died of Cancer - they've all died of the treatment...

Courageous Man Refuses To Believe He Has Cancer

Posted by: Walton | May 16, 2009 6:45 AM

Yet despite all this, I'm more than happy to pay for taxes because in doing so it provides vital services regardless of gender, nationality or religion.

I'm sure you are. But your neighbour might not be. And by voting, you don't just vote to spend your own money - you vote to spend your neighbour's money, without giving him a choice in the matter.

I happily contribute to the cost of your medical care as part of a perfectly good bargain between individuals which also ensures mine.

But it isn't a bargain. It's a coercive imposition. If someone wants to opt out of it, he or she can't. Yes, in theory you can leave the country and go elsewhere; but immigration restrictions limit that, and all countries impose some form of taxation on their citizens.

The fact is that the "social contract" is complete bunk. A person simply does not have the chance to opt out of state control. If every person were completely entitled to opt out of his home nation and establish his or her own micro-state - creating, essentially, a competitive market in government - then there would be some justification for the notion of a social bargain. As it is, that isn't the case.

Democracy does nothing whatsoever to address this problem - because it still means that other people can forcibly prevent me from following my own desires.

That said, I personally don't object to paying for other people's healthcare. I do, however - to provide a better example - strongly object to paying the television licence fee. As it is, I would quite like to have a TV and could easily afford to buy one; but I choose not to, because I don't want to pay the licence fee. The licence fee is a particularly iniquitous form of state coercion, forcing citizens to fund a (fairly worthless and politically skewed) media outlet against their will. (It's also a regressive tax, hurting the poor more than the rich, which begs the question of why socialists nevertheless seem to be so keen on it. But I digress.)

Now, this problem could, on its face, be solved by privatising the BBC and abolishing the licence fee (which will probably be done after 2012 anyway, when everything goes digital). But it doesn't solve the fundamental problem - the state forces people to give over a proportion of their hard-earned wealth to fund things which they may not personally support.

Posted by: 'Tis Himself, OM | May 16, 2009 6:53 AM

Goodness gracious, Walton, you mean that you might actually have to pay money that might help other people? What a self-centered, egotistical, selfish arsehole you are!

Grow up, boy (notice that's "boy" with a small "b"). You need to do some maturing.

Posted by: Tom | May 16, 2009 6:57 AM

"Sorry, I don't see much difference between a parent neglecting and abusing their child because God tells them to and the parent who does it because they're an uncaring bastard. Both harm the child and should have repercussions."

I rather feel that a properly secular state should draw no such distinction either. A state that refuses to directly follow the instructions of a religion but actively attempts to avoid offending it is still ultimately under almost the same degree of religious control - all the religious have to do is define the opposite of what they want as offensive and it will have much the same effect as asking a compliant state to directly enforce it, if only they make indignant noises loudly enough. Secularism shouldn't actively oppose a religion, but it shouldn't "respect" it in any way either; it should make its decisions entirely rationally and enact them without any regard at all for whether they conflict with religion or not. It should, basically, act as if religion did not exist at all - in this case, this would mean it would perceive no difference between a religiously motivated demand to refuse medical treatment without any rational justification, and an equally irrational demand motivated by something other than religion.

Posted by: Walton | May 16, 2009 7:07 AM

Well of course there isn't choice, it's part of the social contract you are born into.

You can't be "born into" a contract. I repeat what I said above:

But it isn't a bargain. It's a coercive imposition. If someone wants to opt out of it, he or she can't. Yes, in theory you can leave the country and go elsewhere; but immigration restrictions limit that, and all countries impose some form of taxation on their citizens.

The fact is that the "social contract" is complete bunk. A person simply does not have the chance to opt out of state control. If every person were completely entitled to opt out of his home nation and establish his or her own micro-state - creating, essentially, a competitive market in government - then there would be some justification for the notion of a social bargain. As it is, that isn't the case.

The fact is that so many people in our society are all too willing to accept the notion that we have to be bound by society's rules, and to subjugate our own desires to the will of the majority. We're all coerced every day of our lives - not just by the state through penal sanctions, but by social pressure, by our peers, employers and family. I dream of a society in which each individual is free to fulfil his or her own wishes and desires, regardless of what anyone else thinks about it - subject only to the rider that one must not interfere with the autonomy of another.

Posted by: Rorschach | May 16, 2009 7:13 AM

Fuck you can be a heartless cunt Walton.

I think he sometimes doesnt compute the consequences his lofty ideals would have for real people in hard cold reality.I dont think he does try to be a heartless .....person(Kel,that there c word is taboo....) intentionally.

Posted by: Kel | May 16, 2009 7:19 AM

If you don't like that you are born into society, you can always leave. But like it or not, your very existence and propserity is because of the society you are born into. If you don't like it, leave. That's it, if you think society is such a bad influence to be forced into social contract, then cease to be in society. This isn't a love it or leave option, if you don't want to be part of a social contract then you have no other choice.

Humans are social creatures, I can't stress this enough. Our success has come from working together and affording the ability for specialisation. Farmers work long hours so you don't have to grow your own food, truck drivers transport it to you so you don't have to live rurally. Scientists and engineers develop technology and infrastructure to make this process easier. Builders make the house you reside in, electricians wire it up for you. Thanks to companies on the other side of the world you have the ability to store food for long periods of time, provided those working at the power plants keep it up and running.

You benefit from having a working society, your rich neighbour benefits from having a working society, and individuals at all levels benefit from having a working society. There are many animals who live in collectives, and while they only work to feed their own child, being in a collective is the very mechanism for survival. Because the group can delegate responsibilities that mean the individual doesn't have to do everything.

Posted by: Carlie | May 16, 2009 7:20 AM

Why is it that every fucking thread that has even a whiff of social commentary eventually devolves into a discussion of libertarianism?

Posted by: Kel | May 16, 2009 7:25 AM

I think he sometimes doesnt compute the consequences his lofty ideals would have for real people in hard cold reality.I dont think he does try to be a heartless .....person(Kel,that there c word is taboo....) intentionally.

Posted by: Kel | May 16, 2009 7:28 AM

Before this becomes another libertarian wankfest, I'm withdrawing. Besides, it's probably better for my blood pressure.

Posted by: Rorschach | May 16, 2009 7:31 AM

@ 249,

Isn't it a sacred right to refuse treatment?

As has been ponted out on the first "Hauser" thread a million times,its not sacred right for a scared 13yo teen,who would also refuse to have his head stitched,a bone straightened etc,coz all these things would freak him out and he'd rather mum take him home.
Just not an option.
Had a 77yo JW bleeding to death at work today,I said after advising transfusion could save her life and she,her family and her "advisor" refused,ok,go right ahead....Not the same as a 13yo.
But I agree,by now the boy has been so traumatized and misinformed that it will be a nightmare to get him to comply.

Posted by: Carlie | May 16, 2009 7:35 AM

I suspect that the reason most people simply accept ethical altruism without questioning it is due to our society's religious heritage

No, the general consensus is that religion co-opted the altruism that had already evolved. Well-functioning collectives outcompete individualistic groups. In an inbred, fairly small group, kin selection = group altruism, providing benefit for both the individual and the group. It's pretty simple selection.

Posted by: Walton | May 16, 2009 7:41 AM

No, the general consensus is that religion co-opted the altruism that had already evolved. Well-functioning collectives outcompete individualistic groups. In an inbred, fairly small group, kin selection = group altruism, providing benefit for both the individual and the group. It's pretty simple selection.

So you're suggesting that Randian Objectivism and ethical egoism are fundamentally inconsistent with evolved human nature, and that this is why ethical altruism has never been seriously challenged? I think that's a bit of a stretch. I would suggest that the reason Rand's moral philosophy has not really caught on in the mainstream of society is because the educational establishment, being left-leaning and set in its ways, has largely ignored it (most philosophy faculties don't teach Rand, and I personally know philosophy students who've never even heard of her), and so her work has never been adequately publicised.

Addendum: I'm not a Randian myself. But I think that, by challenging some of Western society's unexamined assumptions, she did a great service to philosophy as a whole.

Posted by: DJ | May 16, 2009 7:41 AM

Think of the worst, most vacuous, soulless pop music you can think of, and make it ten times worse. And then have some of it sung in a language you don't understand.

But I can't look away. It really is a theatre of the grotesque.

eww, and I thought American Idol was horrible. Good luck with that show, hope your brain doesn't melt.

Posted by: Walton | May 16, 2009 7:47 AM

Humans are social creatures, I can't stress this enough. Our success has come from working together and affording the ability for specialisation. Farmers work long hours so you don't have to grow your own food, truck drivers transport it to you so you don't have to live rurally. Scientists and engineers develop technology and infrastructure to make this process easier. Builders make the house you reside in, electricians wire it up for you. Thanks to companies on the other side of the world you have the ability to store food for long periods of time, provided those working at the power plants keep it up and running.

Exactly - and they do this not because the state forces them to, but because they benefit from it through mutually beneficial transactions. They engage in their economic activities, providing goods and services to others, and others provide money or other goods and services in exchange. We are all interdependent through global trade - and this is a good thing. But the last thing it requires is state control.

Posted by: JeffreyD | May 16, 2009 7:58 AM

Walton, you give to the homeless and hope to have a good job in the future so you can give more to charity. In the US we call that type of person a limousine liberal - "Stop the cah, Chaarles, I wish to distribute pennies to the poor."

Have you ever been hungry, truly hungry Walton? Ever had the choice of paying rent or eating or seeking treatment? Yeah, I know, this rolls off your back. Forget it.

Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM | May 16, 2009 8:00 AM

Walton, the libertarian philosophy is morally bankrupt because it doesn't take into account the common good. It is so tied up in "freedom" for the individual, it forgets that the individual lives in a very interconnected society, and that individual must pay their fair share of the common good, as decided by the people. Small things like roads, schools, medical care, welfare/unemployment, or student stipends. Things we all use or might use. By sharing the costs, we make sure these things are there when needed by an individual. You keep acting like you have control over everything. You don't. I've worked at my place for twenty years, but I could be out of a job if, say my company was sold and the new owners do a housecleaning of old farts. These days, everybody can be made redundant.

Walton, you show signs of getting the bigger picture, but you need to take a hard look at the libertarian philosophy, and why it can't work to form a stable society. Look at history, from say 1850-1920, and the lot of the common worker. And compare that to the present day.

Posted by: Rorschach | May 16, 2009 8:19 AM

Walton manages to argumentatively wipe the floor with stupid religionists these days,but this libertard BS,its just not going away....

Walton,
more JeffreyD,less Viscount Monckton man

Posted by: Tassie Devil | May 16, 2009 8:29 AM

Walton - say we live in the ideal 'free' society you describe. And you are still earning the same wage you make now.

In June you will be diagnosed with leukaemia.

Clearly you couldn't afford treatment. Is your death OK as a consequence of your 'free' society? Especially when compared to that of the son of a wealthy landowner - his father pays without blinking and still has enough leftover to buy him a flat overlooking Hyde Park.

You die, he doesn't. Is your society still 'free'?

Posted by: amhovgaard | May 16, 2009 8:37 AM

Reading about this case has made me wonder about how good doctors are at explaining the (side)effects of chemotherapy
- and what happens when you don't get proper treatment - to people who are, to put it politely, not quite as bright as they are.

Posted by: Laurel | May 16, 2009 8:54 AM

I'm glad this case--horrible as it is--has brought attention to the fake shamans and Native American wannabes infesting the internet and RL.

For Strangebrew and others who might be interested, the New Age Frauds and Plastic Shamans forum is a great place to check out this sort of thing.

http://www.newagefraud.org/smf/index.php

If you don't see the person you're looking for, you can request s/he be investigated in the "Research Needed" section.

Fake Native Americans/"shamans" seem very often to be guru types--controlling personalities, some with a criminal record, who don't care who they hurt or kill as long as they get to play Big Chief Snow Job for money instead of getting an actual job.

Another site on the New Age-yet-supposedly "oldest and once-universal religion of 'shamanism'" and why Native Americans don't like it here:

http://www.geocities.com/ourredearth/index.html

Posted by: John Scanlon, FCD | May 16, 2009 9:20 AM

The worst trolls have been given a swift kicking, but PsychedCT doesn't seem to have got responses to:

No, not even a well informed 13 year old is competent to make life-or-death decisions for himself or herself. No matter how intelligent the kid may be, at 13, the reasoning and planning areas of the brain are not fully developed (this doesn't occur until the early 20's in females, an as late as 25 in males).

Posted by: JeffreyD | May 16, 2009 9:44 AM

Walton at #271, I live in Birmingham part of the year and have the typical American's view that the UK is quite small. If you seriously wish to meet, you tell me when. My weekends and quite a few weeknights are usually free and trains are cheap. From Birmingham to Oxford takes a little over an hour by train so I have no qualms about popping over for a drink or two and then returning. My wife will be here end of May, first two weeks of June, but free before and after that. Ball in your court.

Ciao

Posted by: shonny | May 16, 2009 9:51 AM

For more cases like this, check out: http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-national/baby-suffered-third-world-malnutrition-20090515-b5h6.html

Fortunately no images, but it is very grim reading.

If religion and other woo stopped being a shield from prosecution for the loonies when they mistreat those in their cair, maybe they would smarten up somewhat. And no lenient sentencing either!

Posted by: shonny | May 16, 2009 10:08 AM

Posted by: Matt Author Profile Page | May 15, 2009 3:50 PM @ Benjamin Franklin #16 I'm a little confused... [Colleen Hauser] also testified that Daniel is a medicine man and elder in the Nemenhah Band.
-- Okay, so you can fill out the form and become a medicine man/woman... but how does a child receive elder status?

Maybe it has something to do with mental age, as most of these people are just past the embryo stage in mental development, and anyone beyond that is an elder in this tribe.
I.e. he is marginally less dim than his parents.

Posted by: Kseniya | May 16, 2009 11:11 AM

Laura:

So why have kids? Why have a family? Why even have a thought? or make any kind of decision?

Oh, please. That is SO dishonest. You equate mundane decisions with life-or-death decisions? Do you think that parents should be allowed to starve their children to death because they believe food is evil? Should they be allowed to thrash their children to within an inch of their lives because they believe that's the only effective form of discipline? Do you believe parents should be able to deny their children any kind of formal, systematic education?

I'm guessing you'd say "No" to one or more of those, and yet you're advocating that parents have the right to withhold effective medical treatments from their children in favor of quackery that will almost certainly lead them directly to their premature and unnecessary deaths?

Posted by: Kel | May 16, 2009 12:07 PM

Kel's off to watching "Kill Bill"This is about the 4th time I've seen the film, and my opinion is that it still kicks arse. I haven't sat down to watch the film in about 3 years (last time I made my brother watch it with me, both films back to back) and now I remember why I loved that film so much. It's the great dialogue, the plot-driven story, the action so beautifully stylised and engaging. I'm not one who has seen any of the films Tarantino has so shamefully ripped off, but damn does that man know how to write an engaging story.

Also, a rusty nail with a single malt scotch is pure sex. Only ever tried it with a blended scotch before.

Posted by: Kitty | May 16, 2009 12:19 PM

Sorry Kel but the single malt deserves better.
Try it with just a teaspoon of water, at room temperature - no ice. The water takes away the 'burn', enhances the flavour and makes the scotch sing in your mouth.

Oh but I agree about Kill Bill!

Posted by: Hamster | May 16, 2009 12:36 PM

I am divided in this . One side says that forcing medical treatment when its clear the kid doesnt understand the issues is the correct thing to do , the other says why bother saving a 13 kid who cant read because of some "learning disability". Is he ever going to be able to lead a life without constant support. He has expressed his wishes in the matter , let him have them . I really dont know which will give the better outcome. I do wonder if the parents are thinking the same .

Posted by: mh | May 16, 2009 12:41 PM

Thank you Brownian/Kel/Maureen Brian for replying to Walton with more finesse and knowledge than I have.

And yes, Walton. The NHS is fair. It is fair for my nextdoor neighbours who struggle by on one wage and can just about clothe their kids; and it is fair to me, whose parents could afford to provide me with private healthcare if they wanted to. Material wealth should not equal better healthcare.

Posted by: BlueIndependent | May 16, 2009 12:46 PM

I think we found the universal epicenter of worthless strawman arguments in Laura.

"...So why have kids? Why have a family? Why even have a thought? or make any kind of decision? Maybe I should call into my elected official every night and make sure everything I discussed or led my child to do is ok with them and meets their standard. Or maybe they will just give me a check list or a manual for tomorrow. Heck I am off scott free because according to that train of thought, I dont have to think or care about anything my kid does, learns, or experiences. Whew, thats a relief I thought I was actually responsible for my child?..."

Total strawman, and a typical right-wing obfuscation of what we are saying. Nobody implied at all that the government should be the parent. You are making a meaningless and foolish abstraction.

But put another way, what if a parent is neglecting their child? Beating them? Would you seriously argue the CPS shouldn't come and take the child away? Is that too much government for you? I used to date someone who worked for CPS, and they have a very heavy and nasty plate of so-called "parent" to deal with, all of whom at the very least are summarily neglecting their children. So unfortunately yes, government has to step in where there is a vacuum of parenting or extended family to take the child in.

The parents in young Hauser's case, religion or not, are displaying criminal neglect vis a vis their child. If I was part of a religion that said that my young son, at 7 years old, must go out into the wilderness alone for a week as a right of passage and return with some divined special knowledge that allows him to be considered a man, I should be carted off for some jail time at the very least. I don't care if there's a history of it with the sub-group, allowing something like that would be stupid beyond comprehension. And I don't give a shit if these peoples' religion tells them that chemo is evil; the fact is they're wrong, and will be personally responsible for their child's death. Oh but in this country we give more of a shit about peoples' little superstitions, so it's unlikely the parents will get the punishment they deserve for not listening to trained experts.

My wife is a nurse and deals on a daily basis with patients of all ages 18 to 118 that come in thinking every little thing they find on the internet that's different from what their doctor said is the right treatment to go with. They think some food will cure their hepatitis, cancer, or whatever else they have. And you know what happens? The hospital doesn't listen to them, and they end up getting sent home in better shape than when they came in (after taking their hocus pocus remedies). Gee Laura, there's a perfectly provable example of a private industry telling patients what's good for them. How is that *not* similar to the government telling them what to do? And I do think that is the point you are missing altogether: This whole thing started with a *private doctor* - one of the things conservatives hold dear with regard to health care - giving sound advice to parents that are rejecting it because of religious crap. The government only got involved when the proper treatment was rejected, thus endangering the child's life. So Hauser's parents brought this on themselves. Here we have a perfect example of private AND public expertise telling the parents to move the hell aside and let sane, qualified people help them.

"...For those of you that would rather someone else handle it for you, by all means have lunch at McDonald's, I hear Dairy Queen is good too."

Again, another total and complete strawman. Just because people tell you it's not your diet that saved you means they eat McDonald's every day? WTF? Yes diet is important when you have cancer, but it is NOT the only thing, and to assume it is what's saving you is absurd. Personally, I'd take the example of people like Lance Armstrong, who did about as much as any person can to beat his cancer. He didn't just focus on diet; he also took and dealt with the medical treatments necessary to win his battle.

Taxol is a chemotherapy drug. Obviously in your case it, along with chemotherapy, worked. But you seem to attribute the disappearance of the cancer to your supplements. Congratulations on being "smarter" than your doctor, who likely has a very advanced degree and years of experience with hundreds of patients. You would be sorely mistaken, since chemotherapy is used expressly to kill the cancer. As for the spot on your liver, which you seem to again be attributing to the power of your supplements, means nothing. There are people that have spots that appear and disappear all the time, and whose to say your liver "spot" would've developed into malignant cancer anyway? There are people out there that have had large benign tumors removed from their bodies; having a spot doesn't mean anything until it's deemed - by doctors' expertise - to be malignant an spreading. This is not to say a patient is always wrong about what they are doing or what they feel. But in the information age far too many patients think they can go online and diagnose themselves better than a trained professional can. Oddly enough, I thought this was what a major part of the argument about keeping privatized health care was all about.

But that gets to the other problem with those discussing the healthcare system in Canada and the UK, among other places. Getting away from Laura's craziness for a bit, people here need to keep in mind that the only proposal being offered was to give American citizens a government run health care PLAN, not government-run doctors and hospitals. In fact, the UK is the only country in the world left with truly "socialized" elements of their health system. All other countries that many ignorant Americans label as having a "socialized health system" actually don't have one in the classic sense of the term at all, and simply have a government-run health insurance plan. But this is *on top of the fact* that Obama's plan doesn't force you onto the government plans. Why people can't understand or grasp this I don't know. Perhaps they're so caught up in their right-wing fantasy world armageddon scenario that they have no time to really think about what's been proposed.

I also hasten to point out that while Canadians, for example, may come to the US for specific surgical procedures, we "Amurkans" go to Canada and Mexico for drugs that are intentionally kept highly priced here. My wife knows people that go to Mexico to get cheap drugs (and I'm not talking recreational). How odd that the "free marketers" out there will talk out of one side of their mouth when it comes to keeping the current system, and then try to take advantage of other countries' "socialized" systems when it suits them.

The US's health care system is not going to be government-run. This is a red herring charge made by people who are intentionally not listening to the plans that have been proposed. It is government-run insurance, not government-run doctors, hospitals, and specialist facilities. It's also worth truly reflecting and considering why we, the richest country in the world (well, up until recently perhaps) refuses to make sure everyone can remain as healthy as possible. Denying children health care because you want to keep things highly priced and private? Not a good enough answer IMO. Not letting tax paying adults, some of whom have fragile states of health due to some bad genetics (but otherwise can be performing members of society), have health care? How is this logical? the truth is, it isn't.

Posted by: mh | May 16, 2009 1:03 PM

No Walton, what would happen is that drug companies would more likely look at developing drugs for the majority of people on the planet - the poor. Instead of developing expensive drugs that few rich can afford, they will make drugs that cost less that more can afford.

Posted by: Watchman | May 16, 2009 1:11 PM

Walton:

If prices are driven down in the US market, pharmaceutical companies will simply stop putting money into medical innovation

I disagree. Pharma companies will do whatever they think will give them an edge in the marketplace. You, of all people, should recognize and acknowledge this, even if it fails to support your government-is-the-problem point of the moment.

On a personal note, I concur with JeffreyD and Kseniya. FWIW.

Cheers.

Posted by: Brownian, OM | May 16, 2009 1:21 PM

Yes - but because Americans pay much higher prices for their drugs than other nations, it's currently the American market which essentially pays the drug companies' R&D costs. If prices are driven down in the US market, pharmaceutical companies will simply stop putting money into medical innovation - meaning fewer lifesaving new drugs in the future. And, of course, no one will even notice, because it's impossible to produce statistics on drugs which would have been developed if history had taken a different path.

That's such a bad slippery slope argument. What about all the research that doesn't get done because Richie Rich doesn't find it profitable to build his own lab for abstract mathematics and staff it with Nobel Laureates? What about all the future Nobel Laureates that don't grow up to be Laureates because their parents' income levels don't provide for adequate college or life-saving medicine under a privatised system? What about, what about?

Do you really want to play that stupid thought experiment about everything?

As you said, we wouldn't even notice. We do notice the deleterious effects of huge income inequity in the really-existing world in which you refuse to acknowledge for your wrong-headed utopianism.

And if you think you'll ever have enough money to pay the security and police forces to keep the poor from overrunning your private property when their livelihoods are threatened, I invite you to move to Nairobi, where the rich are far richer than you can even imagine, and the poor are far poorer than you can even imagine, and the prospect of meeting a panga in your sleep if you're the former are very real.

As I said before, drop the political theories. All you're left with are whines of "it's not fair to me", because libertarianism--particularly the economic aspect--has absolutely lousy predictive value.

And with that, I'm off to hit the links. (I know; so bourgeoisie!)

Posted by: Walton | May 16, 2009 1:57 PM

No Walton, what would happen is that drug companies would more likely look at developing drugs for the majority of people on the planet - the poor. Instead of developing expensive drugs that few rich can afford, they will make drugs that cost less that more can afford.

And they will afford to do this how? If you cut down their profit margins by making them charge lower prices, then they will have less money to put into R&D. It's simple common sense.

As I understand it, generic drugs are very cheap. Most of the cost of proprietary drugs doesn't come from manufacture, but from the fact that the developing company has to recoup its R&D costs before its proprietary rights expire. If you stop them from doing that, then how will they be able to afford to channel money into research?

Posted by: Walton | May 16, 2009 2:12 PM

Free Market-ism is usually introduced at gunpoint (either literally, or through financial pressure from those "foreign aid" agencies), AGAINST the will of the people, usually sparking mass protests that either succeed in stopping the excesses of the Free Marketeers, or are bloodily and violently squashed.

Not true. Thatcher was voted in several times with overwhelming parliamentary majorities. It was after she was forced out (by traitors in the party ranks) that the Conservative Party started falling apart. There was, and still is, a strong popular support in Britain for individual responsibility, low taxes and minimal government interference.

And you can't even say that this is a form of "bad tasting medicine" because every time such "reforms" have been introduced, the result was a handful of people who got super-rich, and an entire society that was suddenly poorer and worse off than before. In some cases, FAR worse off.

I would dispute this. Modern Chile is one of the most economically stable and prosperous countries in Latin America. Under Allende, by contrast, inflation was running in the thousands of percent, foreign trade was diminishing and people were getting poorer. The economic changes introduced by the Pinochet regime - at the point of a gun, certainly, and I would be the first to condemn his despicable methods - did, in the long run, improve the Chilean economy.

What you're saying is strongly reminiscent of Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine - a notoriously inaccurate book by a notorious leftist wingnut.

(That said, I would say that Thatcher and Reagan were entirely wrong to give the support that they gave to Pinochet. He was a brutal dictator, and despite the fact that some of his reforms were hugely beneficial in the long run, the ends do not justify the means. But that's irrelevant here.)

Posted by: Tulse | May 16, 2009 2:14 PM

If you cut down their profit margins by making them charge lower prices, then they will have less money to put into R&D. It's simple common sense.

Pharmaceutical companies spend less than 1 dollar in five of their revenue on R&D. According to the Congressional Budget Office, pharmaceutical companies are higher than the average for corporations. Last year Pfizer's profit margin was 37%.

Yeah, clearly if they didn't make all that money we wouldn't get lifesaving drugs.

Posted by: Hypocee | May 16, 2009 2:35 PM

Walton, you have a couple fingers' more grasp on things than the typical libertarianarchist and you spell in complete sentences and paragraphs so thanks for that. for you. However, this - from a college student! With housekeeping staff!

Democracy does nothing whatsoever to address this problem - because it still means that other people can forcibly prevent me from following my own desires.

Posted by: Pygmy Loris | May 16, 2009 2:44 PM

@ Anna #55

As someone who recently watched a loved one die from cancer I want to say: I hope you die a long, agonizing death while your body slowly shuts down. It's not a pretty sentiment and I'll admit I'm not living up to my own ideals here, but you disgust me.

Also, you're an idiot.

Posted by: strange gods before me | May 16, 2009 3:00 PM

I just have moral qualms about being generous with other people's money. I don't currently pay income tax, as I have never earned enough to take me above the tax threshold. Do I, then, have a moral right to say that those who do earn money and pay taxes should be forced to pay for my healthcare?

Yes. Yes, you do. Again, the relevant question is not whether people should have to "fund things which they may not personally support." The only question is whether their objections to those things are correct or not. We still have evaluate to all these moral claims through public critique.

Last time I asked this, you gave the simple and incorrect answer that police protection, for instance, is non-excludable. That's false. It's perfectly possible to ensure that homophobes do not have to pay for police that protect gay people, either by denying protection to gay people and not taxing them, or by denying protection to homophobes and not taxing them.

You haven't come up with a valid answer yet. Here's one: the homophobes are wrong, so their so-called moral objections can rightfully be ignored.

Posted by: bastion of sass | May 16, 2009 3:09 PM

Kel @ 286 wrote:

Kel's off to watching "Kill Bill"This is about the 4th time I've seen the film, and my opinion is that it still kicks arse. I haven't sat down to watch the film in about 3 years (last time I made my brother watch it with me, both films back to back) and now I remember why I loved that film so much. It's the great dialogue, the plot-driven story, the action so beautifully stylised and engaging.

It's just a shame there's not more blood.

Posted by: strange gods before me | May 16, 2009 3:19 PM

So you're suggesting that Randian Objectivism and ethical egoism are fundamentally inconsistent with evolved human nature, and that this is why ethical altruism has never been seriously challenged? I think that's a bit of a stretch. I would suggest that the reason Rand's moral philosophy has not really caught on in the mainstream of society is because the educational establishment, being left-leaning and set in its ways, has largely ignored it (most philosophy faculties don't teach Rand, and I personally know philosophy students who've never even heard of her), and so her work has never been adequately publicised.

Everything Kel said at http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/05/daniel_hauser_might_live_now.php#comment-1637107

But also, yes, Rand is contra human nature. You are the one arguing in ignorance of biological fact. Kin selection is real. Kin selection is one of the biological sources of altruism.

You might plausibly argue that this effect is not powerful enough to account for people tending to praise altruism over self-centeredness. But you can't throw out the biological fact; you have to factor it in. Yelling "damn leftists!" is not enough.

Anyway, haven't you ever wondered why Nietzsche is taught and Rand is not, even though Nietzsche also comes to some conclusions that chafe leftists?

It's because Nietzsche was a real philosopher.

Pity you can't tell the difference.

Posted by: Kevin | May 16, 2009 3:31 PM

Ok first off, if you haven't experienced Hodgkins lymphoma, or at least cancer, personally.... then you need to stop shut up and read this. 2nd, if you have cancer and are feeling lost and scared by your doctor, and haven't done any realistic and practical research into "alternative" treatment, then you ,REALLY need to read this.

Now, for those still reading:

First of all, Daniel's parents may not be making all the "right" decisions, but they are truly making the BEST decisions when it comes to the HEALTH of their child. The irony, sadly, is that they will be condemned for it. Now why am I saying this... because I've invested hundreds and hundreds of hours into researching Hodgkins lymphoma clinically and alternatively. Why? Because my wife HAD it. Long story short, we refused chemo and radiation (at the time our reasons were for the fact that chemo often results in infertility) and ended up finding ourselves on a nonstop journey of education towards other methods, techniques and information. What we found, was MIND-BLOWING, shocking, challenging to the core, angering, scary, but ultimately exciting. Thanks to what we have learned, we are now healthier than ever, and expecting our first child in November. Oh, and did I mention, the cancer is G-O-N-E (we have 2 oncologists). To really begin, let me just say this: It is a FACT that cancer can be EASILY cured with "alternative" means -- i.e. without the use of toxic poison. As a matter of fact, you cannot HEAL any-thing with poison! (Why is that common sense in the real world, but in the doctor's office it's common practice???) Some interesting facts (from my own research, not copy and pasted):

More people are now employed to treat cancer than there are people who are diagnosed with cancer each year (that's over 500,000!).

Each cancer patient generates ~$1.2 million for the cancer INDUSTRY.

Out of the ~$300 BILLION cancer profit, ~$64 billion goes back out for marketing and conventional R&D (more drugs). Only $10 million is spent annually to research alternative treatments, and that's b/c the AMA was embarassed into admitting they actually work thanks to irrefutable evidence.

Every American doctor only receives 0-3hrs. of nutritional education during their ENTIRE medical education!! On the flip side, they are extremely educated in drugs and other toxic chemicals. HOWEVER, NO ONE knows the negative synergy of these drugs and chemicals. You are the guinea pig.

When it comes to bacteria, a doctor will collect a sample, develop it in a lab, and then administer the appropriate antibiotic. This is STANDARD procedure; EVERY doc does this for bacteria infections! There are only 2 places that do this in the US. Rational Therapeutics in CA, and Impath in NY. WHY IS THIS NOT DONE WITH CHEMOTHERAPY?! (think about it.)

One thing I've noticed, CT/PET scans are the main resource used for determing cancer growth and progression. There are 3 HUGE problems with this. 1) Cancer is fed by glucose. Modern medicine knows this. That's why CT/PET scans work. Yet, when you drink they're radioactive glucose, you have just given the cancer a steroid shot of the food it needs to grow! 2) Each CT/PET scan emits a TON of radiation into the patient. Radiation is cumulative throughtout your lifetime. Your body doesn't excrete it. One CT/PET scan is the rough equivalent of 16yrs. of mammograms or 400 chest xrays. The public is just starting to become aware of this. Did anyone see the April '09 cover of Reader's Digest (http://www.zinio.com/browse/issues/index.jsp;jsessionid=202D2570AD6965BC9D34B92B71862949.ns101a?skuId=395943526) It's a reality that radiation from CT/PET scans can CAUSE CANCER! 3) Aside from actually feeding the cancer and giving you extreme amounts of carcinogenic radiation, the main problem with the CT/PET scans is the tool used to view the cancer...... THE NAKED EYE!!!! Now, we all know that cancer operates at the cellular level.. That's just common sense... right? Sooo,... when is the last time anyone was ever able to see a cell with the naked eye????..... Yet this is the tool the radiologist and oncologist uses to proudly declare "You're cancer free!" -- Reeeaalllyy.... --- HOWEVER, other tests, infinitely more accurate than a CT/PET scan do exist. How are they more accurate? Because they provide data at the CELLULAR LEVEL. Yet they are not given or even recognized in the U.S. Why? Hmm... did I mention the average CT/PET scan costs the patient $8000+ dollars. My wife and I are still paying for ours. Quick, what's 500,000 cancer patients x $8,000 x multiple scans annually?... I'll let you do the math. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. (Each chemo treatment bag alone is average $30,000! Wonder what it looks like if you spill it on your hand... http://www.polymvasurvivors.com/images/chemo_spill.jpg) --- Wanna know how much the other tests are? One is a blood test (the blood AMAS test) at $160, and one is a urine test at $50 (the urine HCG test). And of the 2, the urine test is more accurate! I would explain how they all work, but this is getting pretty darn long as it is. I'll just say this, the urine test works b/c it indicates the amount of rapidly replicating cells in your body by measuring the amount of a certain hormone in your body. The test is so accurate, it can tell you if you have cancer up to 2yrs. before a CT/PET scan could ever see it!! That's b/c by the time the naked eye can actually "see" a tumor, it's already made up of over 5 billion cancer cells (about the size of the tip of a pencil eraser). You can read all about it in Bill Henderson's book, Cancer-Free. I hate saying that b/c it looks like I'm selling something, but it's the truth. Read the book if you wanna know more (or just type in "hcg cancer test" in google and read the first link -- Bill Henderson will give you explicit instructions on how to do the test, google will provide some background info).

Let's talk about statistics for a moment. You know, the kind the judge used to reach his "oh-so-smart" verdict. If you have HIV, AIDS, heart disease, diabetes, or any other major health challenge, you would only be considered cured when the virus/ disease is permanently gone, never to return. With cancer, you are considered "cured" if you SURVIVE 5 years from the date of your DIAGNOSIS, NOT from the date of your last chemotherapy treatment... That means, the sec. a doc says "You have cancer." the clock starts ticking and if you are breathing 5 yrs. to the day after that point, you are a STATISTICAL CANCER SURVIVOR. How disgusting and disingenuous is that?! Oh, AND, if you die BEFORE the 5 yr. mark of pneumonia, b/c the chemo scorched your immune system (1 of its many side effects), then you didn't die from chemotherapy, you died of pneumonia! Thus, you are left out of the statistics. Additionally, people who supplement with alternative care and actually do well, are lumped in with the rest so as to make chemo/ radiation look even more effective. Lastly, if you die before treatment concludes and you are over something like 65 or 70, then you are excluded from statistics b/c you are considered to have died naturally, of old age (I forget the b.s. term given to this justification). Here's an interesting article on another way statistics are manipulated: http://www.naturalnews.com/019368.html

Today's youth is the first generation in history to be SICKER THAN THEIR PARENTS!!!! WHAT?!?! Movies and documentaries like The Beautiful Truth, Food Inc., We are What We Eat, Healing Cancer from the Inside Out, Crazy-Sexy Cancer, and many others are coming out more and more. There's a reason for that! People are waking up! A health revolution is coming. Heck, there's already a book called The Self-Health Revolution. It's incredible. I recommend it.

--- Thousands of people know this stuff. And if you don't "know" it, chances are you can sense it. You know, like when you can tell someone isn't telling you the whole truth.. instinctively. Yet no one who has actually done it is given the respected attention they deserve, and no major media network is allowed to truly and unbiasedly cover it (who do you think are the networks' biggest sponsors?... have you noticed ~1 in every 3-4 commercials is a DRUG COMMERCIAL?! Same with magazine ads). Try to create a business around helping people eliminate cancer without poison and you go to JAIL (see Jason Vale). If a doctor even MENTIONS that you should seek alternative means PRIOR to chemo and/ or radiation and surgery, they risk losing their license, their job, their reputation, they're fined, AND they may also go to prison! OPEN YOUR EYES PEOPLE! It's not rocket-science. Something is WRONG. These are published, corroborated facts. Stop swallowing the lie that "modern medicine" is shoving down your throat that your own instinct is telling you is "off." Do your own research, talk to people who have been there, outside the conventional box, and GET EDUCATED!

A great place to start, and possibly the best summation on the topic I've seen, is from a guy who cured himself of stage III non-hodgkins lymphoma - Jerry Brunetti. Watch both videos.

http://www.nuganics.com.au/2007/07/06/jerry-brunetti-food-as-medicine/

_Kevin
Atlanta, GA

Posted by: strange gods before me | May 16, 2009 3:55 PM

By contrast, providing a person with medical treatment is not a pre-requisite of individual freedom.

Death is a tyrant. Even a slave can kill his master. But the dead are remarkably unfree.

The difficulty is this: would it not be rather arrogant for me (or you) to state, in absolute terms, that I am (for instance) right about contraception and that all the Catholics are wrong,

Empirical fact is arrogant now? What are you, a New Ager?

But just as Catholics do not have the moral right to ban everyone else from using contraception, I do not have the moral right to force them to pay for other people's contraception. Isn't that fairly obvious?

Are the Catholics' claims in accordant with reality? Are mine? Is it more wrong for me to be forced to live in a fantasy world, or more wrong for the Catholics to be forced to live in reality?

Your dilemmas are not nearly so insoluble as you think.

Posted by: Carlie | May 16, 2009 4:06 PM

Don't know about England, but here in the US, there are social skills classes that are taught in schools as part of the educational plans for children who have autism, asperger's syndrome, ADHD, nonverbal learning disabilities, and other disorders which often impair social skills.

Very interesting example, because I'm still thinking about the school vouchers (which is a total derail, but like we don't do that all the time here). Walton still hasn't addressed the issue brought up there about how private schools skim off the best and cheapest students, and I was thinking about it in terms of my son. If a private school were to look at his grades, they'd be salivating over him. Kid is almost entirely self-directed and gets everything right the first time. Everything. He'd thrive in a private school environment, right? All that good learnin' going on? But then they'd look a little closer and see that he only achieves that when he's in a class of fewer than 10 students that also has an aide for him, and that he needs anger management and social skills sessions along with constant access to a psychologist/social worker in case of a frustration meltdown along with a multi-year behavior plan geared towards weaning him towards self-control and positive societal interactions. His application would go right into the reject pile. Too expensive. The big bad state, however, is obligated to provide that support for him. And it does. For which, I have to say, I am amazingly thankful, because I'm solidly middle-class and there is no way in hell I could afford to pay for it all on my own.
And what's the benefit to all the poor childless people who have to pay extra taxes for it? Well, they get a next-door neighbor who will end up being a successful, functioning member of society rather than someone who is prone to violent outbursts, treats people strangely, and can't hold down a job. Sounds like a win-win to me.

Posted by: strange gods before me | May 16, 2009 4:09 PM

The reality is, I don't have a really coherent, well-thought-out justification for drawing the line where I draw it. It just seems morally right that there should be some provision of basic welfare so that the poor and unfortunate don't starve to death.

And that much is morally right, because freedom means nothing without opportunities to make use of that freedom. There's a coherent justification for you. Keep it, no charge.

All I've ever been trying to tell you is that the opportunities you'd offer are not sufficient to meaningful freedom. Most of progressivism is a pragmatic response to the empirical facts on the ground.

Posted by: bastion of sass | May 16, 2009 4:11 PM

Die Anyway @207 wrote:

I'm not thrilled about the government deciding what the appropriate treatment should be. How would any of us feel if the government decided that chemo and radiation were too expensive and a judge orders that we should try Reiki and acupuncture first?

A judge is legally required to base any decision on relevant evidence presented in court.

In cases involving scientific or medical knowledge such as this one, one type of important evidence would be expert witness testimony.

In Daniel's case, were I the judge, I'd want to hear from witnesses with expertise in treating Hodgkin lymphoma in children.

Only persons who can show to the court that they have sufficient education, training, knowledge, and skill can testify as an expert witness and offer an expert opinion to the court.

Even then, the expert must provide the court with the basis for his/her opinion. Although the rules of evidence vary by jurisdiction in the US, generally, an expert witness must show his/her opinion is scientifically valid, and that his/her opinion is both relevant and reliable.

I really doubt that any qualified expert would recommend to the court that the first choice of treatment for a child with Hodgkin lymphoma would be with Reiki or acupuncture.

Medicare is running out of money.

Several commenters here have suggested that Medicare would pay for Daniel's treatments.

It is highly unlikely that Daniel meets the eligibility requirements for Medicare: he's not 65; it's highly unlikely that he's worked long enough to qualify for social security disability benefits and that he's been getting those benefits for two years; or that he has end-stage renal disease.

Depending on his family's income and resources, he might qualify for medical assistance under Medicaid or Minnesota's SCHIP.

Would you still want to abide by the government's decisions for you? I doubt it. Watch out for that slippery slope.

Um, you do realize that this part of your argument is fallacious, and that the particular fallacy, is, coincidentally called the "slippery slope fallacy?"

Posted by: Alex Deam | May 16, 2009 4:27 PM

Rather, what I was really trying to point out is this. Suppose a well-meaning liberal, secular, democratically-elected government in Country X introduces a state health service, which includes free contraception and abortion at taxpayer expense. (Let's assume for the sake of argument that Country X, like the UK, is a democracy without an entrenched Bill of Rights, so there are no substantive constraints on the power of a majority government.) So far, so good, as far as you're concerned...

...but then there's a major political shift in Country X, and a reactionary religious party comes to power. They immediately alter the state health service, banning contraception and abortion, and instead providing religious chaplaincy services and "faith healing" to all patients at taxpayer expense. They insert political and religious interference into medical resourcing at all levels, funding only those medical procedures which match their religious beliefs, and forcing everyone - regardless of personal convictions - to pay for it through their taxes.

The point I'm trying to make is that just as government power can be used for good, it can also be used for harm. And if you believe in the legitimising effect of democracy, then you cannot say that the second government in Country X was acting outside its legitimate powers any more than the first was; both purported to implement the will of the people.

Which is why the only fair and consistent solution is to keep government power and interference to a minimum - meaning that no one can inflict their values on anyone else. I can't inflict my values on the Catholics or the JWs or the Mormons, and, in exchange, they can't inflict their values on me. That's what libertarianism is all about.

Or, you could still reject libertarianism, and campaign for an entrenched constitution!

I'm from the UK. I reject the religious interference in the state we have from the C of E. I believe in separation of church and state. This can be "guaranteed" via an entrenched constitution. It doesn't require libertarianism to stop your hypothetical reactionary religious party.

As far as I can tell, this is what liberalism and progressivism is all about.

Posted by: maureen Brian | May 16, 2009 4:39 PM

Look, Walton, I don't think that you are a horrible person. You clearly find much which happened under Pinochet distasteful and unpardonable, as do I, and I applaud you for that.

I do urge you, though, if you plan to be any sort of political thinker to develop the ability to see the whole picture and to see that in this case the installation of someone with little regard for individual freedom was part of the plan - possibly from day one. It was not Pinochet's plan - by all accounts he was not very bright - but probably Henry Kissinger's.

At the risk of repeating myself - economics is not the whole of life. Far too many people suffered far too much to bring about some benefit in that sphere. It is hardly surprising that some of the economic plans worked. They were being written for him in Chicago and though I tend to disagree with the denizens of that city on this topic I would not suggest that they were stupid.

I am still puzzled that at one moment you can be promoting a central government trimmed down to the bare minimum and at the next accepting - coming close to praising - the massive investment of one country in the destabilisation of another country and the installation of a brutal military dictatorship - a dictatorship which managed just a few benefits and from which the people of Chile escaped promptly the moment they were given the chance to say a word on their own future.

The fact that Thatcher appears to have fancied the old demon is not an excuse. It should be a cause of shame.

Posted by: strange gods before me | May 16, 2009 5:09 PM

...but then there's a major political shift in Country X, and a reactionary religious party comes to power. They immediately alter the state health service, banning contraception and abortion, and instead providing religious chaplaincy services and "faith healing" to all patients at taxpayer expense. They insert political and religious interference into medical resourcing at all levels, funding only those medical procedures which match their religious beliefs, and forcing everyone - regardless of personal convictions - to pay for it through their taxes.

The point I'm trying to make is that just as government power can be used for good, it can also be used for harm.

If you're going to turn on the record player, I'm just going to cut and paste:

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/04/what_are_you_doing_alberta.php#comment-1616486

the libertarian critique of strong governments as being uniquely vulnerable to manipulation is unrealistic. There is no government that cannot be made violently powerful under manipulation of [some group]. ...

You would have us give up all the accumulated work that was done to create a government that can protect freedom, for some experiment to see what happens when the government is as weak as possible. We already know what happens. Feudalism happens. And it takes hundreds of years to get back from there to a system that protects freedom.

And if you believe in the legitimising effect of democracy, then you cannot say that the second government in Country X was acting outside its legitimate powers any more than the first was; both purported to implement the will of the people.

And if you believe in the legitimizing effect of a Constitution, then you have the same problem.

There is no transcendent truth that can come down to humanity and tell us what should be legitimizing and what should not. Even this question is discernible only through public debate. We don't have any other options than to argue about this; from argument and persuasion is civil society made.

You do not have an inherently better answer than I do.

Which is why the only fair and consistent solution is to keep government power and interference to a minimum - meaning that no one can inflict their values on anyone else. I can't inflict my values on the Catholics or the JWs or the Mormons, and, in exchange, they can't inflict their values on me. That's what libertarianism is all about.

Then libertarianism is a denial of reality. Empirically, publicly subsidized contraception results in more economic freedom and opportunity for more people. If concern for Catholics' bankrupt morality prevents me from maximizing freedom and opportunity, then the Catholics are already inflicting their values upon me.

If libertarianism tells you there are sidelines, then libertarianism is false. There are no sidelines.

Posted by: Benjamin Franklin | May 16, 2009 5:58 PM

While Walton was merrily driving this train wreck of a thread directly to RandLand, I read Judge Rodenberg's decision, his interview with Daniel Hauser, and more information about Stage IIB Hodgkins lymphoma, the Nemenhah Band, and "Cloudpiler (of shit) Landis than I ought to have in my brain.

I have come to the following conclusions and observations-

- The judge ruled correctly in law and in fact.

- The concern here was for the safety and best interest of the child, which is mandated by Minnesota law. Not religion, and not money or economic issues. (How the fuck did this thread become about Pinochet?)

- Daniel Hauser is a moron. Apparently there were complications before his birth, but the result is that at the age of 13 he can't read or write, and he thinks he isn't sick, and he wrongly thinks the chemo would kill him, not save his life, which obviously was indoctrination by his mom.. He doesn't know the name of the Catholic church he attends every other week, nor the name of his priest. He doesn't know what "elder" means, nor does he have a clue what Nemenhah is about. He was told a bunch of crap by his mom, and he believes it. He is not capable of making proper medical decisions for himself.

- Ma Hauser is an ignorant idiot, and if she keeps going, she will be a criminal as well. She really lost the case when on May 7th, she refused to let her son have an x-ray taken, as recommended by her doctor to see the status of the mass in Daniel's lung.

She refused to let her son, diagnosed with cancer have an xray taken!

This is the point where the state child agency really nailed her. This is where her neglect really shows. She's living in her La La land, a combination of Catholicism and internet con-man crap, while her son will almost definitely die within 5 years if she doesn't follow the advice of every one of the 5 doctors she has taken her son to, as well as every one of the alternative health doctors at the trial, all of whom said that Daniels' best course is the chemo.

She is just one more stupid Catholic, with her 8 kids, at least one of which is retarded, and at least one of which is home-schooled (probably all), who, along with her two eldest daughters (aged 14 & 16) milk the 100 cows and take care of the farm, while the other kids babysat the youngest ones (down to 16 months old), while praying their rosary every night.

- The Nemenhah band is complete bullshit, set up as a religion to avoid persecution for their peddling of bullshit remedies that they claim will cure aids and cancer, and gullible idiots such as Ma Hauser buy into afementioned bullshit. They have been reamed not only by legitimate practitioners of medicine, by also by alternative practitioners, as well as real Native Americans. In fact, the organizer, "Cloudpiler" Landis has been found guilty of fraud in 2 states already.

What is the first thing the court has ordered? That Daniel have an xray taken, so the status of his cancer can be re-determined.

I personally don't give a rat's ass whether the moron kid lives or dies, (or his woo-flated mom, for that matter), but the legal implications intrigue me.

Posted by: strange gods before me | May 16, 2009 6:40 PM

(How the fuck did this thread become about Pinochet?)

strange gods' law wins: As a blog discussion with libertarians grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Pinochet approaches 1.

Posted by: Walton | May 16, 2009 7:01 PM

There is no transcendent truth that can come down to humanity and tell us what should be legitimizing and what should not.

Exactly - which is why each individual should decide for himself, or herself, how to live, without undue interference from others. If X wants to spend all his time and money on beer, prostitutes and cigarettes; Y wants to donate all his time and money to the Catholic Church; and Z wants to devote all his time and money to the advancement of the biological sciences, then let them all do so. We might think that Z has taken the better path in life. But, as you say, there is no transcendental truth - and Z cannot dictate his path to X or Y, just as they cannot dictate their paths to him.

Posted by: strange gods before me | May 16, 2009 7:55 PM

Exactly - which is why each individual should decide for himself, or herself, how to live, without undue interference from others.

Yet there is no transcendent truth which comes down and says that even this is so. What gives you the right to insist that another libertarian should have to pay taxes for a child's basic welfare? It's undue influence according to them, and all you have to back you up is empirical argument backed by the power of democracy.

But, as you say, there is no transcendental truth - and Z cannot dictate his path to X or Y, just as they cannot dictate their paths to him.

I've already answered this, so don't ignore my answers:

"Are the Catholics' claims in accordance with reality? Are mine? Is it more wrong for me to be forced to live in a fantasy world, or more wrong for the Catholics to be forced to live in reality?

Empirically, publicly subsidized contraception results in more economic freedom and opportunity for more people. If concern for Catholics' bankrupt morality prevents me from maximizing freedom and opportunity, then the Catholics are already inflicting their values upon me."

And in the current stalemate, I am inflicting my values upon Catholics. (Aside, it's unfair to rhetorically target Catholics like this; statistically they're no more in favor of abortion and contraception restrictions than the average American. http://www.thedemocraticstrategist.org/strategist/2009/05/notre_dame_and_the_intracathol.php )

These ultra-conservative Catholics who are against contraception, they are not moral relativists. They do not merely believe that contraception is wrong for themselves. They believe it is wrong for everyone. By preventing them from outlawing contraception, or outlawing abortion, or firebombing abortion clinics in "just war" or "defense" of fetuses, I am inflicting my values upon them. And I am using state force to do so.

Someone is going to have their values stepped on. What's relevant is that my views are empirically defensible, and theirs are not. I am advocating maximizing opportunity for more people. You are advocating limiting women's opportunities, for the sake of a few ultra-conservative Catholics' cruel and false beliefs.

There is nothing fundamentally different between you forcing other libertarians to pay for a poor child's meal, and me forcing an ultra-conservative Catholic to pay for a poor woman's pills. Nothing. We're both trying to maximize opportunity for people who would otherwise be functionally less free.

Blink twice if you can hear me.

Posted by: Kel | May 16, 2009 8:56 PM

Sorry Kel, didn't mean to sound OTT but I'm a bit of a single malt nerd! Currently into a rather fine Strathisla I bought on a recent visit to Speyside. Yum! All those whiskies and not enough time - or money! Still try it my way some time - it's worth it even for a 12 year old!

Posted by: Jadehawk, OM | May 16, 2009 9:09 PM

Walton,

I'm not gonna bother responding to the Naomi Klein is a lying propagandist BS in detail, since 'Tis Himself took care of that, but I will say that you can't just label something inaccurate just because it disagrees with you. show data that contradicts her, and then maybe you'll have a point.

anyway: have you ever heard the phase "like herding cats"? do you know what it means, and WHY it means that? What you're suggesting is for humans to live like cats, which are individualist to the core and only create "societies" temporarily and inefficiently. Human societies couldn't survive as the loose associations that cat-society forms, since they're far more interdependent than that, to the point where a single human, unlike a single cat, cannot provide for itself anything resembling a decent standard of living. society IS a compromise, and you ARE born into it, if only because we've effectively run out of space to send the individualists off to. incidentally, this also means that the more crowded this planet becomes, the more freedoms people will have to compromise, or see their society collapse into bloody mayhem. libertarian society might be possible on Asimov's Solaria, but it's not on Earth

also, on your claim that governments can be used for good and for bad... how exacly does that make governments any more different than anything else? Corporations, religious organizations etc. ALL tend to grow to absorb all available power when left unchecked. the libertarian POW however only sees danger in government power, but none of the others. without a strong government to counteract the other two (in our current society) most powerful entities, you lave too much power in too few hands. in order to prevent power accumulation, power needs to be 1)spread among as many people/entities as possible 2)prevented from accumulating (which is the natural instinct of people with some power: combine it with the power of others, to become more powerful) 3)play any and all concentrations of power against each other.

this is why we have religious freedom; anti-monopoly laws; "one person one vote" laws; anti-discrimination laws; laws that forbid private entities to extort people in need; etc.

we can actually already see what would happen if we scaled down on government. just look at the international scale, where the obnly governmental agency is the UN, which is pretty much toothless. at this level, corporations rule supreme: they can blackmail whole nations into subserviency (well, if YOU don't let us abuse your workers, then we'll take our factory somewhere else, and then there won't be any jobs at all!); they can pollute, poison and destroy wherever the governments aren't powerful or rich enough to stop them; etc.

and when you're not allowing people to band together for decisions of mutual benefit, but letting people band together for profit, then the profiteers will soon rule the rest. you're creating an imbalance

Posted by: Walton | May 16, 2009 9:34 PM

Walton, are you an only child?

No. I have a younger brother. Why?

Posted by: Anton Mates | May 17, 2009 12:09 AM

But for all the cold, hard rationality in the world, I can't advocate letting poor children starve. However compelling the ideological justification.

Not really sure why there's a conflict with rationality here.

PREMISE #1: I don't like to see children suffer.
PREMISE #2: Starvation is a form of suffering, and the starvation of my country's children can be prevented by a government expenditure of X million dollars.
PREMISE #3: Depriving my fellow citizens of X million dollars bothers me less than having children starve.

CONCLUSION: Tax away!

Quod erat demonstrandum, post hoc ergo propter hoc, semper ubi sub ubi, malo malo malo malo, et cetera.

Posted by: nothing's sacred | May 17, 2009 1:23 AM

But for all the cold, hard rationality in the world, I can't advocate letting poor children starve. However compelling the ideological justification.

Ahem. Ideologies are not rational. Ideological justifications are not rational justifications, they are the opposite. Rationally, it's a bad idea to let children starve. There are many reasons why it is bad but, specifically for you, it makes you feel bad, and if there's one thing above all else that is irrational, it is self harm.

Posted by: Alan Kellogg | May 17, 2009 2:11 AM

Brownian,

Out here in California the state consistently underpays for medical care. The Medi-Cal program for example has set fees it pays, which do not cover the cost of the treatment. So private insurance and private individuals have to cover the rest. Now add in the cost of keeping up with all the mandatory paperwork.

It comes down to this; you're not only paying through your taxes, you're paying through increased private medical fees and higher insurance premiums.

In addition, when you insist on letting insurance handle all health care payments, you're divorcing yourself from the costs. It becomes somebody else's money, not yours, and that makes it easier to spend it. It's not real money, so why fret about it?

And that leads to the big problem with free things; free things are worthless. We put a greater value on things we earned than on things we didn't.

But when you get right down to it, the worth of medical care lies not in how it is paid for, but in the doctor who provides it. Bad doctors are not exclusive to private clinics, nor good doctors to public. Both types can be found in both fields, and the patient had best beware lest he be hurt.

Posted by: Isabel | May 17, 2009 3:37 AM

"Thanks to modern medicine, lifespans have increased 30 years in the last century. "

this is bullshit.

citation, Raven?

Actually, when you look at the lifespans of people who reached adulthood (and don't average in all the infant and early childhood deaths) it's more like 18 months.

If you include infant and early childhood mortality, and ignore improvements in housing and sanitation and then credit modern medicine, you have the makings of a great, self-serving myth...my great and great-great and great-great-great grandparents did not keel over at 40, or even 50 (many lived very active lives into their 80's and 90's) and most of yours probably didn't either, unless they lived in a crowded slum or had other problems that had nothing to do with modern medicine.
Time to put that myth to rest.

Posted by: windy | May 17, 2009 4:07 AM

Oh, and did I mention, the cancer is G-O-N-E (we have 2 oncologists). To really begin, let me just say this: It is a FACT that cancer can be EASILY cured with "alternative" means -- i.e. without the use of toxic poison. As a matter of fact, you cannot HEAL any-thing with poison!

It's great that your wife's cancer is gone, but actually you can heal a lot of things with poison. Foxglove is a very toxic plant and it can be used to treat heart failure. Scorpion venom can be used to treat cancer. And most medicines are toxic in sufficiently large quantities, like aspirin.

When it comes to bacteria, a doctor will collect a sample, develop it in a lab, and then administer the appropriate antibiotic. This is STANDARD procedure; EVERY doc does this for bacteria infections! There are only 2 places that do this in the US. Rational Therapeutics in CA, and Impath in NY. WHY IS THIS NOT DONE WITH CHEMOTHERAPY?! (think about it.)

Because cancer consists of the body's own cells, it's not an infection by bacteria or other parasites, so it can't be treated the same way.

And I seriously doubt that US doctors always do a culture before prescribing antibiotics...

Posted by: Rorschach | May 17, 2009 5:24 AM

When it comes to bacteria, a doctor will collect a sample, develop it in a lab, and then administer the appropriate antibiotic.This is STANDARD procedure; EVERY doc does this for bacteria infections!

Wrong.Most of the time we know which bacteria cause what illness and treat accordingly without culturing the organism first.Takes 1-4 days,and a lot of patients dont have that much time to wait for treatment to commence.

WHY IS THIS NOT DONE WITH CHEMOTHERAPY?! (think about it.)

If I think about that line too much,I might get dizzy,its so...reveiling.
Actually,we have started doing this for some cancers in some centers,say,for certain kinds of melanomas,where we try to determine the cell properties and then either try to "vaccinate" the body against those properties,or tailor our treatment to certain properties of the cancer cells.
Its called science,we learn,and improve our treatments,all the time.

Posted by: Anonymous | May 17, 2009 8:58 AM

I've thought long and hard before posting this. Whether he'll take any notice remains to be seen.

Posted by: Walton | May 16, 2009 7:59 AM [kill]​[hide comment]

I'm sorry for driving everyone away from the thread.

I wish I had better social skills. :-(

So if you're so sorry why do you keep coming back and doing it again and again? You declare "as a libertarian" at every opportunity. You hijack the thread with ideology irrelevant to the topic. You repeat yourself ad nauseam. You don't address the considered replies you receive. You ignore advice. You reject proffered help.

In order to acquire social skills you actually have to go out and start socialising. You're a university student go out to the bar, join a club, do voluntary work, hell you're in Oxford hold a sherry party for your tutorial group - I'm sure you can afford it!
But here you are on Saturday night churning out the same old stuff when you should be out with your mates.

You constantly tell us you are physically unattractive, as if this explains everything, yet you don't seem to take on board that your real problem might lie in your superior attitude and dogmatic adherence to an odious ideology which compounds any physical problems you may have. An attractive mind is far superior, and more durable, than mere physical beauty.

I have a friend who is really physically unattractive - more than half of his face is taken up with a crusty, raised, livid birth mark. He'd been bullied in school, spent most of his time alone, took refuge in books and attained high academic qualifications. In university he blossomed, people were not so cruel, he learned to express himself, his mind was attractive, his conversation became witty and informed. Within a short time his disfigurement became irrelevant. He became popular. He married, had two lovely daughters and a successful career. He is a beautiful human being. He could have stayed a lonely recluse - it's easy in academe - but worked at being sociable and reaped the rewards.

I repeat "grow up" Walton. You have a lively mind, use it to improve your lot. Make the effort to get some friends, join in their conversations, embrace their criticism and their praise, laugh with them, cry with them, share with them, care for them, learn about real life and put the ideology of Rand in the bin where it belongs with the rest of the trash. You'll be happier for it.

Posted by: Walton | May 17, 2009 9:13 AM

Kitty: I think you've formed a slightly skewed impression (which is my fault entirely, not yours) of what I'm like in RL; when I'm in the grip of a bad mood I tend to exaggerate how bad things actually are.

I do go out and socialise (though, admittedly, not as often as the average student), and I do have plenty of friends. I'm a cadet in the OTC (Officers Training Corps) and meet people through that, and I'm also active in my university's Conservative Association. So don't get the impression that I'm some sort of social recluse who spends all his time in his room arguing with people on the internet. I do spend a lot of time doing that, but I do other things as well.

yet you don't seem to take on board that your real problem might lie in your superior attitude and dogmatic adherence to an odious ideology which compounds any physical problems you may have.

I have plenty of friends and acquaintances who share my ideology entirely - to an even more extreme degree, in some cases - and have normal, happy social lives. So it's nothing to do with that whatsoever.

I appreciate that you're trying to help, but as I said, I think my comments have somewhat exaggerated how bad my problems are, and as a result of this you've misunderstood the nature of those problems.

Posted by: Bachalon | May 17, 2009 9:21 AM

Walton,

Didn't I try and tell you that they're not your allies?

Did you say anything to them?

Posted by: strange gods before me | May 17, 2009 9:47 AM

Fair enough. That's true. I can't rationally justify it.

But for all the cold, hard rationality in the world, I can't advocate letting poor children starve. However compelling the ideological justification. On a visceral level, I know and you know that giving a child a meal - whether his parents have earned it or not - is the right thing to do.

What do you mean you can't rationally justify it? What's wrong with the justification I gave you? Really, it's free of charge, you don't even have to thank me: freedom means nothing without opportunities to make use of that freedom; starvation is profoundly limiting of opportunity. At least give this justification a test drive before you dismiss it, or tell me what you find lacking.

And who told you rationality must be cold and hard? That's a platitude reminiscent of "this hurts me more than it hurts you." A phrase most often administered just before a beating, or some other abuse that undoubtedly hurts you far more than the speaker. "Cold, hard rationality" is a post hoc rationalization, that you may more placidly assent to a dominator's morality which was pressed upon you. If it shocks your conscience, then cast that rationalization away. And keep your conscience for yourself; it is one of those precious few things that can guide you to freedom from behind enemy lines.

I reiterate that there are good reasons why reason and conscience are not to be understood as opposing one another: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/04/right_wing_inanity.php#comment-1590484 And nothing's sacred has offered you a worthy answer in this thread as well, though if you are still suffering from depression, you will probably (wrongly) believe that you don't deserve to feel good.

Posted by: Walton | May 17, 2009 10:32 AM

As Kel says, we cannot avoid being born into a society. We can only try to make our societies worth being born into. Here John Rawls has something to offer

As I'm studying jurisprudence/legal philosophy this term, I'll be reading Rawls anyway in a couple of weeks (A Theory of Justice is considered one of the seminal works).

If we're going to have inequality of outcome, as we currently do, then for this to be even in principle defensible, we must be striving for equality of opportunity. That much at least is necessary for any semblance of fairness.

Is it? A person may inherit two categories of advantages from his or her parents: genetic advantages (such as intelligence, physical health, good looks) and environmental/social advantages (money, property, family connections, a stable upbringing, a good education). Societies based on "equality of opportunity" and a "level playing field" accept that the first category of advantages will generate inequality, while attempting to account and compensate for the second category of advantages.

But why is the first category of advantage more "deserved" than the other? Why does the person who inherits intelligence or good looks from his parents "deserve" those advantages any more than the person who inherits money or family connections from his parents?

This isn't to say that the distinction has no force; it has a profound importance when it comes to efficiency, since a society which had no social mobility whatsoever, and thereby wasted the talent of those who happened to be born into more straitened socio-economic circumstances, would inevitably be profoundly inefficient and economically weak. But I see it as a practical, not a moral, imperative to facilitate social mobility.

freedom means nothing without opportunities to make use of that freedom; starvation is profoundly limiting of opportunity. At least give this justification a test drive before you dismiss it, or tell me what you find lacking.

I think we're relying on different definitions of "freedom". The libertarian concept of "freedom" essentially boils down to self-ownership. The idea is that you own your body and your mind and all fruits thereof, and that no one else has any right to use these things without your consent. Thus, if you starve to death, your "freedom" has not been infringed, because no one has interfered with your sovereignty over your body; just as your car running out of fuel, or breaking down, does not mean that anyone has interfered with your ownership of your car. By contrast, if some or all of the fruits of your labour are confiscated for the benefit of others, then your "freedom" -that is, your ownership of your body and mind and everything which proceeds from the use thereof - has been violated. Just as, if you own an apple tree and someone else takes the apples from it, your property rights have been violated.

I put "freedom" in scare quotes here because I realise that this is a heavily contestable definition of freedom; and it would be better described as "self-ownership" than as "freedom". I'm not saying that this is the right definition of freedom; I'm just trying to isolate the core philosophical reasons for our disagreement.

Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM | May 17, 2009 11:50 AM

Annie, you miss the point frequently. For example, on the FDA and Cheerios for example, the FDA rules are clear. Food makers cannot claim specific health improvements, like saying eating BrandX will reduce your serum gobbletygook by 10 units (versus non-specific claims like better health with varied diet) in advertising and labeling without doing the proper controlled testing and submitting those tests for prior approval, just like they were a drug. General Mills just went over the line.

Posted by: Isabel | May 17, 2009 12:03 PM

Sorry, that was "gift" of old age. :)

Anyway, enjoy your Sunday, Maureen, and your team members too!

Posted by: Jadehawk, OM | May 17, 2009 12:37 PM

I think we're relying on different definitions of "freedom". The libertarian concept of "freedom" essentially boils down to self-ownership. The idea is that you own your body and your mind and all fruits thereof, and that no one else has any right to use these things without your consent. Thus, if you starve to death, your "freedom" has not been infringed, because no one has interfered with your sovereignty over your body; just as your car running out of fuel, or breaking down, does not mean that anyone has interfered with your ownership of your car. By contrast, if some or all of the fruits of your labour are confiscated for the benefit of others, then your "freedom" -that is, your ownership of your body and mind and everything which proceeds from the use thereof - has been violated. Just as, if you own an apple tree and someone else takes the apples from it, your property rights have been violated.

that's the most useless definition of freedom I've ever seen (And I'm certainly glad you realize it isn't optimal). Not only is it begging the question, it has completely removed itself from freedom as it is understood generally (i.e. the ability to do what you want, when you want it, however you want it, with whomever you want) and thus is actually often diametrically opposed to actual freedom (as you've said, a starving person might be "free" but he or she is certainly not free; on the other hand, a person in a social democracy is quite free [as compared to the rest of the world], but never "free"). The only time a person is neither free nor "free" is in actual slavery.

Posted by: Brownian, OM | May 17, 2009 1:11 PM

If you include infant and early childhood mortality, and ignore improvements in housing and sanitation and then credit modern medicine, you have the makings of a great, self-serving myth...my great and great-great and great-great-great grandparents did not keel over at 40, or even 50 (many lived very active lives into their 80's and 90's) and most of yours probably didn't either, unless they lived in a crowded slum or had other problems that had nothing to do with modern medicine. Time to put that myth to rest.

There's something to this claim, although I don't think it supports Isabel's apparently anti-modern medicine position as strongly as she thinks.

As a measure of general population health, life expectancy tends to be highly sensitive to high infant mortality rates. For this reason, cross-cultural or cross-historical comparisons are often made using life expectancy at age 5 as it provides a better indicator of the bulk of the population's overall life span. (In a similar way, the use of the mode rather than the mean of a population's income gives a better indicator of the bulk of the population's income--means can be heavily influenced by extreme outliers like the income of people like Bill Gates.)

While I don't see support for the claim that modern medicine hasn't increased our life spans (though less than life expectancy measures would suggest due to the decrease in infant mortality), it does seem to be the case that reports of life expectancy, especially of past societies, erroneously imply that we used to 'keel over' at some bizarrely young age, which wasn't necessarily the case.

However, those who study public and population health are indeed aware of the difficulties with this measure (so no, it's not a Big Pharma conspiracy), which is why a whole slew of measures have been developed to more accurately gauge population health, including measuring population morbidity and mortality ('morbidity' indicates non-fatal injury and illness; 'mortality' the fatality rate), or morbidity-free life expectancy (MFLE) (the number of years one would expect to live without chronic illness or injury).

As always though, the significance and differences between these measures are often left by journalists reporting health trends to a largely statistically innumerate population. And, to be fair, some researchers will sometimes select less appropriate measures in their study designs, usually due to data limitations, ignorance of the existence or application of more appropriate measures, and occasionally to bolster support for their hypotheses.

Posted by: Walton | May 17, 2009 1:16 PM

On the general topic of state healthcare and freedom, a good article by Steven Landsburg:

http://www.slate.com/id/2133518/

Posted by: Alex Deam | May 17, 2009 1:44 PM

"Thanks to modern medicine, lifespans have increased 30 years in the last century. "

this is bullshit.

citation, Raven?

I'm not Raven, but here's one from the WHO:

http://www.who.int/global_health_histories/seminars/presentation07.pdf

Actually, when you look at the lifespans of people who reached adulthood (and don't average in all the infant and early childhood deaths) it's more like 18 months.

If you include infant and early childhood mortality, and ignore improvements in housing and sanitation and then credit modern medicine, you have the makings of a great, self-serving myth...my great and great-great and great-great-great grandparents did not keel over at 40, or even 50 (many lived very active lives into their 80's and 90's) and most of yours probably didn't either, unless they lived in a crowded slum or had other problems that had nothing to do with modern medicine.
Time to put that myth to rest.

Well of course your hypothesis is right if you chuck out of all the evidence against it. You can't just ignore all the people that died before they reached adulthood. They were people too!

And sure your "great-great-great grandparents" may not have died at 40/50, but so what? You're not really getting the concept of an average, are you? While they might have lived into their 80s, others didn't make it past 10.

Raven, like many others before him, took life EXPECTENCY at birth, and equated it with life SPAN. Can you justify this?

Yes, from Wikipedia (there are plenty of other, better, sources out there that give the same results):

*Life expectancy is the average number of years of life remaining at a given age. It is the average expected lifespan of an individual.
*Life span refers to the typical length of time that any particular organism can be expected to live.

I really don't see what's so different about those two definitions.

Posted by: Bachalon | May 17, 2009 1:57 PM

Alex Deam,

The difference is this: the life expectancy of a 70 year old, even in good health is going to be far shorter than that of a five year old, whereas, barring unforeseen events like disease or accident, they both may have a similar life span.

Posted by: Alex Deam | May 17, 2009 2:52 PM

On the general topic of state healthcare and freedom, a good article by Steven Landsburg:

http://www.slate.com/id/2133518/

I've just read the article, and it's actually a poor piece of journalism.

Let's examine what he says:

Here, for the edification of bloggers everywhere, is an example of an economic consideration: If you ask people—and especially poor people—what their most dire needs are, you'll find that "guaranteed ventilator support" ranks pretty low on the list. OK, I haven't actually done a survey, but I'm going out on a limb here and predicting that something like, say, milk, is going to rank a lot higher up the priority list than ventilator insurance.

Well he hasn't done a survey, so why should I bother listening to his point of view? He hasn't done any science, just thought about his own opinion, and yet Walton posts a link to this article calling it "good". Walton, this is a science blog, so while we lambaste your usual libertarian philosophical basis for your views, we're likely to find articles that are so blase about empirical evidence even less gratifying.

So far, so hand-waving.

In fact, I'll go further. The back of my envelope says that a lifetime's worth of ventilator insurance costs somewhere around $75. I'm going to hazard a guess that if, on her 21st birthday, you'd asked Tirhas Habtegiris to select her own $75 present, she wouldn't have asked for ventilator insurance. She might have picked $75 worth of groceries; she might have picked a new pair of shoes; she might have picked a few CDs, but not ventilator insurance.

Where did the 21st birthday come from? This woman was removed from her ventilator when she was 27! Of course if you asked her what she would do with $75 on her 21st birthday she wasn't going to answer "ventilator insurance". Most people wouldn't. I reckon if you asked her what she would do with that $75 a few days ago when the prospect of running out of money to keep herself alive was very very real, she would've gone for ventilator insurance every time.

She might even have picked something health-care related—a thorough physical exam, or, if there were better markets for this sort of thing, $75 worth of health or disability insurance. I doubt very much, though, that with $75 to spend, she'd have chosen to insure against needing a ventilator as opposed to any of the other minor and major catastrophes to which we mortals are susceptible.

That's the point though. $75 doesn't go very far at all. As the writer says, that amount is just enough to pay for the ventilator insurance. Having that $75 wouldn't have suddenly made Tirhas Habtegiris not poor anymore. If she was earning the amount of say Joe the Plumber, then she could afford plenty of CDs, milk and the ventilator insurance. Buying a CD means little to Joe the Plumber, because he can buy lots and lots, whereas to her, it's probably a rare event, so given $75 on her 21st birthday, she'd be off down the nearest shop to buy some music or whatever. Joe the Plumber will still have money left over for ventilator insurance after he's bought his CDs. She won't.

Now let me remind you what "compassion" means. According to Merriam-Webster Online (which, by virtue of being online, really ought to be easily accessible to bloggers), compassion is the "sympathetic consciousness of others' distress together with a desire to alleviate it." By that definition, there is nothing particularly compassionate about giving ventilator insurance to a person who really feels a more urgent need for milk or eggs. One might even say that choosing to ignore the major sources of others' distress is precisely the opposite of sympathetic consciousness.

No, because their "distress" for milk was when they were 21, not when they were 27. These bloggers weren't arguing about this woman 6 years ago. Their compassion comes when the distress comes. The major source of this woman's distress in the last few weeks(?) has been the ventilator insurance. So they aren't ignoring the major source of her distress. That is the major source of her distress!

I think Steven E. Landsburg should go look up the Merriam-Webster definition of "time".

There is room for a great deal of disagreement about how much assistance rich people should give to poor people, either voluntarily or through the tax system. But surely whatever we do spend should be spent in the ways that are most helpful.

Therefore there's no use arguing that the real tradeoff should not be ventilators versus milk but ventilators versus tax cuts, or ventilators versus foreign wars. It's one thing to say we should spend more to help the poor, but quite another to say that what we're currently spending should be spent ineffectively.

Of course money shouldn't be spent ineffectively, that's why it makes a lot more sense to not give all poor people $75 to do with what they want, but use all that money to guarantee ventilator insurance for everyone. You can't just throw money out and expect it to do good things automatically. It has to be targeted. You can have some sort of benefits system like we do in the UK, but don't expect it to guarantee health care or education unless those things are decided upon by society as a whole (i.e. state health care and schools). It's the same reason that Gordon Brown's Keynesian stimulus which is 70+% tax cut isn't that wonderful because it's not targeted. Better to have spent the majority of that money on green technology and housing.

You can't do that with every government service. You can't offer people a choice between police protection and its cash value, because police patrols tend to protect entire neighborhoods at once, not just specific individuals. You might not want to offer people a choice between a flu vaccine and its cash value, because you'd really prefer to have vaccinated neighbors. But critical life support isn't like that; the benefits are targeted to specific individuals. There's no reason those individuals shouldn't be allowed to choose different benefits if they want them.

Actually it's exactly like that. A public health service that's free at the point of use is exactly like that. It doesn't benefit individuals any more than the police benefit individuals because they might stop individual people becoming victims of crime. A health service is there for everyone to use, it's then up to the gods of fate who will actually use it. It protects entire neighbourhoods, just like the police, but then specific individuals use the service, just like those who call the police.

And it's a stupid false dichotomy he's presenting anyway. So the poor can either have health care or benefits? Why not both? We do here.

A policy of helping everyone who needs a ventilator is a policy of spending less to help the same class of people in other ways.

If they don't have the ventilator insurance, then they die, just like this woman. If they're dead, then you can't buy them milk.

Seriously Walton, you're backing up your views with an article that answers no to the question, "Do the Poor Deserve Life Support?" Sounds pretty 19th Century to me.

Posted by: Alex Deam | May 17, 2009 2:56 PM

Bachalon, we're talking about life expectancy from birth, or at least that's what Isabel said.

Plus what maureen said.

Posted by: Brownian, OM | May 17, 2009 3:15 PM

Plus what maureen said.

As I noted, that's not correct. If it were, then the age-specific mortality rates for all species would remain constant or slightly decrease throughout life (as susceptibility to injury would reduce as an organism gains experience, and susceptibility to disease would reduce as an organism's immune system gains antibodies through exposure.)

This is not the case.

Both of you might be interested in reading up on age-specific mortality rates, life tables, and the general fields of population biology and population health (the former dealing with non-human species, the latter with humans.)

Posted by: Brownian, OM | May 17, 2009 3:30 PM

Unfortunately, I've got to head out for the day and so won't be able to continue this discussion for awhile.

Have a good one, everybody!

Posted by: SC, OM | May 17, 2009 3:35 PM

Enjoy your day, Brownian!

Posted by: Knockgoats | May 17, 2009 4:00 PM

Then let's say that A and B, a few months later, both become chronically ill and need urgent surgery. A, because he's been sensible and spent his cash handout on health insurance, will be treated. B, on the other hand, will not be treated and will die. This, in a nutshell, is justice - wise choices are rewarded, and foolish ones punished. And it all happens without any government control. - Walton

Walton, you're a fucking scumbag when you follow your loathsome ideology, you really are. The death penalty for making foolish choices.

Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM | May 17, 2009 4:05 PM

You are right Knockgoats, the libertardians are their own worst enemy when they open their mouths and spout their morally bankrupt philosophy. What they see as the virtue in their philosophy, we see as criminal action.

Posted by: Carlie | May 17, 2009 4:22 PM

If the federal government suddenly gave every low-income person in America a large pile of cash, some of them would be sensible and spend it on health insurance. Others would be foolish and squander it on alcohol and fripperies

Posted by: Isabel | May 17, 2009 4:51 PM

Knockgoats, you only show the results for one region, I saw a different study. Also,even your example supports a less than 20 year increase, though it is difficult to interpret. Furthermore, there is no indication of how much "modern medicine" had to do with it. As I've pointed out there are many other factors involved.

The rest of your comment makes little sense to me - I did not assert any of those factoids.

My main point was conflating life span and average life expectancy is misleading, and gives lay people the impression, thanks mainly to poor journalism, that old age is some kind of modern phenomenon.

Posted by: Alex Deam | May 17, 2009 5:20 PM

So... you're basically saying that individuals can't be trusted to spend their own money on beneficial things, and that it's better for the Nanny State (which always knows best) to spend it for them?

Strawman time.

It's not "their own money", it's richer people's money this "$75" the writer was talking about.

And if you want universal access to health care, you can't just give anyone who can't afford health care money, and expect that result. For starters, people who can't afford health care can't afford other things, as Carlie points out. So some of that money won't go towards health care. Also, health care is generally something you don't think about when you're perfectly healthy. You're more likely to spend money on decent housing than health care, because housing is a immediate need, whereas health care is a potential future need. A rich person though, as I already pointed out by pointing to Joe "OH NOES, my taxes are going up on my $250,000" the Plumber, doesn't have all these things to worry about. He can afford decent housing, clothing, education (not that that helped him) etc, and yet still have enough to pay for his health care. A poor person doesn't have that "luxury". It has nothing to do with "alcohol and fripperies" (and if they do waste benefits on that, they'll regret it in the future), and suspect that that remark shines a blazing light on your libertarian philosophy. It probably all stems from a belief that the poor are all drug addicts or something.

Similarly, if the goal is universal access to education, then you don't just give everyone money and hope that's what happens. You can't expect millions of people to all act in the same way. If the money is meant to guarantee one social goal (like universal education) but (as you freely admit) is likely to be used for other things, then surely that goes against the whole idea of at least some of that money being spent? You're the person who's always going on about taxes being other people's money, so what about my money? If I voted for a politician who wants universal access to health care, then that's because I want the money that this politician puts towards universal health care to actually be used for that. If I want money to be spent on poor people so they can buy clothes (and I do, as it happens, agree with benefits systems in a general sense), then I will vote for that. If the money's is only supposed to be used for health care because the politician never said anything about clothing or whatever, then why should it be used for anything else? And if this money is only supposed to be used for health care, then surely the most efficient way of providing health care is the best way to spend the tax money? And as I've outlined, state health care is more efficient at providing access to all, than hoping that millions of people all spend their benefits on the same one thing, especially when they probably won't need that thing now, but some time in the distant future. The "Nanny" State may not always know best, but there are some things it's best at providing.

Seriously Walton, how hard is this to understand? I even gave it in terms you could understand. If the goal is universal health care, then that has to be guaranteed by the government. Homo economicus has been dead for a long time.

Posted by: Isabel | May 17, 2009 6:47 PM

"It is simple fact that a lot more of those people who reach adulthood live into old age than used to; and that modern medicine has a great deal to do with this."

Your comment above is vague. What are the figures? That is the whole point.

Your factoids were wrong - why paraphrase and distort - just quote please when needed.

The study I read was based on life expectancy at age 21, not 5, and ended a decade ago, comparing the beginning and end of the 20th century and the figure was 18 months. Also, the Denmark study was based on a much longer period than others have mentioned - "100 yrs" and "the 20th century" .

Factors not considered; modern sanitation and less crowding in the cities, people are better educated and have better nutrition. Vaccinations and antibiotics have probably had the biggest impact as far as modern medicine. I'm not against advances, I support them. I am just against the exaggerated claims of the medical establishment.

Posted by: strange gods before me | May 17, 2009 8:41 PM

the debt they accumulated the last time their car had to be fixed or they'd lose their job due to not having transportation, or to pay for their kid's braces that they should have gotten a year ago, or to buy their kids clothes that actually fit, or to fix the hole in the wall that has been there since they fell into it two years ago, etc., etc. Seriously Walton, you have NO IDEA what it means to be poor, or what the needs and pressures of the poor are.

Carlie, you mustn't make our dear Walton feel uncomfortable. Look at how he speaks again and again of the "deserving" and "undeserving." It's important that the poor be explicable as morally flawed. Why, it just wouldn't be fair if there were poor people out there doing everything they're supposed to be doing, still unable to afford bootstraps.

But this isn't a nineteenth century morality play about how the rich are morally superior, nope.

Posted by: BlueIndependent | May 18, 2009 2:30 AM

Since nobody has yet addressed Kevin at 318, I will.

Kevin, not sure if you are a passerby to this blog, or someone who watches but never posts until feeling compelled to on this thread, but there are a lot of serious logic holes in what you post, and you are taking a very subjective tack with your opinion.

Starting with this one:

"...More people are now employed to treat cancer than there are people who are diagnosed with cancer each year (that's over 500,000!)..."

...that's rather easy to explain. I hate to break it to you, but the medical profession is rather flooded with students and people trying to become doctors. Why? Because in part, it's guaranteed work (unless you REALLY screw up and lose your license) for life, and it pays pretty damn well. That there are more people capable of treating cancers than have cancer I would think would be a good thing. It means on some level the system is working and services are available for an epidemic that affects everyone on some level. But you figure only says "people are now employed to treat cancer", which could mean a lot of things. Do you mean people actually treating it, or people researching, studying, treating, etc.? Either way, how is it any skin off your back if there's more than the population? If there were less you'd probably be here complaining that some other event was causing a shortage of services.

As for the profit of drug companies, I do not necessarily disagree. BUT, there are some very good drugs available for treating different cancers. Labeling them all as "toxic" and "poison", especially using all caps (which really betrays whatever point you were trying to make), is simply ludicrous and unfair, and ignores the fact that people get better through these methods on a daily basis. You make it sound as if anyone that uses drug company cancer treatments is a sell-out signing their death warrant to a shadowy system built on nothing but myths. My wife is a nurse who deals with cancer patients of all ages and stripes weekly; she would quickly and handily disabuse you of your claims, and for every "alternative remedy" you use she has a story about how a patient who thought the same things as you on the way to their deaths. And might I add, both her family and mine have and continue to deal with cancer in our families using treatments you deride as hopeless and inhumane without the negative results you are so sure will happen.

The drug companies are certainly trying to conduct their experiments on many unsuspecting people in society, but that is in part a deterioration of regulations and a simultaneous increase in the marketing ingenuity of such companies in order to get their products out. We see some of the same problems you do, but we come to different conclusions. And nobody here will argue that America is less healthy that it used to be. Making pleas toward diet and exercise fall on deaf ears here because everyone already gets it. You are not saying anything novel, just as Laura further up the reply line here thought she was breaking ground by telling us eating McDonald's was bad for our health. Your argument treats your audience like children.

Posted by: Walton | May 18, 2009 4:41 AM

Feminists in particular have been trying to raise consciousness about lookism. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lookism It may seem an unscalable obstacle, but so did other forms of discrimination that we now at least have a grip on.

Hang on. "Lookism" isn't necessarily a form of discrimination that can be, or should be, eliminated - and I say this as an admittedly ugly person myself.

Certainly, if I were being discriminated against in economic, professional or academic life because of my looks, then that would be unacceptable. But I'm not.

Rather, the major handicap conferred by my looks is that I'm unable to have a romantic relationship. In a sense, that might be "discrimination", but it's a legitimate form of discrimination; everyone discriminates between people to whom they are attracted and people to whom they are not.

It's just as absurd, therefore, as complaining about "intelligencism" and pointing out that stupid people are significantly less likely than intelligent people to be employed in a number of professions. This is true; but the reason for this disparity is that their intelligence actually impacts on their ability to do the job.

Discrimination, itself, is not inherently bad. It's only bad when the factors on which one is discriminating are irrelevant to the task in hand. So discriminating against a potential employee because of his or her race, hair colour or sexual orientation is bad; but discriminating against him or her because of intelligence and competence is clearly not bad. (I presume even you wouldn't advocate that employers should be forced to take a certain number of incompetent employees?)

Similarly, with disabilities, these can be relevant to employment and, therefore, a legitimate reason for discrimination. If you run a small business with minimal cashflow, the cost of installing wheelchair access in all facilities may be prohibitive; and there are some (physical) jobs which simply require an able-bodied person. That said, I'm all in favour of fighting against disability discrimination in situations where it isn't defensible; universities, for instance, really need to do more to facilitate access for the disabled. (Oxford colleges, with their old buildings, are notoriously bad in that regard.)

The point I'm trying to make is that not every natural disadvantage can be, or should be, eliminated - because some of them are actually relevant to one's ability to perform in society. An intelligent person will succeed, and should succeed, in professional life more easily than one lacking in intelligence. Similarly, an attractive person will find it easier to have a fulfilling sex life than an unattractive person will (being unattractive myself, I speak from personal experience). Neither of these disparities is simply a social contruct which can be eliminated; they're natural advantages in one's ability to function in society.

Posted by: Walton | May 18, 2009 4:56 AM

I would argue instead for equality of outcome, though I might settle for equality of opportunity if it can be stabilized.

So, in a society with equality of outcome, how would you get around the inherent problem with socialism? That is, how would you ensure that wealth creation and productivity are incentivised?

Like it or not, consumer capitalism - for all its flaws - has a vast, and proven, capacity for wealth generation, innovation, and producing consumer goods and services. That's why all Western nations have, to some degree or another, market economies with private ownership and disparities of wealth. I assume that you will concede this fact. I, in turn, will concede that consumer capitalism, in itself, also creates huge disparities between rich and poor, and that such disparities are (rightly or wrongly) usually seen as unacceptable; hence why all Western nations have, to some degree or another, a social safety net.

Hence most people agree that a combination of a generally capitalist economy with a social safety net and provision for public education - that is to say, a mixed economy - is a desirable compromise, because it allows us to combine wealth creation with provision for the poorest and some equalisation of opportunities. What we haggle over is, fundamentally, the balance between the two. I would like to see the UK, at least, swing somewhat away from socialism and towards capitalism; but, that said, I would not abolish welfare, nor public funding of education, nor would I privatise all remaining public infrastructure. And as regards the US, I wouldn't necessarily have less government assistance than at present; I just think it could be spent more effectively, since your social safety net is, as far as I can see, a hodgepodge of inefficient systems and bureaucracy.

So while I have a tendency to use over-the-top rhetoric for dramatic effect - "taxation is theft", "government is coercion", etc - I don't think we're poles apart, really. We just approach things from different angles and describe them in different language.

Posted by: Anonymous | May 18, 2009 5:17 AM

Sorry Alex! Got carried away - damn!
So Walton Lookism is all about why you don't get laid? Did you actually understand anything I said upthread about inner beauty?
Apart from that Lookism is a real threat to excellence in many fields.
A simple example - I won't name names as it would embarrass those concerned.
Singing student A has a fine, successful career. She's beautiful, has a great figure and is world renowned. Her voice is very good but not exceptional. I'm thrilled for her.
Her contemporary, singing student B consistently outshone her in college, received two prestigious awards, and scored higher than any previous student in the performance part of her degree. She is struggling to get work. She is short, has a dumpy figure, and 'quirky' looks.
Their sex lives are of no interest whatsoever - the point is that we are all suffering the loss of B's wonderful voice because she doesn't look like a model.
Simple enough for you now?

Posted by: Kitty | May 18, 2009 5:22 AM

That was me at #414! I'm sticking to signing in, consigning typekey to the trash.

Posted by: Bachalon | May 18, 2009 5:31 AM

Walton, at that conference (sorry to bring that up again, but I'm very interested in your experiences there especially since you said you don't want to go back), did you attempt to engage anyone about homosexuality?

Also, what else happened that turned you off of the whole idea? Did you come away with the sense that these were people you would want to work with?

Posted by: Walton | May 18, 2009 5:36 AM

One of my suggestions was voluntary work. What about a homeless shelter, Help the Aged, or a PHAB club? I don't mean giving or raising money I mean get your hands dirty and get involved - give your time, you seem to have lots to spare. You're a law student? Offer your research expertise to the charities who help people who are in debt. Meet these feckless poor, learn about who they really are. It will help your career if you need libertarian motivation - or will you only be interested in law for the rich? (Dog forbid you have your eyes on a political career!)

One of my best friends on my course - who's a bit of a leftie by inclination - used to work for the Citizens' Advice Bureau. She told me I'd hate it (knowing well that I tend to have a fairly unsympathetic attitude towards the general public and their legal mistakes).

As to only being interested in law for the rich: I have no desire to work in City commercial law (and opportunities in that field are somewhat diminished at present, in any case). And I don't have the confidence or advocacy skills to be a barrister. So no, I'm no more interested in "law for the rich" than in "law for the poor".

As to a political career; having barely survived a term as an officeholder in the Conservative Association here, the words "hell no" come to mind. I can't handle the abuse that high-profile public figures have to deal with. I'm also not charismatic enough, and don't have good enough people skills, to get to the top in modern-day politics.

What I'd really like to do is carry on studying and eventually progress to a doctorate, but I'm unlikely to be able to afford to fund myself unless I do a few years of work first. At the moment I'm hoping to go into the civil service; I've been advised by several people that I'd be good at that line of work. (Though I'm slightly worried that in the vetting process - which is notoriously stringent for UK civil service positions - they might follow the Internet paper trail, read my comments on this site - where I've been much more candid about myself than I ever am in real life - and reject me on the grounds of my mental instability and radical political outlook.)

Posted by: Kel | May 18, 2009 5:51 AM

Ugly people get into relationships all the time. Unless you are the elephant man, you really can't use that one as an excuse.

Posted by: Kitty | May 18, 2009 5:55 AM

Alex - exactly the same as the Olympics but this may end a career before it's begun. She gets the auditions on the strength of her CV and Demo but as soon as they see her it's "thanks but no thanks" - apart from radio work. Hah!

Of course Walton doesn't watch the news! He won't pay his TV license because the left wing have taken over the BBC and tell us all lies about his precious capitalist system. He only reads the news when it agrees with him.

One of my best friends on my course - who's a bit of a leftie by inclination - used to work for the Citizens' Advice Bureau. She told me I'd hate it (knowing well that I tend to have a fairly unsympathetic attitude towards the general public and their legal mistakes).

All the more reason to do it!

Anyway I'm off to peace and tranquillity for a few days away from the insanity that is Walton.
You haven't driven me away Walton, but I'll think twice before engaging with you in the future. I've never liked Tory supremacists and it looks like you're growing up to be a prime example of the type.

Posted by: John Morales | May 18, 2009 5:58 AM

Walton,

When did I say that I wouldn't eschew a potential romantic partner because of her looks.

Posted by: John Morales | May 18, 2009 6:03 AM

Walton @425,

So you're happy for businesses to become insolvent, creating more unemployment and harming the economy, just for the sake of enforcing disability access laws?

Posted by: Bachalon | May 18, 2009 6:13 AM

Walton wrote:

So you're happy for businesses to become insolvent, creating more unemployment and harming the economy, just for the sake of enforcing disability access laws?

But it's fine if the disabled can't get jobs and thus have to rely on taxpyers for money for food and other necessities?

You know, the government is usually happy to provide funding for that sort of thing. They'd rather you not break the law.

Posted by: John Morales | May 18, 2009 6:14 AM

I bet that Daniel Hauser would love to live long enough to have your problems, Walton.

Thanks to the coercive power of the State, it seems he might yet do so.

Arguments from consequences have validity in policy considerations.

Posted by: maureen Brian | May 18, 2009 6:17 AM

I wish you luck, Walton, and I bet that such people are within 500 metres of you right this minute.

They are fairly numerous in the general population but at a university my experience says there is almost a surfeit of them.

Posted by: Stephen Wells | May 18, 2009 6:19 AM

@430: remember that in Waltonworld, the disabled and the unemployed don't get any public benefits; they get private charity or they starve.

Walton, here's a hint: it's not your looks that are stopping you getting laid. It's the words that come out of your mouth.

Posted by: Alex Deam | May 18, 2009 6:24 AM

'Tis Himself (if you're still reading this thread), you seem to know a lot of Latin phrases. Is this down to knowledge of Latin, a liking for Roam history, or epic googling skills?

Posted by: Anonymous | May 18, 2009 7:07 AM

Certainly, if I were being discriminated against in economic, professional or academic life because of my looks, then that would be unacceptable. But I'm not.

Sorry to break this to you, but if you really are as ugly as you say you are, you almost certainly will experience workplace discrimination in hiring and promotion.

You won't find many ugly people in upper management. On the other hand, most of the ugly people I know are in fulfilling long term relationships. I'm afraid you've got the whole thing backwards.

So, in a society with equality of outcome, how would you get around the inherent problem with socialism? That is, how would you ensure that wealth creation and productivity are incentivised?

Like Alex Deam said, this isn't an issue of socialism; you need to make finer distinctions to be meaningful. But as far as you're right about monetary compensation being an incentive toward productivity, it's not the only incentive. Something else must exist that accounts for your unpaid work at Wikipedia, for example. Pride of craftsmanship is well understood. And scientists have motivation in raw curiosity.

I'm just not convinced that the profit motive is worth the accompanying violence. But I mentioned this not because I'm interested in evangelizing equality of outcome -- discussions where we find no common ground are actually quite boring to me -- instead only to explain why I might not be the best advocate for equality of opportunity.

So while I have a tendency to use over-the-top rhetoric for dramatic effect - "taxation is theft", "government is coercion", etc - I don't think we're poles apart, really. We just approach things from different angles and describe them in different language.

Leave it at the picket line. Inflammatory slogans that you don't wholly believe are insulting to your audience's intelligence. That's why I keep asking you to say what you mean, as specifically as necessary to be understood. It's not merely because I disagree with you that your sloganeering drives me bonkers.

Posted by: Hypocee | May 18, 2009 10:35 AM

I wish people would lay off Joe the Plumber in their rhetoric - he's a strawman, and I consider that quip one of Obama's mistakes. Hoping to buy and manage a business worth $250K does not mean you have $250K lying around, let alone that you earn it in a year. It's letting the side down, like quoting without extreme caution from a Moore piece.

Posted by: Walton | May 18, 2009 12:53 PM

How about "freedom and power are synonyms?" Any sincere disagreement?

Yes, I have a sincere point of disagreement.

One of the principles often advocated both by the left and by libertarians, for instance, is that consenting adults should have the freedom to engage in whatever sexual activities they wish. In our model free society - both yours and mine - therefore, a person will not face any adverse legal consequences from having whatever kind of sex, gay or straight, s/he sees fit.

Yet this self-evidently does not mean that every free person has the ability to engage in any kind of sex they desire. Some people are unable to do so because no one else wants to have sex with them. Others are unable to do so for medical reasons. Do either of these things make them any less free?

The same applies to freedom of speech. In our model free society, a person has, broadly speaking, the right to express whatever views he wishes. Yet this doesn't imply that he has the practical ability to do so. Clearly, not everyone is equally eloquent, and equally able to get across their ideas; and not everyone has equal access to high-profile platforms, or equal popularity with the public, or an equal number of endorsements and references from others. But the fact that I am less eloquent than, say, Professor Myers, and that my blog has fewer readers and a lot less coverage and attention than his does, does not mean that I am less free than he is.

We can see, then, that if this is true of sex and speech, there is no reason why it should not also be true of economics. For example: should I wish to, I am perfectly free to work as a gardener. It isn't a controlled-entry profession, like medicine or law; anyone can, to the best of my knowledge, proclaim themselves to be a gardener and advertise themselves as such. Yet this doesn't mean that anyone is going to hire me to work on their garden (and since I know nothing about gardening, they'd be stupid to do so). And it's clearly silly to claim that freedom would be enhanced if people were somehow forced to employ me as a gardener.

So no, freedom does not equal power. Freedom is negative. It means that people can't stop you from doing what you want. It does not mean that people can be forced to give you practical opportunities to do what you want.

Posted by: Walton | May 18, 2009 2:00 PM

strange gods:

The natural conclusion of your view - that freedom is the practical ability to achieve one's desired course of action - is that freedom is a limited commodity, and that one person's freedoms directly and inevitably conflict with another's.

So, for instance, on your view, I am not "free" to become a gardener - despite the fact that no one will prevent me from advertising myself as a gardener - because of the fact that no one is willing to hire me in that capacity. Thus, in order to make me "free" to be a gardener, the law would have to force someone (A) to employ me as a gardener. Yet if the law did so, it would clearly be impinging upon the freedom of A to choose his or her own employees at will. Thus the law cannot simultaneously guarantee my freedom and that of A; it must choose between the two.

(Or - to take a less palatable example - if X wants to have sex but is unable to find a sexual partner, then he is not "free" to have sex, and the law can guarantee such freedom to X only if it forces Y to have sex with him. Clearly the latter course, aside from being morally repugnant, also impinges on Y's freedom. So, again, X's freedom and Y's are directly opposed.)

If you're right, then the natural conclusion is that there is really no such thing as a "free society", and no society is more "free" than any other; rather, society and the law inevitably have to make policy choices about how freedom, a limited commodity, should be apportioned among the individuals in society. So a libertarian society, on this view, is no more "free" than any other society; it simply makes a policy decision to grant more freedom to those who have wealth and property, at the expense of those who do not.

(Similarly, a society which we might characterise as "unfree", such as Iran, is, on the above view, in fact no less "free" than any other; in the case of Iran, it simply decides to allocate more freedom to the country's Islamic religious leaders (giving them the "freedom", i.e. practical ability, to impose their beliefs on everyone) and less to everyone else.)

I don't agree with this definition of "freedom", of course; I'm just trying to understand and work through the ramifications of your view.

Posted by: Alex Deam | May 18, 2009 3:31 PM

Walton @446:

Congratulations! You've just outlined something that a great many philosophers before you have thought about. It's called the state of nature.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_of_nature

Without a government, we have the freedom to do almost anything. Most people see this as a bad thing, for the very reason you outlined (but then decided to reject): people's "rights" and "freedoms" invariably come into conflict, and therefore society has entered into some sort of "social contract" to adjudicate whose rights and freedoms are more important.

For instance, without a government, there is no law and order. So hypothetical person X has the freedom to have sex with you, but you also have the freedom to reject his/her advances. Maybe s/he doesn't listen to your pleas, and decides to rape you. Surely that's a conflict of freedoms? As a society we've "allowed" the government the power to prosecute rapists. So we've come down in your favour i.e. we favour the right/freedom to not consent to sex more important than the right/freedom to have sex with someone against their will.

In this way, all (legitimate?) government action is as an adjudicator between conflicting "rights" and "freedoms"

Posted by: 'Tis Himself, OM | May 18, 2009 6:05 PM

Alex Deam #438

'Tis Himself (if you're still reading this thread), you seem to know a lot of Latin phrases. Is this down to knowledge of Latin, a liking for Roam history, or epic googling skills?

I went to a Catholic high school in the early to mid 1960s where I had four years of Latin. I've forgotten most of the Latin I learned, but some of the more famous quotes are still stuck in my mind.

• Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres. - "All of Gaul is divided into three parts." The opening sentence in Julius Caesar's Gallic Wars.
• In hoc signo vinces. - "In this sign you will conquer." Constantine I adopted this phrase as a motto after his vision of a Christian symbol in the sky before a battle in 312.
• Senatus Populusque Romanus - "The Senate and People of Rome" Used as an official signature of the Roman government.
• Illegitimi non carborundum. - Bad Latin for "Don't let the bastards grind you down."
• Cartago delenda est. - "Carthage must be destroyed." Senator Marcus Porcius Cato the Elder would always end his speeches with some variation of this expression even if he had not been discussing Carthage in the speech.[
• Argumentum ad hominem. - "Argument to the man." A well known logical fallacy.
• Quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra? - "How long, Catilina, will you abuse our patience?" The opening sentence of Marcus Tullius Cicero's speech denouncing Lucius Sergius Catilina's plot to overthrow the Roman government.
• O tempora o mores. - "Oh the times oh the customs." Another line from Cicero's speech against Catilina.

Posted by: Jadehawk, OM | May 18, 2009 6:46 PM

alex, my mom once gave me a book full of graffiti from Pompeii. It was... interesting, and a definite antidote to the view of Rom as some sort of super-dignified society, based on reading the official writings of Romans.

most of the graffiti involved rumors of who fucked whom how often and for how much.

Posted by: Anonymous | May 18, 2009 7:27 PM

If you're right, then the natural conclusion is that there is really no such thing as a "free society", and no society is more "free" than any other; rather, society and the law inevitably have to make policy choices about how freedom, a limited commodity, should be apportioned among the individuals in society. So a libertarian society, on this view, is no more "free" than any other society; it simply makes a policy decision to grant more freedom to those who have wealth and property, at the expense of those who do not.

Well, it looks like Walton finally figured out why nobody else can stand his unflinching Libertarian ideology. Will he side with evidence or ideology this time around? Stay tuned!

Posted by: Alex Deam | May 18, 2009 9:18 PM

Societies' relative freedom can still be meaningfully compared, though. Take the mode average freedom of an Iranian citizen, and it will be lower than the mode average of a British citizen.

I'm arguing for raising the mode average as high as possible.

This might be a really dense question, but why the mode and not the mean?

Posted by: strange gods before me | May 18, 2009 9:24 PM

So, for instance, on your view, I am not "free" to become a gardener - despite the fact that no one will prevent me from advertising myself as a gardener - because of the fact that no one is willing to hire me in that capacity. Thus, in order to make me "free" to be a gardener, the law would have to force someone (A) to employ me as a gardener. Yet if the law did so, it would clearly be impinging upon the freedom of A to choose his or her own employees at will. Thus the law cannot simultaneously guarantee my freedom and that of A; it must choose between the two.

Yes, and this is not a problematic formulation, because there are degrees of freedom instead of absolute freedom and absolute un-freedom.

So you are less free to become a gardener than someone with experience who knows what they're doing, but you are more free than you would be in a society where gardening apprenticeship was exclusive to secretive guilds. You have a lot of time and opportunity to get the necessary experience, so in the long run you are fairly free to become a gardener, less free to become an astronaut.

Posted by: strange gods before me | May 18, 2009 9:33 PM

This might be a really dense question, but why the mode and not the mean?

I could be stumbling here, but I think you can make someone a tyrant and make everyone else slaves without altering the mean.

The mean is not a useless measurement, though; I think mean freedom today is higher than in the past because of increases in quality of life.

Posted by: Alex Deam | May 18, 2009 9:43 PM

Damn, you beat me to it. :^)

You're not stumbling!

Posted by: Walton | May 19, 2009 4:17 AM

The natural conclusion of your view - that freedom is the practical ability to achieve one's desired course of action - is that freedom is a limited commodity, and that one person's freedoms directly and inevitably conflict with another's.

That's right. That explains why, to deal with these conflicts, we use a space-filling metaphor, understanding space as finite: "Your freedom to swing your arm ends where my nose begins." That's why I handed you the "state of nature" hint which Alex Deam made more explicit.

So a libertarian society, on this view, is no more "free" than any other society; it simply makes a policy decision to grant more freedom to those who have wealth and property, at the expense of those who do not.

And ought to admit as much. My objection is that right-wing libertarians use an arbitrary definition to conveniently cover up this truth. And that definition is incoherent.

OK, now that I am sure I've correctly understood and characterised your view, here is why I disagree with it.

In a capitalist society, when a person creates wealth, he does so by providing some good or service for which other people are willing to exchange money. This is a voluntary exchange, which, by definition, is beneficial to both parties (otherwise they wouldn't enter into it). It is non-coercive in character.

And, if you think about it, A and B have each entered into this commercial relationship in order to gain some advantage for themselves. If they were to be prevented from entering into that relationship, they would each be deprived of the advantage which they stand to secure from it.

Let's say, then, that A is a factory owner and B is a sweatshop worker in the Third World. B's side of the bargain is pretty miserable, in objective terms. But we need to remember that B would not have entered into the bargain if it were not better than the next best alternative. (For most such people, the "next best alternative" is either prostitution or starvation.)

So if a well-meaning left-wing government introduces restrictions on wages and working conditions, hoping to force A to treat B better, then A may well leave the country and go somewhere without such restrictions; or, if he can't do this, he may well go out of business. This means that B is denied the chance to enter into the above voluntary exchange - meaning that he is stuck with the "next best" option, which, as noted, may well be starvation.

So where is the "power" in this situation? A has "power" in the sense of leverage; he has something that B needs, and is able to set his own terms to the bargain. Yet this kind of "power" is transient. A's power over B is limited by temporary market conditions. B isn't a slave; if another factory owner, C, sets up a new factory and offers higher wages, there's nothing to stop B going to work for C.

Yet the above kind of "power", in the sense of leverage possessed by the economically stronger party over the economically weaker party, is certainly a very real kind of power. As 'Tis Himself notes above, the average person is coerced far more frequently by his employer than by the State.

So why, then, should this kind of power be allowed to exist? Simply, for the practical reasons that I indicated above. If you introduce restrictions preventing A from employing B on low wages and in poor conditions, then certainly you reduce A's power over B - but if you go too far in this direction, you also increase the chance that B will have no opportunities to work at all and will live in poverty. Likewise, you can tax A and redistribute part of his wealth to B, which certainly increases B's power relative to A. But if you go too far in this direction, you milk the cow dry, since it will no longer be profitable for A to run his business and create wealth; he will either go overseas or go out of business, and, either way, will no longer be paying taxes or employing B.

I can recognise that this isn't an argument for libertarian absolutism. Rather, it's an argument for a mostly capitalist society. If you leave A and B's relationship untouched, but tax A to a moderate, manageable extent in order to provide income support and public services to B, then you partially redress the balance of power without destroying the voluntary employment relationship.

Posted by: Walton | May 19, 2009 4:35 AM

OK - contrary to what I had believed, the browser did in fact publish both my responses. The second one is better, so please ignore the first.

Posted by: Jadehawk, OM | May 19, 2009 4:46 AM

er... outlawing child labor, that is...

Posted by: Alex Deam | May 19, 2009 5:30 AM

Okay. Epic blockquote fail.

Posted by: Walton | May 19, 2009 5:51 AM

Such a well-meaning left-wing government would likely have a system of benefits, no?

Besides, why should A go out of business? If A doesn't "leave the country" (which is likely, since A is trying to make money in that very area), it either has to pay B the minimum wage, or not employ B at all. There's no need for A to go out of business. By definition, a minimum wage is meant to be fair. And that means fair for both parties. It would not be fair to set the minimum wage higher than a basic company could afford to pay. I mean, we didn't see loads of companies suddenly go out of business when New Labour brought in the minimum wage, did we Walton?

No, what may happen is that unemployment will rise. With a minimum wage (above a certain level), you can't have full employment, as far as my lay knowledge tells me. So someone like B may end up without a job. But as I said: benefits.

And as I expressly noted, the provision of benefits to B and other unemployed persons requires taxation - meaning that businesses like A's will be squeezed even harder, increasing the probability that they will either leave the country or go out of business. And once this happens to more and more businesses, you have a higher and higher number of unemployed people to support on a smaller and smaller tax base, leading, eventually, to economic collapse. It isn't rocket science. The cow you're milking will eventually dry up.

This can be done by empowering B. We provide him with an education. We make sure he has benefits if he needs them. We encourage the formation of unions to protect people like B from being exploited. Et cetera. Now if A fucks off, B through Z can shrug their shoulders and use their entrepreneurial skills to better their future.

And how will B through Z manage that, when they have to compete with producers in other countries who aren't constrained by minimum wage laws, high taxes or labour market restrictions?

Of course, you can avoid that by introducing protectionist tariffs and trade barriers. But not only will this raise the prices of consumer goods - reducing the standard of living in your own country - it will also impoverish people in foreign countries, as they can no longer trade on an equal footing with people in your country.

As I clearly said, I'm not arguing for some sort of "libertopia" with no taxes or state services. Rather, I'm arguing for a mostly capitalist society. Because practical freedom - defined as the ability to actually do what you want to do - depends on the creation of wealth; and if you remove the mechanisms of the market and squeeze businesses harder and harder, you prevent the creation of wealth. So the practical answer is to have some taxes, public services and state protections, in order to redress the grossest inequalities in bargaining power; but to maintain an essentially market-based economy.

Posted by: strange gods before me | May 19, 2009 7:12 AM

This is a voluntary exchange, which, by definition, is beneficial to both parties (otherwise they wouldn't enter into it). It is non-coercive in character.

Wrong already. You can "define" it all you want, but your definitions won't make it non-coercive in fact. If I need some particular medical care to live, the providers can charge as much as they want for it, and I will have to pay. In any arrangement where my alternative is death, or homelessness, then I am being coerced. At this point, having had this conversation many times, I no longer hope for any libertarian to admit this fact; it seems the best I can hope for is that the blatant distortion of reality will serve as a warning to others that your ideology is neurotoxic.

So where is the "power" in this situation? A has "power" in the sense of leverage; he has something that B needs, and is able to set his own terms to the bargain. Yet this kind of "power" is transient. A's power over B is limited by temporary market conditions.

And when A finds his situation unprofitable, he can liquidate his assets, pick up his accumulated wealth and its attendant power, and move on, because his power is the freedom to do so.

Did I claim power couldn't be transient? No, Walton, my claim that power is freedom, and wealth generally confers power/freedom, is patently a claim that power/freedom shifts in response to market conditions, because asset values shift in response to market conditions.

B isn't a slave; if another factory owner, C, sets up a new factory and offers higher wages, there's nothing to stop B going to work for C.

What world do you live in? What do you know about sweatshops?

http://hrc.berkeley.edu/pdfs/trafficking-RS-HRQ.pdf

"In another case study, the individuals trafficked by Kil-Soo Lee also suffered from psychological injury. Lee, a Korean businessman, recruited over 200 Chinese and Vietnamese men and women to work in his garment factory, Daewoosa Samoa, on the island of American Samoa from 1998 until the factory closed in late 2000. Lee kept the workers locked in the factory compound, withheld food as punishment, withheld regular pay, and authorized violent retaliation and deportation for those who resisted.
In one violent incident, Samoan security guards under Lee’s orders assaulted several of the Vietnamese workers. One Vietnamese worker was struck in the face with a PVC pipe and lost her vision."

Again, all the factory owners will find it unprofitable to continue business - meaning that they'll either move overseas, or go out of business. Which means not only that B and his peers will find themselves out of work, but also that the government will face a declining tax base and a weaker economy.

Against the presumption that factories need owners: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8149373547373833649

So why, then, should this kind of power be allowed to exist? Simply, for the practical reasons that I indicated above. If you introduce restrictions preventing quack quack quack quack quack...
I can recognise that this isn't an argument for libertarian absolutism.

Do you also recognize that you changed the subject?

You started off saying that "no, freedom does not equal power." But you ended by reiterating my characterization of right-wing libertarianism that "it's entirely possible to hold that rich people are more free than poor people and that this is an acceptable end result."

You gave up arguing that power is not freedom.

Posted by: maureen Brian | May 19, 2009 7:44 AM

As someone who actually makes things, Walton, I'd like to bring this back down from the heights of economic and political theory and back into reality.

Mostly I make things for fun but should I choose to make a king-size quilt for direct sale to a customer I could ask for a thousand pounds or so.

Should I be obliged for whatever reason to sell the quilt through a shop we'd have to do a bit of negotiation so that the shop could still sell it and I wouldn't have to be out of pocket. In fact, I'd make very little that way.

If the structure of society was such that I could only do the work within a factory system I'd get a little over the minimum wage! The factory owner would become rich from employing, say, 20 of me.

In each case I would be the one who added value - who turned a few metres of fabric and some thread into someting worth a four-figure sum - with the same amount of effort, the same amount of skill.

So why cling with such passion to a system which in many, many cases prevents the skilled worker from realising a fair share of the value which she or he has produced?

I know there is a limit to have far you can extend this example - it would not work for steel making, for instance. But if you look at work from the point of view of the individual worker then whole new vistas open up. Or they should do!

Posted by: Walton | May 19, 2009 9:18 AM

Tangential to the question of whether power is freedom, but still worth mentioning, is that those nations with the highest GDP happen to be nations which redistribute wealth for the goal of spreading opportunity.

I'm surprised at you - it's not like you to make this kind of empirical claim without evidence to support it. And, in fact, you're wrong.

A perusal of the CIA World Factbook's list of countries by GDP, adjusted for purchasing power parity (taking into account disparities in the cost of living), reveals that the highest GDP in the world is that of tiny Liechtenstein, an independent European monarchy and noted tax haven. Second on the list is Qatar, which we can disregard since its wealth comes from massive oil reserves. Third is Luxembourg and fourth is Bermuda - again, both well-known as international tax havens.

You might, of course, argue that small rich countries full of expatriate tax-avoiders are not indicative of a general trend; so let's look further down the list. Norway comes in at fifth, admittedly - but its extensive welfare system is supported largely by oil wealth, as it has the lion's share of the North Sea oil reserves.

But seventh on the list is Singapore. I'll let that sink in - Singapore, a low-tax, free market, capitalist economy which consistently tops the WSJ's Economic Freedom Index. A country with no natural resources, but which has an amazingly strong economy which stems from its business-friendly policies. Singapore is immediately followed by the US, which, at eighth on the list, ranks well ahead of most European countries.

The more social-democratic European nations - Sweden, Denmark, France, Belgium, etc - are right down in the 15-25 range. And Chavez's Venezuela, despite its oil wealth, ranks right down at number 64. Finally, the title of poorest country in the world by real GDP goes to a country led by a professed socialist and habitual confiscator of private wealth - Zimbabwe.

Other sets of figures tell a similar story. The IMF's figures from 2008 place Singapore at fourth in the world for GDP, the United States at sixth, and low-tax, pro-banking Switzerland at seventh.

Posted by: Hypocee | May 19, 2009 10:03 AM

'Social safety net' meaning...? Come on now, you can do it...

Posted by: Hypocee | May 19, 2009 12:51 PM

Yup, but barking's cheap and when it's this easy I like to dig up admissions of defeat that people have tried to bury under code words.

Posted by: Nomad | May 20, 2009 1:50 AM

Not only is he on the lam, but the last word on his condition is that he was experiencing severe pain (described as ten on a scale of one to ten for intensity) thought to be from the cancer mass growing and pressing on a port doctors installed in his chest so they could administer the chemo. It sounds like this could become a serious threat before the cancer itself does. Even though the cancer was reported to have grown back to the size it was at before he the chemo.

Posted by: Equisetum | May 20, 2009 7:17 AM

Even though the cancer was reported to have grown back to the size it was at before he the chemo.

"He (the judge) noted that Colleen Hauser testified that she would again consider chemotherapy if Daniel's condition worsened, but pointed out that another X-ray is necessary to make that decision."

Looks like contempt of court and perjury. Of course she always say that she 'considered' it, and decided, "Eh, no."

Posted by: Mark Daniel | May 21, 2009 7:08 AM

It is amazing how we have been duped into believing the drugs is the only way. The Gerson Institute and many others, have documented thousands of cancer healings through a natural process. This isn't magic, we are just poisening our bodies everyday and eventually they just break down to diseases and illnesses.
And then to think that the government can come into our homes and take our kids. Wow! This is like the Nazi Gestapo. We better wake up soon are America will soon be destroyed from the inside out.

Mark

Posted by: strange gods before me | May 21, 2009 8:02 AM

I'm surprised at you - it's not like you to make this kind of empirical claim without evidence to support it.

Thanks. And I won't pretend that I don't make careless mistakes sometimes. But this was not one of those times.

A perusal of the CIA World Factbook's list of countries by GDP, adjusted for purchasing power parity (taking into account disparities in the cost of living), reveals that the highest GDP in the world is that of tiny Liechtenstein, an independent European monarchy and noted tax haven.

I clearly said "highest GDP," but you acted like I could only have meant to say "highest GDP at PPP per capita."

Why does the United States dominate so much of the world? Why isn't Liechtenstein known for being able to murder thousands of civilians from the air, every day, at any point on the globe?

If you're going to compare the power of one nation to another -- this is what allows global hegemony -- you can't measure per capita.

And if you want to estimate the average citizen's power, then GDP per capita just isn't going to answer that question. It's a mean average that tells you nothing about who has the wealth; example, Qatar, where so much of that money is concentrated in the hands of the nobility.

For that, there are several imperfect indices worth using. The Human Development Index has the same problem with GDP, but education and life expectancy are at least indicators of opportunity. The Human Poverty Index is better, because it considers how many people are below the poverty line. The Happy Planet Index has a good idea, because it has implications for the future when most people hope to still be alive, but it's measuring only indirect indicators of opportunity.

Most useful is the Weighted Index of Social Progress, which includes many quality of life factors, political rights, bureaucratic corruption, GDP at PPP per capita and the Gini coefficient of inequality. http://web.archive.org/web/20060910100647/http://caster.ssw.upenn.edu/~restes/world.html

But seventh on the list is Singapore. I'll let that sink in - Singapore, a low-tax, free market, capitalist economy which consistently tops the WSJ's Economic Freedom Index. A country with no natural resources, but which has an amazingly strong economy which stems from its business-friendly policies.

Thanks for mentioning this. Singapore is a fascist state rivaled only by North Korea in its totalitarianism. It's nice to have you on record lauding its "business-friendly policies."

Finally, the title of poorest country in the world by real GDP goes to a country led by a professed socialist and habitual confiscator of private wealth - Zimbabwe.

You can't deny Pinochet as your own, while simultaneously trying to pin Mugabe on socialism. A little consistency, please. Either take socialists' opinions of what counts as socialism, or admit Pinochet into the libertarian ranks.

The International Socialist Organization works against Mugabe. http://www.greenleft.org.au/2000/412/23274

And for the record, Mugabe's party, the ZANU-PF, formally renounced Marxism in the 1990s.

As I clearly said, I'm not arguing for some sort of "libertopia" with no taxes or state services. Rather, I'm arguing for a mostly capitalist society. Because practical freedom - defined as the ability to actually do what you want to do - depends on the creation of wealth; and if you remove the mechanisms of the market and squeeze businesses harder and harder, you prevent the creation of wealth. So the practical answer is to have some taxes, public services and state protections, in order to redress the grossest inequalities in bargaining power; but to maintain an essentially market-based economy. ...
Therefore, the best solution is a regulated capitalism - in which wealth is in private hands, but the state intervenes to a limited degree to redress the imbalance of power between the wealthy and the non-wealthy. This can be done through worker protection laws, competition laws, and a social safety net.

Social democracy from libertarian principles. Not bad, Walton. You're getting there.

Posted by: Anon | May 21, 2009 2:31 PM

Ok, I am a mom. I would do anything for my kids. I do believe however that the parents should have the right to seek out alternative care if they so wish too. First, I agree that the parents are probably using their religion as a crutch to get out of having to do Chemo for their son, as it has been reported that they had their son go through the first round of chemo, it scared them and they wanted to find an alternative...Should they not have that right??? I don't believe that we should be forced to take the way the gov wants us too, like someone else said, yes Chemo works (sometimes) in the short term...but what about long term?? it does weaken your immune system permanently among other things it does to you. The risk of getting a more severe cancer is highly more likely....There are downfalls to chemo....the high likely hood of a short term vicory and long term loss and suffering, as opposed to a higher likely hood of short term loss and suffering and possible better long term affects. This is just my opinion, but I think the parents, as long as they are seeking out medical care for their son, should be allowed to research their options and pursue them. We do need to follow the laws of our country, I just never thought seeking out alternatives, even for our children were illegal. If this were my child, I would most likely do the Chemo....but I think I should be allowed the right to seek out if that was the best way or not.......

Posted by: Knockgoats | May 21, 2009 5:47 PM

Piotr,
You're a moron. The achievements you cite ("man on the moon") etc. stem from exactly the same approach as taken by scientific medicine. you can "suggest" anything you like, but until your "suggestions" have been subjected to proper scientific testing, they are worth precisely fuck-all. This is a 13 year old child, certainly illiterate and possibly mentally disabled, kept in ignorance by religious fanatics from whom he desperately needs protection in order to save his life.

Posted by: Jadehawk, OM | May 21, 2009 6:25 PM

And if you want to eliminate "global hegemony", the best way is by encouraging international free trade and globalisation

actually it simply takes hegemony out of the hands of governments and into the hands of multinationals; hegemony remains, it's just economic instead of purely military. this transition is almost 100 years old, and now that multinationals are literally above the law (because there's no international law-giving body above it), they rule the earth as absolute economic hegemons (as a parallel to absolute monarchs who were also above the law, not in the pure, literal sense of absolute)

High inequality is actually a sign of individual freedom;

oy. by that logic, the most free individuals lived in the ancient empires; at best, you can say that inequality is not correlated with freedom at all, but that wouldn't be true either. the wealth differences in democracies, even when they're obnoxiously large, are NOTHING in comparison to the wealth differences of feudal or dictatorial societies. RANDOM inequality in wealth (as opposed to predictable inequality, i.e. one that follows socio-cultural patterns, most notably class divisions) could be a sign of individual freedom, i.e. a sign of meritocracy where a person from absolutely any background could end up either rich or poor, but we don't really see a lot of this kind of random wealth inequality. most of it still follows the good old patterns of class divisions.

Not really. The kind of society I advocate is in no way substantially different from that advocated by Thatcher or Reagan (with the exception that I'm a little stronger on social and civil liberties).

does not compute. how does "regulated capitalism" square with the man who believed in aggressive deregulation and condemned medicare as socialism and predicted that it would be the death of capitalism :-/

Posted by: Alex Deam | May 21, 2009 6:52 PM

That last comment was me. Typekey sucks ass.

Posted by: Alex Deam | May 21, 2009 8:15 PM

And Walton, why do you keep bringing up socialism? No-ones advocating that here, as far as I can tell.

Posted by: kh123 | May 21, 2009 8:47 PM

See, I figured it was less politically correct to call the the Nemenhah Band (the natural cure system that the Hausers want to treat Daniel with) a "lie". Or calling by name the head of the Band (Philip Cloudpiler) a "quack" or "religious kook".

It's easier (and more convenient) to call the Caucasian parents "pseudo-Indian" rather than slipping off the PC trail and lambasting Native American beliefs about sweat lodges and natural cures (which is what this kid seems to want to do).

Can't do that now, can we? It might seem like progressive agnostics are truly intolerant of Native American medicine men/healers and their beliefs - much like how the wonderfully progressive and secular Soviets were when they threw shaman out of Sikorsky helicopters at several hundred feet up... (They were testing scientifically, you see, if whether or not Siberian shaman could fly like they claimed they could during their spirit trances. Of course, science prevailed in that bout of wits, as did Marxism...)

Ah, we have to be careful! This isn't the typical "scapegoat-religious-beliefs" type story, after all. These targets aren't so easy to tar and feather. Political correctness first! Otherwise, we may offend some Sioux or Blackfeet by indulging in our lovable "hate-all-religion" candor and calling their tribal elders "quacks", and their beliefs a lie.

So remember, Young Atheist: Next time you see a Native American shaman, make sure to educate them on how their beliefs have nothing to do with the real world, especially in bioethic situations. If that doesn't work, there's always the helicopter option.

Posted by: strange gods before me | May 21, 2009 11:18 PM

Some people are simply born with more ability to succeed than others, and the only way to prevent this is to punish the successful and reward the unsuccessful.

We've been over this. In nature vs nurture, yes some people probably do have a more genetic predisposition to be intelligent or whatever, but that is far outweighed by the factors which affect people as they live their lives e.g. their education. Which is why we provide State education for children.

Isn't arguing with Walton intellectually stimulating? You can give him citations, as in #405, and he'll come right back and quack quack quack like he doesn't give a shit what you say.

I don't know what my problem is. Every time I start to think he's processing new information, he throws a rhetorical smoke bomb. And like an idiot, I keep trying. Talk about rewarding the unsuccessful!

Posted by: Alex Deam | May 22, 2009 4:43 AM

Isn't arguing with Walton intellectually stimulating?

Well, it's at least keyboard stimulating, that's for sure.

Posted by: Roy Schwartz | May 23, 2009 4:46 AM

You can read more about Hodgkin's and why treating Daniel is so important here:
http://bit.ly/PtgV3

Posted by: strange gods before me | May 23, 2009 9:19 AM

then why not ensure this through also from the general fund

Posted by: Walton | May 23, 2009 1:56 PM

Oh, come the fuck on, Walton. When Hayek wrote The Road to Serfdom he was on a three week meth bender. No bureaucrat in the modern Western social democracies is going to say "now here's the budget for national citizens, and over here's the budget for Christ-killing Jews."

The simple and non-discriminatory supplementation of income by asking "you make less than X dollars? then here's some more," is not "a considerable amount of power" or "the state monopolising power" or the end of market economies. It's nothing to be afraid of, and you ought to be ashamed of yourself for using such reactionary non-arguments.

Strawman. I wasn't contending that bureaucrats arbitrarily distribute money to their favoured clients, like medieval kings dispensing pennies to the poor.

Rather, I would point out a few real-world examples of where the state's distributive power gets abused. How about the US Farm Bill, and the corresponding Common Agricultural Policy in the EU? These policies are, in the modern world, completely indefensible. They arbitrarily subsidise certain crops, leading to inefficient farming and overproduction and driving down prices - leading to the impoverishment of Third World producers who can't compete. They benefit not the poor and struggling, but large agribusinesses in France and Iowa. You know this as well as I do, and, in my experience, most leftists will admit that this is a ridiculous use of public funds.

Yet farm subsidies never disappear - because wealthy farmers have a vested interest in sustaining them, and influence the political process to that effect. And the more money they receive through subsidies, the more political influence they can afford to buy, in a vicious circle at the expense of taxpayers and the poor. This is an example of why the state should not be allowed to control any area of the economy.

(Reagan tried to entirely eliminate Medicaid, too. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,913876,00.html He failed at that, but later succeeded in cutting Medicaid by billions.

As I understand it, a big part of Reagan's philosophy was that, where possible, resource-allocation decisions should be made at the state or local level, rather than the federal level - because federal government initiatives are, by virtue of their sheer scale, inherently less accountable to the people, and harder to escape, than state or local initiatives. Local participatory democracy is a good thing. This doesn't mean that there should be no welfare, just that, wherever possible, it should be administered by the states under state laws - as Medicaid and SCHIP largely are - on a footing of local administrative accountability.

Posted by: 'Tis Himself, OM | May 23, 2009 3:01 PM

In a free society, individuals should be able to choose whether to invest their money in safe but low-return investments, or in risky investments; if they choose the latter, then just as they reap the benefits if they make the right choices, they must also deal with the losses in time of economic downturn. It's a matter of individual choice. The government has no right to force people to invest their money how it thinks best.

As I said but you didn't seem to read, my investment strategy was low risk. Even low risk investments lost money. You don't have a fucking clue about what happens in the real world, do you?

My parents, both in their 80s, have seen their portfolio lose value in the past year. Like many people who grew up in the Depression, they started investing for their retirement while they were in their 20s. Their investments were as conservative and low risk as they could get. However, it appears that holding General Motors and Merrill-Lynch bonds were not as low risk as they might have appeared even three years ago.

Besides, you still are showing your contempt and disdain for the poor. If given the choice between paying rent and investing for retirement, most people will prefer to have a roof over their heads. Social security will keep these people from starving in the street, something that you libertarians apparently wish they would do.

No, Walton, don't give me that "but I love the poor" bullshit because you don't. You want the economic safety net to disappear because you don't want your taxes to benefit anyone but you and the deserving rich. You'd rather see people die in penury than spend tuppence to help them.

Do you know who started the first governmental old age pension system? That radical socialist Prince Otto von Bismarck. As a practical politician, he knew that old people living and dying in poverty was not conducive to a healthy society. You libertarians, with your hatred of society and your fellow man, don't care if your society is healthy or not. You should, because a good example of an unhealthy society is the libertarian utopia, Somalia. Is that how you want to live? I assure you that the thinking (and even most of the unthinking) parts of society would prefer not to. If a governmental old age pension scheme is needed to keep society healthy, then I'm all in favor of it and you should be too.

Posted by: Walton | May 23, 2009 4:54 PM

A noted authoritarian nationalist, whose protectionist trade policies ended Britain's economic golden age, and whose encouragement of xenophobia and international hostility was a major cause of the First World War, the greatest waste of life in history.

(Just to clarify the above, as it was poorly written - my assertion is based on the fact that, during Bismarck's tenure as Chancellor of Germany (if I recall correctly from history lessons a few years ago), he introduced trade policies which, by protecting German industry and agriculture by means of tariffs, were damaging to those countries such as Britain which still generally followed free-trade policies. A bit of A-Level History knowledge. :-) If it's not accurate, please don't bother correcting me, as it isn't particularly relevant to the discussion we're having.)

Posted by: strange gods before me | May 23, 2009 7:21 PM

Sorry for that terrible blockquote. It ate my hard returns.

Posted by: Alex Deam | May 23, 2009 7:53 PM

Yet farm subsidies never disappear - because wealthy farmers have a vested interest in sustaining them, and influence the political process to that effect. And the more money they receive through subsidies, the more political influence they can afford to buy, in a vicious circle at the expense of taxpayers and the poor. This is an example of why the state should not be allowed to control any area of the economy.

What? So wealthy farmers influence the political process, therefore the state is to blame? Just what kind of cognitive dissonance do you have, Walton?

A noted authoritarian nationalist, whose protectionist trade policies ended Britain's economic golden age, and whose encouragement of xenophobia and international hostility was a major cause of the First World War, the greatest waste of life in history.

Aside from the fact that WWII had a far greater waste of human life (WWI doesn't even make the top five), are you seriously claiming that Otto von Bismarck's trade policies were a major cause of WWI? That's a fairly laughable claim.

Of course, Bismarck's use of government pensions has nothing to do with whether government pensions are a good thing or not. So I have no idea why you brought it up.

AND THE FIRST WORLD WAR HAS WHAT TO DO WITH PENSIONS??

Posted by: Walton | May 24, 2009 5:01 AM

strange gods:

Re Reagan and Neshoba County, David Brooks claims that the accusations of racism are a left-wing partisan slur - http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/44484.html I don't know enough about the incident in question to determine who's right, but I'm pointing out that there are different sides to the story. And Reagan's acts in office - in particular, his deep concern for those suffering under Communist dictatorships in foreign countries - do not, to me, suggest that he harboured personal prejudices.

(Though admittedly I could be wrong, as I never met the man personally, and it's very hard to get any objective information about him; Dinesh D'Souza's biography and other conservative texts border on the hagiographic, whereas left-wing authors tend to attack him viciously. I tend to assume that the truth lies somewhere in the middle, but of course this is a golden mean fallacy.)

Get rid of Medicare and Social Security, and the slack will have to be picked up by other welfare programs. If society cannot abide aged people becoming vagrants and eating dog food, then whenever private investments fail, the public fund becomes the safety net anyway.

Workers are going to be paying for it with their taxes one way or the other. Remove the itemized payroll taxes for Social Security, and the non-itemized taxes must rise instead. The difference is not so substantive as you think.

The itemized system is not ideal, but one of the good arguments for it is that people like you, who feel guilty and undeserving of direct aid, can more readily feel that they have earned their Medicare and Social Security benefits. That means fewer proud workers turning down money that they really need, and consequently less poverty.

OK, I take your point. But as I understand it, Medicare in particular is financially struggling (which is not surprising, since the part of the population it serves is far more likely to need medical assistance than the population as a whole). Of course, I suspect your answer to this will be that a Medicare-style system should be extended to everyone, not just the elderly (as Michael Moore has advocated). But all government healthcare systems run into financial trouble sooner or later. Half the NHS trusts in this country have had major problems balancing their budgets in the last couple of years. Healthcare is inherently expensive; and it frankly makes no sense to provide it at state expense to people who can afford it anyway. That said, it certainly should be provided at public expense to the very poor, and to those with serious lifelong conditions which render them uninsurable.

Just out of interest, what would be your preferred solution for American healthcare? As I understand it, there are basically four options: (a) extend Medicare to everyone, i.e. universal federal health insurance, as in Canada; (b) require everyone to take out private health insurance, with subsidies for the poor and uninsurable, as in Germany and Switzerland; (c) have a joint federal-state provision of actual health care services, with publicly-owned hospitals and clinics, making it more like the British system; or (d) carry on with the present jumble of systems, but increase tax breaks and subsidies so as to allow more people to become insured. There could, of course, be more options that I haven't thought of, but these are the main ones I've seen Americans advocating.

As to Social Security, I accept the force of your points, will think about it, and won't argue it further for now. Milton Friedman was against the system in principle, but didn't (IIRC) offer any compelling pragmatic reasons against it.

Posted by: 'Tis Himself, OM | May 24, 2009 11:19 AM

Re Reagan and Neshoba County, David Brooks claims that the accusations of racism are a left-wing partisan slur

We all know that David Brooks, former op-ed editor for the Wall Street Journal, senior editor for The Weekly Standard and a columnist for the Washington Times, is completely unbiased.

. And Reagan's acts in office - in particular, his deep concern for those suffering under Communist dictatorships in foreign countries - do not, to me, suggest that he harboured personal prejudices.

Reagan fired all the air traffic controllers (something which the FAA still hasn't completely recovered from) and abolished their union. This shows another side of him. Besides, what does concern for suffering Poles and Ukrainians have to do with personal prejudice?

Reagan, who I did met albeit only formally, was not called the "amiable dunce" for no reason. His economic ideas, the so-called "Reaganomics," were referred to as "voodoo economics" by George Bush Sr. I would think that an economic conservative would object to tripling the government debt. Admirers of Reaganomics contend that the tax cuts did lead to a near doubling of tax receipts ($517 billion in 1980 to $1,032 billion in 1990), so that the deficits were actually caused by an increase in government spending. However, critics argue that the doubling of revenue is significantly smaller when looking at real inflation-adjusted figures ($1,077.4 billion in 1981 to $1,235.6 billion in 1988, measured in FY2000-dollars). Furthermore, an analysis from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities argues that "history shows that the large reductions in income tax rates in 1981 were followed by abnormally slow growth in income tax receipts, while the increases in income-tax rates enacted in 1990 and 1993 were followed by sizeable growth in income-tax receipts." Specifically, the analysis calculated that the average annual growth rate of real income-tax receipts per working-age person was 0.2% from 1981 to 1990 and a much higher 3.1% from 1990 to 2001.

But as I understand it, Medicare in particular is financially struggling (which is not surprising, since the part of the population it serves is far more likely to need medical assistance than the population as a whole).

This is true. Medicare spending is growing steadily in both absolute terms and as a percentage of the federal budget. Total Medicare spending reached $440 billion for fiscal year 2007, or 16% of all federal spending. The only larger categories of federal spending are Social Security and defense. Given the current pattern of spending growth, maintaining Medicare's financing over the long-term will require significant changes.

My 401K (private investment portfolio) has lost 20% of its value from a year ago. The only reason it didn't lose more is that my investment scheme is quite conservative.

In a free society, individuals should be able to choose whether to invest their money in safe but low-return investments, or in risky investments; if they choose the latter, then just as they reap the benefits if they make the right choices, they must also deal with the losses in time of economic downturn. It's a matter of individual choice. The government has no right to force people to invest their money how it thinks best.

This is the third time I've explained to you THAT MY INVESTMENTS WERE 'SAFE BUT LOW RETURN BUT I'VE STILL LOST MONEY!* What part of this statement do you fail to understand? There are people I know who had intended to retire in a few years but now won't be able to afford to because of what the economic downturn did to their investments.

Why do I even bother to discuss this with you, Walton? I'm using real world situations and you're using ideological arguments. As I've said before, if there's a conflict between reality and your ideology, then you choose ideology every time.

*I've got Caps Lock and I'm not afraid to use it.

Posted by: 'Tis Himself, OM | May 24, 2009 7:17 PM

In the US, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s, the phrase "states' rights" meant racial discrimination. George Wallace, in his 1963 inaugural address after being elected Governor of Alabama, said "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever...we will not allow the Federal government to dictate to us, we believe in states' rights."

So for Brooks to pretend that Reagan's use of the phrase in Mississippi in the 1970s wasn't racially motivated is strictly that, a pretense. You, as an Englishman, may not be aware of the meaning of the phrase, but any American knows what Reagan was referring to.

Posted by: Alex Deam | May 24, 2009 10:10 PM

1) WWII certainly destroyed more human lives, but it was also fought for a much more compelling moral reason (to halt the spread of Nazism). WWI was fought, by contrast, over little more than national rivalries.

1. Walton, the UK went into WWI because of the German invasion of Belgium. In WWI, the UK fought because Germany and the USSR invaded Poland. Not to stop the spread of Nazism.

2. Was defending Belgium not a "compelling moral reason"? I agree that the fact that there even was a war was due to immoral reasons (he who fires the first shot sort of thing), but that only make those who cause the war immoral, not those who join later either to defend themselves or others.

3. How is that WWI gets lumped as to do with national rivalries, but when you describe WWII as to do with Nazism, you don't realize that there's an inherent nationalism in Nazism also?

(2) No. Read my post again. I did not claim that Bismarck's trade policies were a major cause of WWI. I said that the atmosphere of nationalism, xenophobia and German imperialism he engendered was a long-term cause of WWI - something few historians would deny.

Here's what you said:

A noted authoritarian nationalist, whose protectionist trade policies ended Britain's economic golden age, and whose encouragement of xenophobia and international hostility was a major cause of the First World War, the greatest waste of life in history.

(Just to clarify the above, as it was poorly written - my assertion is based on the fact that, during Bismarck's tenure as Chancellor of Germany (if I recall correctly from history lessons a few years ago), he introduced trade policies which, by protecting German industry and agriculture by means of tariffs, were damaging to those countries such as Britain which still generally followed free-trade policies. A bit of A-Level History knowledge. :-) If it's not accurate, please don't bother correcting me, as it isn't particularly relevant to the discussion we're having.)

You seem to be making the claim that:

1. Bismarck was a major cause of the German nationalism etc which was then a major cause of WWI. I agree with the second half (that it caused WWI), but not this massive link back to Bismarck, as if a lot of the blame for WWI can be laid squarely at the feet of him.

2. That somehow the ending of "Britain's economic golden age" was a cause of WWI. This may be so, but it's silly to again then connect up the dots and blame Bismarck for both the first effect and the second effect.

Unless you're claiming that it was a good thing for the British Empire to have a monopoly on capitalism?

But I'm not interested in debating European history, since it has absolutely nothing to do with the topic at hand.

THEN WHY DID YOU BRING IT UP?!

Posted by: strange gods before me | May 25, 2009 6:40 AM

Join the fight against communism!

http://img188.imageshack.us/my.php?image=fightcommunism.png

Posted by: strange gods before me | May 25, 2009 6:53 AM

(PZ has wisely set up a filter that auto-moderates any post that links to Stormfront, so that post may show up twice later.)

Paul Krugman responds to Brooks' dishonesty at http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/10/innocent-mistakes/

So there’s a campaign on to exonerate Ronald Reagan from the charge that he deliberately made use of Nixon’s Southern strategy. When he went to Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1980, the town where the civil rights workers had been murdered, and declared that “I believe in states’ rights,” he didn’t mean to signal support for white racists. It was all just an innocent mistake.

Indeed, you do really have to feel sorry for Reagan. He just kept making those innocent mistakes.

When he went on about the welfare queen driving her Cadillac, and kept repeating the story years after it had been debunked, some people thought he was engaging in race-baiting. But it was all just an innocent mistake.

When, in 1976, he talked about working people angry about the “strapping young buck” using food stamps to buy T-bone steaks at the grocery store, he didn’t mean to play into racial hostility. True, as The New York Times reported,

'The ex-Governor has used the grocery-line illustration before, but in states like New Hampshire where there is scant black population, he has never used the expression “young buck,” which, to whites in the South, generally denotes a large black man.'

But the appearance that Reagan was playing to Southern prejudice was just an innocent mistake.

Similarly, when Reagan declared in 1980 that the Voting Rights Act had been “humiliating to the South,” he didn’t mean to signal sympathy with segregationists. It was all an innocent mistake.

In 1982, when Reagan intervened on the side of Bob Jones University, which was on the verge of losing its tax-exempt status because of its ban on interracial dating, he had no idea that the issue was so racially charged. It was all an innocent mistake.

And the next year, when Reagan fired three members of the Civil Rights Commission, it wasn’t intended as a gesture of support to Southern whites. It was all an innocent mistake.

Poor Reagan. He just kept on making those innocent mistakes, again and again and again.

PS: It has been pointed out to me that Reagan opposed making Martin Luther King Day a national holiday, giving in only when Congress passed a law creating the holiday by a veto-proof majority. But he really didn’t mean to disrespect the civil rights movement - it was just an innocent mistake.

Joseph Crespino at http://hnn.us/articles/44535.html

A full account of the incident has to consider how the national GOP was trying to strengthen its southern state parties and win support from southern white Democrats. Consider a letter that Michael Retzer, the Mississippi national committeeman, wrote in December 1979 to the Republican national committee. Well before the Republicans had nominated Reagan, the national committee was polling state leaders to line up venues where the Republican nominee might speak. Retzer pointed to the Neshoba County Fair as ideal for winning what he called the “George Wallace inclined voters.”

This Republican leader knew that the segregationist Alabama governor was the symbol of southern white resentment against the civil rights struggle. Richard Nixon had angled to win these voters in 1968 and 1972. Mississippi Republicans knew that a successful Republican candidate in 1980 would have to continue the effort.

On July 31st, just days before Reagan went to Neshoba County, the New York Times reported that the Ku Klux Klan had endorsed Reagan. In its newspaper, the Klan said that the Republican platform “reads as if it were written by a Klansman.” Reagan rejected the endorsement, but only after a Carter cabinet official brought it up in a campaign speech. The dubious connection did not stop Reagan from using segregationist language in Neshoba County.

It was clear from other episodes in that campaign that Reagan was content to let southern Republicans link him to segregationist politics in the South’s recent past. Reagan’s states rights line was prepared beforehand and reporters covering the event could not recall him using the term before the Neshoba County appearance. John Bell Williams, an arch-segregationist former governor who had crossed party lines in 1964 to endorse Barry Goldwater, joined Reagan on stage at another campaign stop in Mississippi. Reagan’s campaign chair in the state, Trent Lott, praised Strom Thurmond, the former segregationist Dixiecrat candidate in 1948, at a Reagan rally, saying that if Thurmond had been elected president “we wouldn’t be in the mess we are today.”

Hell, it's in the name. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/States'_Rights_Democratic_Party

Posted by: strange gods before me | May 25, 2009 6:59 AM

You want more proof? Republican strategist Lee Atwater tells you how the Republican party deliberately planned this coded language: "You start out in 1954 by saying, 'Nigger, nigger, nigger.' By 1968 you can't say 'nigger' -- that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites." http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C04E6DF1E30F935A35753C1A9639C8B63

Posted by: strange gods before me | May 25, 2009 7:07 AM

The Freedom Riders were largely organized by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), under an umbrella group called the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO). And Michael Schwerner, one of the victims in the Nashoba County killings, worked for CORE; one of his duties was preparing for the Freedom Riders' arrival.

I can't say for sure that Schwerner was a communist. He definitely worked with communists. http://www.nytimes.com/1990/03/19/obituaries/samuel-h-friedman-93-editor-and-ex-socialist-party-candidate.html And COFO was partially made up of communists. http://books.google.com/books?id=-k9Wyp87Z7cC&pg=PA341&lpg=PA341&dq=cofo+communist Indeed, many communists put their lives on the line for black people's civil rights when few other white people would take the risk. But regardless of his actual affiliations, more importantly Schwerner was perceived as a communist by the people who killed him. They knew him as "that goddamned bearded atheist communist Jew." http://books.google.com/books?id=KUAvmWBFWBIC&pg=PA159&lpg=PA159 I don't know about Andrew Goodman, but James Chaney had communist ties too.

So it's perfectly understandable why Ronald Reagan would come to Nashoba County and gloat about white supremacy where real or imagined communists were murdered.

Can you support some of Reagan's policies without being a racist, yourself? The answer is not a simple "yes." You might, but only if you simultaneously acknowledge that Reagan was a white supremacist and that he appealed to racism in order to build support for certain policies. Otherwise you provide cover to white supremacists with your silence, and regardless of any personal prejudices, that's an objectively pro-racist action.

I'll get back to you on medical care when I have more time. I know you'll want to ignore all this racist Reagan stuff, but you definitely can't get away from the Reagan/de Klerk apartheid issue, nor Bob Jones University, nor Lee Atwater's confession.

Posted by: Walton | May 25, 2009 8:00 AM

OK, strange gods, we've become rather sidetracked down this one line of argument.

I am well aware that the history of both political parties in the South is deeply tainted by segregation and racial hostility. And it is unfortunate that some politicians, who were not themselves racists, were willing to play to racist prejudices in order to gain an electoral advantage: Nixon and Goldwater were particularly guilty in this respect. Maybe Reagan was guilty of a little of that, as well; and I don't doubt that Atwater and some of his other strategists were very keen to keep using the "southern strategy" which worked for Nixon.

But surely no politician of that era is truly untainted in that regard? Look at Carter; his first political experience was gained in the Georgia Democratic party which, at the time, was dominated by segregationists such as Lester Maddox, and (while never a segregationist himself) he co-operated with segregationists in his campaign for governor of Georgia. Yet Carter was certainly not a racist, and has worked hard for racial equality and harmony in the decades since his presidency. I don't condemn him for the fact that he compromised moral principles at some times in his political career. Every politician does that. And the shameful legacy of segregation blights the history of both parties, not just the Republicans.

And, btw, please stop linking to Stormfront. Let's not give those deranged lunatics any more attention.

Now can we get back to talking about healthcare reform?

Posted by: strange gods before me | May 25, 2009 8:28 AM

And the shameful legacy of segregation blights the history of both parties, not just the Republicans.

What a sneaky git you are. I give you George Wallace and you still act like I'm trying to pin everything on Republicans.

I am well aware that the history of both political parties in the South is deeply tainted by segregation and racial hostility.

And let's be clear about when that ended: the Dixiecrat platform. The segregationist Democrats left the party, and soon joined the Republicans. Henceforth the Republican party exclusively was the party of white supremacy, and happily remain so to this day.

Well before Reagan in 1980.

And, btw, please stop linking to Stormfront. Let's not give those deranged lunatics any more attention.

Those deranged Reaganites, you mean? Dude, you're the one denying that Reagan was a white supremacist. If pointing to Stormfront is how I have to make my case, I see no reason to hide the very topically relevant opinions of white supremacists. You could have saved me the trouble and admitted the fact already.

And it is unfortunate that some politicians, who were not themselves racists, were willing to play to racist prejudices in order to gain an electoral advantage: Nixon and Goldwater were particularly guilty in this respect. Maybe Reagan was guilty of a little of that, as well;

No, Reagan openly supported white supremacy in South Africa. This obliterates any pretense to human decency he might otherwise have had. US voters didn't give a shit about South Africa. Reagan did that because he, Ronald Reagan, wanted to.

Now can we get back to talking about healthcare reform?

This came up because Reagan's white supremacist policies had the effect of depriving black Southerners assistance from Medicaid. It's not a diversion.

And it's absolutely stunning how willing you are to downplay everything that Reagan did. "Unfortunate," you say. Unfortunate. Christ what an asshole.

Posted by: strange gods before me | May 25, 2009 8:54 AM

Contrary to what some left-wingers seem to believe, cutting welfare payments was not a "racist policy" merely because it happened to affect a higher proportion of African-Americans than white Americans.

There's nothing so convenient as being a conservative without context, is there?

You have Reagan using race-baiting rhetoric for political gain.

And then you have Reagan enacting policies that disproportionately hurt black people.

That's enough right there to set off any honest person's bullshit detector. At this point it's already your burden of proof to demonstrate that the latter is not related to the former, because if it's unrelated then that's a hell of a coincidence to explain away.

But then you have Lee Atwater in 1981 explaining that the whole point was to enact economic policies that hurt blacks worse than whites.

And you still claim it means nothing!

Under this kind of reasoning, it means nothing that the black residents of Coal Run were deprived of access to public water until 2004. Just a convenient coincidence of devolving power. And George Wallace's segregation was just another coincidence of devolving power. There's a pattern here, Walton, and you're ignoring it.

Posted by: Alex Deam | May 25, 2009 11:08 AM

How about Reagan's open and enthusiastic support of the white supremacist de Klerk government in South Africa? How do you ignore that? http://www.democracynow.org/2004/6/11/allied_with_apartheid_reagan_supported_racist

Not to mention that Mandela was a terrorist in Thatcher's eyes.

Posted by: Walton | May 25, 2009 2:11 PM

And now, can we stop talking about the past, and engage in the far more constructive exercise of talking about the future? I repeat the question I asked earlier, which you didn't answer:

Just out of interest, what would be your preferred solution for American healthcare? As I understand it, there are basically four options: (a) extend Medicare to everyone, i.e. universal federal health insurance, as in Canada; (b) require everyone to take out private health insurance, with subsidies for the poor and uninsurable, as in Germany and Switzerland; (c) have a joint federal-state provision of actual health care services, with publicly-owned hospitals and clinics, making it more like the British system; or (d) carry on with the present jumble of systems, but increase tax breaks and subsidies so as to allow more people to become insured. There could, of course, be more options that I haven't thought of, but these are the main ones I've seen Americans advocating.

Whether we conclude that Reagan's legacy was good or bad, we can't do anything to change it now. All we can do is try and come up with a policy that works today, learning from the mistakes of the past and of other countries. Isn't that a more constructive thing to be discussing?

Posted by: Jadehawk, OM | May 26, 2009 1:22 PM

whose encouragement of xenophobia and international hostility was a major cause of the First World War, the greatest waste of life in history.

*picks jaw off floor*

Bismarck encouraged international hostility...?! I'm not sure whether to chalk this one off on you not paying attention in History, or on some serious bias in the British history curriculum.

Bismarck's network of defense treaties, and his refusal to enter into the colonial competition, have given Greater Europe its first significant period of peace since... well, possibly since Genus Homo first entered the continent. Now granted, those were treaties made primarily to protect Germany, not out of the goodness of his heart, but the effect was undeniable. Now, almost 40 years of peace didn't sit so well with some macho aristocrats (can't be a war hero without war) and the Ministry of War (not really useful without war, either); so when the Wilhelm II came into power, he undid everything Bismarck achieved, threw himself into colonialism, pissed everybody off, and started a war to satisfy the war-itch spreading among his buddies (at which point of course all those bismarckish defense treaties backfired on them). That's however not even close to "Bismarck encouraged international hostility" :-/

Posted by: maureen Brian | May 26, 2009 5:35 PM

Lessons from real life .....

1. If you want to have a balanced and fact-based view of a person do not read hagiography.

2. Be deeply suspicious of any book, any written material in fact, which is given to you for free. Be prepared to ask yourself whether the giver has an agenda.

Friends and acquaintances - like those here - may well give you very sound advice on things worth reading but you need your own mechanism for assessing their advice.

You are confused enough already, Walton, and you really ought to have learned both these lessons about the time you began to read books for adults. I worry sometimes at the seeming narrowness of your education to date.

And, no, this is not an attack on you - I know you keep on trying, I know you can learn but you also dig yourself very unnecessary holes. Reagan was only the most recent example.

Posted by: strange gods before me | May 27, 2009 10:11 PM

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A55301-2004Sep27.html

"The cost of family health insurance is rapidly approaching the gross earnings of a full-time minimum-wage worker," said Drew Altman, president and chief executive of the nonprofit foundation, which compiled the data. "If these trends continue, workers and employers will find it increasingly difficult to pay for family health coverage, and every year the share of Americans who have employer-sponsored health coverage will fall."

That trend has already begun. From 2001 to 2004, the proportion of workers receiving health coverage through an employer fell from 65 percent to 61 percent, according to the latest Kaiser data. That decline translated into 5 million fewer jobs providing health benefits, with the sharpest drop in small businesses.

The impact on businesses cuts across the board, however, according to a survey of 900 businesses by Mercer Human Resource Consulting. The report projects a 9.6 percent increase in health care spending per employee in 2005.

"For many employers, an increase of this magnitude -- four times the rate of general inflation -- is painful to consider," said Mercer spokesman Blaine Bos. "And some just aren't going to sit still for it."

So our private healthcare system is burdening our businesses, putting them at a competitive disadvantage with businesses in nations with publicly funded care. Our private system is much more inefficient than those publicly funded systems, so that we're spending hundreds of billions of dollars more than other nations. Then we're getting lower quality care for more money.

And when the economy struggles, our quantity of healthcare drops as well, which impacts worker productivity and causes the economy to decline even further. This last problem is one which cannot be solved by private care alone. We need a system of universal publicly funded care, because only such a system can borrow money to provide consistency of care during an economic depression, keeping productivity up so that the economy can recover more quickly.

Any system is going to be imperfect. But the United States is at a serious competitive disadvantage right now because of the burdens imposed by private health care, burdens which would only be shifted directly onto workers if the employer-payer system were abandoned without replacement by a single-payer system.

Morally speaking, there's a problem with creating a financial incentive for gatekeepers to deny necessary health care. There should instead be a financial incentive built in for meeting people's needs. That would improve quality of care faster than anything.

Posted by: Walton | May 28, 2009 5:19 AM

strange gods, since you like links so much:

http://www.adamsmith.org/think-piece/health/selfcare-%11-essentials-of-21st-century-health-care-reform-2007111640/

Provision of health care by private companies is not enough

The tax-funded system of health care in this country [the UK] has become counterproductive. It does not give any incentive to prevent or avoid diseases. As a result not only should the provision of health care be decentralized, but also opened up to market forces, as initiated by the Tories and continued by New Labor.

However, if only the delivery of health care is privatized there remains the problem of collective or state purchasing of health services. Any kind of third party commissioning as a proxy for patients is prone to bureaucratic failures and complexity. Probably the most advanced concept, although not implemented yet, has been developed by Newt Gingrich at the Washington based Center for Health Transformation (CHT). He is attempting to abolish third-party payments in all US public healthcare provision under Medicaid and Medicare.

This means that the patient acquires full consumer power since he is put in control of all health expenditures on his behalf. The crucial point of a consumer-driven healthcare system will be the direct link between personal lifestyle and individual control of health expenditure with fully informed consumers.

The information point is important and the internet as well as new virtual or real health coaches hopefully can reduce the knowledge gap between health professionals and the consumers. The bridging of this gap is crucial in order to provide us with a true consumer driven health care system. My impression is that this problem of bridging the information gap is underestimated in the CHT approach which is focuses on IT implementation in the US health care system.

Markets can best address inequalities in health

Contrary to the prevailing prejudice, healthcare is not much different than other sectors where the market prevails. True, the bulk of our healthcare resources are taken up only in the last couple of years before we die. But the way to deal with this is that every consumer/patient should contribute to the necessary pool of resources to cover for these expenditures with a monthly basic contribution let us say of about Pounds 150. Upon entry into the workforce this payment should be mandatory by law.

People with healthy lifestyles will not need to spend more than this – they may spend even less. But people with risky lifestyles, like skiing or horse riding etc, will have to pay extra fees. The same of course applies to couch potatoes and people who keep smoking, boozing or overeating. However, for people with inherited diseases, permanent disabilities or for the ten percent of people who cannot afford the contribution, the government would have to step in.

Such ideas do not have to be developed from scratch, because others have already tried market-style solutions for health care.
Good examples are Denmark, Switzerland, the Netherlands and the United States, although mostly in the private sector. What they have in common is the implementation of meaningful consumer choice - with impact before any disease hits. People in some countries are encouraged to take responsibility for their future health earlier in life - all of which can be monitored by them selves or their doctors - and are rewarded with lower monthly health insurance contributions.

This book also sounds pretty interesting: http://liberty.pacificresearch.org/publications/the-top-ten-myths-of-american-health-care-a-citizens-guide

Posted by: John Morales | May 28, 2009 5:51 AM

Walton,

As long as the NHS is in place, I won't bother getting private insurance, because I use healthcare so rarely that it wouldn't be worth it.

But why do we need tax-funded health care for people who could afford it for themselves?

Posted by: strange gods before me | May 28, 2009 7:53 AM

Some libertarian think tanks have suggested that minor day-to-day health expenses - trips to the GP, etc - should be paid up-front rather than covered by insurance, keeping insurance for the large unforeseeable expenses (operations, long hospital stays, etc.), which would make insurance substantially more affordable.

This is pretty much the worst idea you've presented yet. A major burden on our health care system already is people who cannot afford to go to regular doctors and get preventive care, who then show up at emergency rooms with aggravated conditions that should have been treated earlier. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/09/business/09emergency.html

You would only make that worse.

But I don't see why someone like me should get NHS care at all. There are people who do need it - the indigent, people with chronic congenital illnesses, etc - and I'm not arguing for letting poor people die in the street through lack of healthcare. But why do we need tax-funded health care for people who could afford it for themselves?

I already answered this:

"And when the economy struggles, our quantity of healthcare drops as well, which impacts worker productivity and causes the economy to decline even further. This last problem is one which cannot be solved by private care alone. We need a system of universal publicly funded care, because only such a system can borrow money to provide consistency of care during an economic depression, keeping productivity up so that the economy can recover more quickly."

Private insurance has to charge more or provide less when the economy suffers. This is in direct conflict with society's primary intent for broad coverage, to keep up worker productivity. Private systems, which have to maximize shareholder profits, do not have an answer to this dilemma. Public systems, on the other hand, can borrow to operate at a loss.

Posted by: Walton | May 28, 2009 11:13 AM

See, I've noticed something about you, Walton. You accuse leftists of "paternalism," which you characterize as an attitude "that state bureaucrats and politicians knew better than ordinary people how to run individuals' lives".

But you do not acknowledge that when people choose to elect a leftist government, we are making the decision for ourselves to appoint representatives who can work full-time for us, a conscious delegation of power that leaving us more time to concentrate on other matters of interest to us. There's nothing paternalist about this, beyond whatever is inherently paternalist about a republican form of government.

And when other nations choose to elect leftist governments, you become a violent drunk daddy, supporting the murderous overthrow of those governments, because according to you, those people cannot be trusted to elect representative governments for themselves.

You're conflating the collective with the individual. It might be true that the majority of people in a given political community might want to delegate their decision-making powers to a left-wing government. But that doesn't mean that they have a right to take away my decision-making powers by their vote.

You, and most other American leftists, strongly believe - correctly, IMO - that the voting majority should not be allowed to take away the social and political rights and liberties of the minority. So marriage equality, religious freedom, and other individual rights, should be constitutionally protected and should not be subject to a democratic vote. I agree with you up to this point - but I take it further. Why should the economic liberty of the minority be subject to a democratic vote? Why should other people have a right to vote on whether I should get to keep the fruits of my labour for myself? Just as no government should be able to detain me indefinitely without trial, or prevent me from marrying who I like, or force me to support a religion - even if the vast majority of voters may believe that these things ought to be forced upon me - so, too, the people ought not to be able to take the products of my labour for the benefit of others.

Ultimately, none of us truly has a choice about being part of a political community. We're born into it, and while it might (if you're lucky) be possible to emigrate, it is not possible for any person to escape entirely the sovereignty of governments. (Social contract theory is a load of bullshit, as Ronald Dworkin - a leftist, incidentally, and in many respects a man after your own heart - acknowledges.) Thus, no political community has a "collective will". Individuals have preferences, desires, and rights; nations and "peoples" do not. So it makes no sense to talk about, say, "the people of Venezuela" "choosing" to "delegate" their rights and liberties to the Chavez government. The majority might have made such a choice; but this doesn't give them any right to take freedom away from the minority. Individuals, not nations or communities, are sovereign and ought to be free to exercise self-determination.

Posted by: Walton | May 28, 2009 12:27 PM

So this is why it's still constructive to discuss. Because if staging violent coups against the Sandinistas was the right thing to do, then similar options are still on the table. If Reagan was right, then Obama should at minimum initiate a proxy war with Venezuela. And given black Americans' demonstrated habit of electing leftists, perhaps certain measures should be taken to prevent black people from voting.

Reagan's policy of global interventionism, while (I believe) well-intentioned, did not always work out - and caused more harm than good, and more deaths, in some of the countries in which he intervened. This doesn't mean that the policy of interventionism should be abandoned; in moral principle, it is justifiable. But, as with any overseas military action, we should think very carefully - and weigh up the costs in human life - before embarking on any such action; and in so doing, we can certainly learn from the mistakes past presidents have made.

But this doesn't mean that we need to condemn Reagan as some sort of evil monster, nor, indeed, that we need to abandon the policy of interventionism completely. I remain convinced (as is President Obama) that US and UK presence in Afghanistan is worthwhile, both in moral and practical terms; that we were right to send troops to Afghanistan; and that we are right to keep them there now. The same is not, of course, true of Iraq, which was poorly-thought-out and is generally agreed to have been a costly and bloody mistake. We will learn from that - but it doesn't follow that all interventionism is bad.

Re Venezuela: as much as it would make me happy in principle to get rid of Chavez, I think any realistic person would recognise that a war, proxy or otherwise, would be very costly in human life and would only breed more anti-American resentment (which resentment is a large part of the cause of the problem in the first place). So that would be a foolish - bordering on insane - policy.

Posted by: Jadehawk, OM | May 28, 2009 1:06 PM

Some libertarian think tanks have suggested that minor day-to-day health expenses - trips to the GP, etc - should be paid up-front rather than covered by insurance, keeping insurance for the large unforeseeable expenses (operations, long hospital stays, etc.)

you're being a clueless brat. show me the poor, or even middle class, family who can afford shelling out $300 to find out whether the persistent cold is actually something worse, $1000 for a regular checkup, $3000 for birth control, etc.

you've no clue how expensive it is to not be insured; and you have no idea how the juggling of financial responsibilities ALWAYS shuffles non-immediate needs to the end, until one ends up in the ER with a kidney infection/cancer/whatnot.

your lovely plan up there basically eliminated preventive care. congratulations.

Posted by: Walton | May 28, 2009 1:32 PM

Jadehawk: I wasn't talking about local government in its present form. I was referring to hypothetical voluntary communities of like-minded people.

Posted by: Alex Deam | May 28, 2009 3:05 PM

I was referring to hypothetical voluntary communities of like-minded people.

And where are these voluntary communities going to exist then? Are you going to turf out the people who don't agree with your ways of running a certain individual community? Not all people in a given community are going to be like-minded.

You talk later on about interventionist policy (I'll comment on this again below), but would this mean that you have an interventionist policy between these small "voluntary" communities?

The tax-funded system of health care in this country [the UK] has become counterproductive. It does not give any incentive to prevent or avoid diseases.

The evidence for this claim? It's actually the other way round. There's little incentive for private health care to prevent or avoid diseases.

Probably the most advanced concept, although not implemented yet, has been developed by Newt Gingrich at the Washington based Center for Health Transformation (CHT).

Yes, any policy that comes from Newt Gingrich is clearly the sanest choice.

Re Venezuela: as much as it would make me happy in principle to get rid of Chavez, I think any realistic person would recognise that a war, proxy or otherwise, would be very costly in human life and would only breed more anti-American resentment (which resentment is a large part of the cause of the problem in the first place). So that would be a foolish - bordering on insane - policy.

Yes those are the reasons not to invade Venezuela. Personally, I like to go with the one where it's noted that Chavez was democratically elected! FFS.

(Social contract theory is a load of bullshit, as Ronald Dworkin - a leftist, incidentally, and in many respects a man after your own heart - acknowledges.)

If Walton and Richard Dworkin say social contract theory is bullshit, then so it must be, for all those philosophers who have come before and argued its case were no match for those two. I await your reasons as to why social contract theory is bullshit.

Individuals, not nations or communities, are sovereign and ought to be free to exercise self-determination.

What does this rhetorical slogan even mean Walton? Are you going to declare yourself independent from the UK?

The problem with that slogan is that if everyone is sovereign onto themselves alone, then what happens when someone violates my sovereignty, by punching me or something? What exactly will stop them? The answer is the government, but since this answer comes directly from social contract theory, you will reject that idea out of hand. It's hard discussing these things with you Walton, because you're stuck in this ideological standpoint where we don't even share the same axioms.

One of my axioms is that individuals acting alone, can affect other people, both positively and negatively. A good example of this is measles here in the UK, with parents refusing to give their children MMR.

You, and most other American leftists, strongly believe - correctly, IMO - that the voting majority should not be allowed to take away the social and political rights and liberties of the minority. So marriage equality, religious freedom, and other individual rights, should be constitutionally protected and should not be subject to a democratic vote. I agree with you up to this point - but I take it further. Why should the economic liberty of the minority be subject to a democratic vote? Why should other people have a right to vote on whether I should get to keep the fruits of my labour for myself? Just as no government should be able to detain me indefinitely without trial, or prevent me from marrying who I like, or force me to support a religion - even if the vast majority of voters may believe that these things ought to be forced upon me - so, too, the people ought not to be able to take the products of my labour for the benefit of others.

So you claim that the economic liberty of people shouldn't be up for a vote. Then I have to wonder how on earth you would fund government (even one as stupidly small as yours would be) at all. No taxes, no government. Are you advocating no government at all?

Even if you somehow weasel yourself out of that position, how would you enforce it? Maybe you could put it into a constitution that would make it illegal for economic liberty to be up for a vote, but then how would you enforce such a constitution? Even entrenched constitutions can be changed. If you make it impossible to change the constitution by force, then exactly how is a libertarian-run country free?

You are quite frankly making a mockery of the injustices of the past if you think that the state forcing you to pay taxes is in any way comparable to (say) the civil rights violations against African-Americans. The right not to be taxed is generally not seen as a good right to protect. There is no discrimination being made: if you can pay tax, you pay tax (obviously more complicated than that, but that's the general idea). No-one is being made to pay more taxes based on their looks, genetic make up, or belief system.

If you don't want people to make you pay taxes, then stand in a fucking election and argue you case. Or at least stop blogwhoring and get out there in the public eye. If you're so right that you're being done an injustice on a parallel of the suffragettes, then people will listen and agree with you. It's called democracy. Deal with it.

I'm the same age as you Walton, but I'm telling you to grow up and join the real world.

Posted by: amphiox | May 28, 2009 8:35 PM

I for one am totally in favor of hypothetical voluntary communities like-minded people, joined in the universal adoration of chocolate ice cream with bacon bits.

Posted by: Alex Deam | May 29, 2009 9:31 AM

Walton may actually be a closet Marxist.

Posted by: MAJeff, OM | May 29, 2009 1:55 PM

Posted by: Another Child of God Terrorised | May 29, 2009 1:50 PM

That's some fun-crazy.
Thanks for the entertainment.

Posted by: Jadehawk, OM | May 29, 2009 3:33 PM

Walton may actually be a closet Marxist.

hah! well, quite a lot of what he says does sound dangerously close to ParSoc philosophy; I guess the main difference would be that ParSoc allows people to make democratic decisions, while Libertarianism only allows for "voting with the wallet"

Posted by: MAJeff, OM | May 29, 2009 3:36 PM

Posted by: Anonymous | May 29, 2009 3:33 PM

WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!

Posted by: strange gods before me | May 30, 2009 8:38 AM

But this doesn't mean that we need to condemn Reagan as some sort of evil monster

As long as you'll say the same for Lenin and Trotsky. They were just doing what they believed was right. Undoubtedly my criticisms of them would be more coherent than yours.

Did I say Reagan was the personification of evil? No. He was a Sith, but nobody's perfect. What I said was more nuanced:

"Can you support some of Reagan's policies without being a racist, yourself? The answer is not a simple "yes." You might, but only if you simultaneously acknowledge that Reagan was a white supremacist and that he appealed to racism in order to build support for certain policies. Otherwise you provide cover to white supremacists with your silence, and regardless of any personal prejudices, that's an objectively pro-racist action."

You're saying, as I understand it, that the denial of civil rights is not a priori illegitimate because it violates principles of freedom.

What are these principles of freedom? In a state of nature, no one is constrained by laws, so why is it we don't all agree that absolute lawlessness is a principle of freedom? What I'm saying is that we've never learned what freedoms people ought to have except by empirical observation and argumentation. We take certain freedoms to be self-evident now, but in every case there were earlier times when they were not so obvious. Cryptography is an example today that brings this phenomenon into focus.

Should individuals be allowed to develop and share powerful cryptographic algorithms? I say yes, it's a matter of free speech. My government says no, it's illegal for me to share certain algorithms across international borders, even if I have a sharing license from the algorithm's developers.

Should individuals be allowed to crack or circumvent cryptography on devices that they otherwise obtained legally? I say yes, if you own a device you ought to be able to use it how you see fit, as long as you aren't endangering other people. My government says no, and so the DeCSS algorithm, that first allowed a legal owner of a DVD to watch that DVD on their legal Linux computer, is illegal. Can't use it, can't share it, can't even develop it. It's a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act here. It's similarly illegal in the UK.

Should it be possible to own a number and sue people for sharing that number? Obviously a ridiculous question. But capitalist law cares not for reality, so certain numbers are private property and illegal to publish. A famous and internet-searchable example I will only allude to is abbreviated in hexadecimal as "09 f9".

What ought to be the principles of freedom here? In the DeCSS case there's a conflict between one party's so-called intellectual property and another party's actual physical property. The answer is more obvious for the less capitalist. But in any case, these questions did not make any sense a few decades earlier, and could not even have been coherently asked.

These questions and their answers, like every issue of power and freedom in history before us, are not even apparent until circumstances challenge previous assumptions. They are not even a priori imaginable, let alone a priori resolvable.

So when I say that "we've never learned what freedoms people ought to have except by empirical observation and argumentation," this statement shouldn't be controversial. If it's surprising, that's only because we take so much accumulated historical evidence for granted. The ground state of freedom is the state of nature, but everything we've built upon that was learned through experiment and argument.

Rather, in your view, the denial of civil rights is illegitimate simply because the rationale being offered for such denial is empirically wrong. And you're drawing from this that the denial of certain other rights - specifically, the rights to private property and to economic autonomy - may be legitimate if a valid rationale is offered for them.

And you agree with me, holding that children's poverty is a compelling rationale.

That may be true. But you're still making certain normative assumptions. You're assuming that civilisation is a good thing and that mass murder is a bad thing. While those propositions are relatively uncontroversial, not all are. Some people believe that socio-economic equality is more important than economic growth, for example; others disagree. There is no "right" answer to this question, because it's a normative question, not an empirical one. Empirical evidence might show us that policy X promotes equality while policy Y promotes economic growth; but that doesn't, in itself, tell us how to choose between policy X and policy Y.

"Mass murder is a bad thing" is not at all uncontroversial; Lenin and Reagan took strong exception to that statement. The empirical policies that support equality of opportunity are on my side, not yours. In the public sphere, I win the argument, because I appeal to fairness, compassion and human decency, while you, like a morally bankrupt Catholic, appeal to the nobility of suffering. You can gripe all day that equality of opportunity is a normative imposition, but you've set a trap for yourself: under your own nihilism, I am no more wrong when I vote to impose equality of opportunity than when I vote to impose laws against mass murder.

The best answer is to avoid choosing at all

Again, this is impossible, and your cowardice is tempting you to lie to yourself. Cowardice is a path to the dark side.

"These ultra-conservative Catholics who are against contraception, they are not moral relativists. They do not merely believe that contraception is wrong for themselves. They believe it is wrong for everyone. By preventing them from outlawing contraception, or outlawing abortion, or firebombing abortion clinics in "just war" or "defense" of fetuses, I am inflicting my values upon them. And I am using state force to do so."

You pretend you are not choosing, but they disagree, and they are right. They recognize quite correctly that their own freedom to fight against abortion is being taken away from them. For the ultra-conservative Catholic, an embryo is a person, intrinsically valuable, and "any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." You are stomping on their freedom, the same as you would be stomping on my freedom if you told me I could not use force to defend my own life or the life of another innocent person.

If abortion is ever legal anywhere in the world for any reason, then that is in fact an infringement upon the freedom of everyone who believes that abortion is murder. We have no choice but to make a normative judgment. Should their freedoms be infringed, or not? I have empirical answers for why they're wrong, but you cannot escape forcing your normative judgment on someone. You either force it upon them, or you force it upon those of us who believe that laws against abortion, anywhere in the world, are an affront to individual women's liberties.

because if decisions can be made by voluntary communities rather than an overarching, coercive state, then we can allow people to choose what type of community they, personally, want to live in. So fundamentalist homophobes can go and live in a community where no sex is allowed except between straight Christian married couples - but if they change their minds, they're absolutely free to leave and to move to a more liberal environment.

And that will work for approximately two years, until their first offspring start to understand language and the coercive indoctrination begins. Some of their children are going to be gay, and some of their children are going to be girls. And the adults will be telling those children that being gay is evil, and girls are inferior to boys. That's child abuse, Walton. Telling a child that they are inherently bad or inferior is child abuse. The psychological damage of a typical patriarchal upbringing is well documented.

Now what, are you going to take their children away? Or tell them they aren't permitted to share their hateful values with their offspring? That kind of defeats the point of your whole non-coercive thought experiment (absolute science fiction, by the way, but I recognize you're using it as a metaphor. At least, it had better be a metaphor, because if it isn't then you're more gullible than I previously imagined). But if you don't stop them from indoctrinating their children somehow, then you're complicit in child abuse and the inevitably resulting child suicides.

The only option that is fair to children -- who should not be punished for or by their parents' evils -- is to keep these people visible within the broader society and under government supervision. We must oppose their attempts to teach inferiority of women and immorality of gays; we may use peaceful argument between adults when they do likewise, but when they attempt coercion of children then we should meet force with force. We should hope for a future when their ideas are completely defeated, and are attested only in history books.

Posted by: maureen Brian | May 30, 2009 3:03 PM

"The rationale for intellectual property law is obvious; if a person invests his or her time and effort in developing an idea, s/he should be able to exclusively profit from that idea."

...... says Walton @ 581.

It's a nice idea but how does it work in practice? What happens when a large corporation with a compliant government behind it and an army of lawyers sets itself against several thousand small farmers and a thousand or more years of selective plant breeding, most of it undocumented?

We know exactly what happens - basmati rice - and do read that, Walton, if only as proof that real life is lived in practice and not in theory.

'Cos I love you I'm also including here the Wikipedia entry on the common law tort of passing off - I'm sure you have a more scholarly treatment to hand.

Posted by: Alex Deam | May 30, 2009 3:52 PM

I don't know why you're so scathing about "so-called intellectual property". The rationale for intellectual property law is obvious; if a person invests his or her time and effort in developing an idea, s/he should be able to exclusively profit from that idea. If you deny a person that privilege - and yes, I will concede that it is a state-granted privilege and not a "natural right" - then you remove the incentive for people to innovate and create ideas. You also prevent a person from enjoying a reward commensurate with the value of his labour. Hence why I strongly support copyright laws (inconvenient as they frequently are).

Walton, how in any way is a number "intellectual property"? Could you imagine if someone tried to copyright the number 9? That case was exactly the same thing.

Robbing Peter to pay Paul will dissuade Peter from creating wealth, and will mean that Peter has fewer resources to invest in creating more wealth - which will mean, in turn, that Peter will employ fewer people, produce fewer affordable consumer goods, and innovate less than he might otherwise have done.

Sigh. How many times have people been over this with you? Robbing Peter to pay Paul does mean that Peter has less resources to play with, but it also means more resources to play with. Perhaps Paul was barely a consumer before. Now he will be more able to spend money.

The problem with your argument is that it can be used against ALL taxation, regardless of what the money would've been used on, or the justification of those taxes. You don't take those arguments into account into your little rhetorical slogans.

Do you really think that the US or the UK are anywhere near the summit of the Laffer curve with their taxation rates?

The problem I have with your position is this: if you give the State power to dictate and supervise how children must be raised, then what happens when those who do not share your values take over the State?

...

As harsh as it sounds, it's better to let the children of fundamentalists suffer than to give government the power to dictate how children should be raised - for, if government is given such power, then a bad government has power to impose insane values on everyone.

Again, you generalize far far too much. Your argument could be used by parents who abuse their children to stop the government from interfering in their "upbringing". Or by owners who are abusing their pets.

And you use the word "power" far too wantonly. You're basically committing the slippery slope fallacy by suggesting that if government is given the kind of power that strange gods was talking about, then it will be able to "dictate how children should be raised". No it wouldn't. They're called regulations. A government that says that children should have an education, and that they shouldn't be abused, isn't one that can say children should be brought up to support Gordon Brown.

You need to stop using over-generalized emotive language, and start thinking for a change.

Posted by: Alex Deam | May 30, 2009 5:58 PM

How many times have people been over this with you? Robbing Peter to pay Paul does mean that Peter has less resources to play with, but it also means more resources to play with. Perhaps Paul was barely a consumer before. Now he will be more able to spend money.

This should have been:

How many times have people been over this with you? Robbing Peter to pay Paul does mean that Peter has less resources to play with, but it also means Paul has more resources to play with. Perhaps Paul was barely a consumer before. Now he will be more able to spend money.

Posted by: strange gods before me | May 31, 2009 11:17 PM

And I do enjoy talking to you as well, Walton. Things like this:

The reality is, I don't have a really coherent, well-thought-out justification for drawing the line where I draw it. It just seems morally right that there should be some provision of basic welfare so that the poor and unfortunate don't starve to death.

give me the feeling that you are at heart a better person than your intellectually shackling memeplex allows you to express. I wouldn't bother to give you thoughtful replies otherwise. So it's nice to know that you're really listening.

Posted by: Walton | June 1, 2009 5:10 AM

I didn't look for studies on acceptance at school, and I don't know if there are any. I can only say from personal experience that it was very valuable to me when those teachers who I saw as role models were welcoming and did not judge me for being gay. (I was out in high school.) Those who made their homophobia clear, I did not apply myself as much in their classes.

More generally, if not LGBT-specific, I know we can find plenty of studies on the benefits of having a teacher or other adult role model who is interested in a child's future even when the parents are not so great. We wouldn't even have to resort to earnest early 1990s movies.

So I don't think it's too much to ask that you grant the assumption that if gay kids have occasional classes where sexuality is discussed and it's stated clearly that it's okay to be gay, especially with discussion about how the future can be easier once they get out of oppressive environments and move to a tolerant city, some fewer depressed gay kids are going to attempt suicide.

I agree with that, and don't misunderstand me - I wasn't suggesting that any discussion of sexual orientation in schools should be verboten. Certainly, creating a tolerant environment in school, where possible, is a good thing and can compensate for some of the deficiencies of kids' home lives.

But the point I was making is that, in order to guarantee the school experience you outlined above to every child in America, you would have to have the federal government take over all schools - including private schools - and decide how they should be run. And it should be obvious that this would be a bad move. Quite apart from the demonstrated inefficiency of large, centralised government bureaucracies, it would also mean that a future fundamentalist President and Congress could do immense harm to all schools. With the present system, at least power is dispersed; so if wingnuts take over one school board, they can't control schools outside their jurisdiction, nor can they control private schools. (Though I'm aware that large state education departments, such as Texas and California, have a big influence on the printing of textbooks and resources nationwide; but that's a side issue.)

In my own country, we have a relatively centralised education system, and it is, to say the least, unsatisfactory. We don't have big problems with bigotry or religious indoctrination (despite the fact that we have state-funded "faith schools", something about which I'm a little uncomfortable), but we do have serious problems with the fact that some schools are simply very bad. Despite money being poured into them, they haven't succeeded in providing opportunities to children. And since these bad schools tend to be in the most socially deprived areas, we get a self-perpetuating cycle of poverty and ignorance. I would much rather see a school voucher system in which poor kids at least had a chance to go to good schools. It wouldn't be a utopia - and we'd probably have more problems with religious organisations taking over schools and indoctrinating kids - but it could hardly be worse than the present status quo, in which, as there is no market mechanism, schools simply have no incentive to succeed.

Posted by: strange gods before me | June 1, 2009 5:30 AM

In addition to the above amusement, I am twice accused of libertarianism.

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/05/another_abortion_doctor_gunned.php#comment-1671098

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/05/another_abortion_doctor_gunned.php#comment-1671393

Posted by: Walton | June 1, 2009 6:58 AM

The National Curriculum was imposed on us by your lot Walton - the ball was set rolling by Thatcher's need to control what our children were taught because of all the leftie teachers teaching the 'wrong' history/literature/science and 'indoctrinating' them with 'unsuitable' ideas, like 'promoting' homosexuality.

Yes. Thatcher was wrong to create Ofsted, the National Curriculum and other institutions of centralisation. Most of the true intellectuals within the Tory Party today - Daniel Hannan MEP being a fantastic example - now acknowledge this, and call for decentralisation and marketisation of education.

You have no idea how much time I spend arguing with other Tories. I know the party has its fair share of wingnuts and bigots, believe me. But it's the lesser of three evils as far as British politics is concerned.

The curse of Britain in the last fifty years has been statism. We need to break the power of Whitehall and give it back to the individual, where it belongs. Conservatives may not achieve that; but at least some of them are willing to try.

Posted by: Walton | June 1, 2009 12:04 PM

If the fundies want to have control of a federal curriculum, they don't have to wait for our approval. And if your suspicions are right that it's only a matter of time before power grows and corrupts, then we ought to get a head start on them and do it first.

Or the third option: you can put an institutional structure in place which is so decentralised that it is simply impossible for any one group to impose their agenda on everyone. This, as I understand it, is the whole point of the US Constitution in the first place; it creates a deliberately complex network of institutions and distribution of powers, so that no one group can control all organs of government at any one time. Checks and balances.

Since you believe in democracy as an intrinsic good, you can't exclude the wingnuts from government without betraying your own fundamental principles. So the only thing you can do is ensure, through institutional means, that they can't gain absolute power even when they're in the political ascendancy. If there are fifty thousand different authorities making local education decisions, then the fundies can't take over and control all of them.

The betrayal of this principle has already led to problems. Because the federal government controls so much funding, they can strong-arm state governments into compliance - which, as I understand it, is why the oppressive, moralising laws limiting drinking and gambling to over-21s apply across the United States.

Posted by: Jadehawk, OM | June 1, 2009 12:29 PM

decentralisation and marketisation of education.

because for-pay education is such a great step forward, back into the 19th century where only the wealthy could send their kids to school :-/

Posted by: Anonymous | June 1, 2009 2:37 PM

Wow I guess I've missed a fair bit of Walton absurdity.

Let's review:

But the point I was making is that, in order to guarantee the school experience you outlined above to every child in America, you would have to have the federal government take over all schools - including private schools - and decide how they should be run.

Or you could just regulate the private education system, like the government does with the rest of the private sector. In fact it has to be regulated, else you could have private entities setting up schools that indoctrinate children for a profit.

Quite apart from the demonstrated inefficiency of large, centralised government bureaucracies

Depends on what it's overseeing.

I trust you've read the Tragedy of the Commons?

It wouldn't be a utopia - and we'd probably have more problems with religious organisations taking over schools and indoctrinating kids - but it could hardly be worse than the present status quo, in which, as there is no market mechanism, schools simply have no incentive to succeed.

What are you talking about? There is no market mechanism? Last time I checked, schools like Eton were doing just fine.

Most of the true intellectuals within the Tory Party today - Daniel Hannan MEP being a fantastic example

Daniel Hannan? Intellectual? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

You have no idea how much time I spend arguing with other Tories. I know the party has its fair share of wingnuts and bigots, believe me. But it's the lesser of three evils as far as British politics is concerned.

The curse of Britain in the last fifty years has been statism. We need to break the power of Whitehall and give it back to the individual, where it belongs. Conservatives may not achieve that; but at least some of them are willing to try.

You're a libertarian, and yet you vote Tory. Wtf? That doesn't even make sense.

Just to clue you up on the whole statism thing Walton: the Tories won't lessen statism, nor do they propose to, nor are they the likeliest of the three main parties to attempt to do so.

You may be looking forward to a raise, and I'm glad that you're getting one. But what happens when an employer decides that they can't afford to pay the extra wages mandated by law, and makes their staff redundant? Isn't a low wage better than unemployment? I oppose the minimum wage, as did the late Milton Friedman, because it hurts the vulnerable people who it's intended to help.

So you'd be in favour of any company that decided it was going to pay its workers 50p/hour or even less?

If, without a minimum wage, there would be a company paying as little as that (which isn't an unthinkable scenario), then in my opinion, they're little better than slavery, and a minimum wage would make sure such a company doesn't exist. In practice, most companies would charge a bit below the minimum wage if there wasn't one, so having a minimum wage, as studies show, will only have a minor effect on unemployment. There is not some great collapse in capitalism due to the minimum wage.

And bullshit to the idea that you support it because "hurts the vulnerable people who it's intended to help". The relatively few people who may become unemployed due to the minimum wage can claim benefits. They don't get hurt. The only people who get hurt in your mind are "taxpayers", which is all your libertarian brain can think about.

But since a minimum wage's positive effects are also intended to effect taxpayers, it's overall effect on taxpayers isn't negative.

With the present system, at least power is dispersed; so if wingnuts take over one school board, they can't control schools outside their jurisdiction, nor can they control private schools.

Why can't wingnuts take over private schools again?

We don't have big problems with bigotry or religious indoctrination (despite the fact that we have state-funded "faith schools", something about which I'm a little uncomfortable), but we do have serious problems with the fact that some schools are simply very bad.

Don't forget Academies.

call for decentralisation and marketisation of education.

Yes. Let's market our children's education. That makes perfect sense. There's no flaws with making profits out children's education, and clearly the state has a better chance at indoctrinating children than individual private schools without democratic accountability.

Posted by: strange gods before me | June 1, 2009 7:33 PM

Or the third option: you can put an institutional structure in place which is so decentralised that it is simply impossible for any one group to impose their agenda on everyone.

Hey, that sounds great! Wait, you're not just going to recommend more Unicornocracy, are you? No, surely you've learned your lesson by now. I hear you have a real world example?

This, as I understand it, is the whole point of the US Constitution in the first place; it creates a deliberately complex network of institutions and distribution of powers, so that no one group can control all organs of government at any one time. Checks and balances.

Ha ha haaaa! What a kidder. By your own measure, the US Constitution has utterly failed to do any of that!

We have summary executions, eminent domain, a legislature that has abrogated its war powers for the last 60 years and an executive that grabs imperial power at every opportunity, torture of prisoners, multiple domestic spying programs monitoring innocent civilians, 1/100th of the population in jail or prison, corporate personhood with charters that are never revoked under the Fourteenth Amendment, and a peacetime war machine so large that our 34th president felt it necessary to explicitly warn us of its dangers in words that leftists are nevertheless ridiculed for repeating.

So I said "just like there's no government that can't be bought, there's no government that can't be expanded" and in response you offer the US Constitution? Ffff, then you agree with me.

Since you believe in democracy as an intrinsic good, you can't exclude the wingnuts from government without betraying your own fundamental principles.

You ought to know by now that I don't believe in much of anything as intrinsically good. What I've said instead is that democracy is the only halfways decent solution that we have available:

[you:] And if you believe in the legitimising effect of democracy, then you cannot say that the second government in Country X was acting outside its legitimate powers any more than the first was; both purported to implement the will of the people.

[me:] And if you believe in the legitimizing effect of a Constitution, then you have the same problem.

There is no transcendent truth that can come down to humanity and tell us what should be legitimizing and what should not. Even this question is discernible only through public debate. We don't have any other options than to argue about this; from argument and persuasion is civil society made.

You do not have an inherently better answer than I do.

And this "fundamental principles" stuff? You assume too much. Democracy is a means to freedom, not freedom in itself. Armed resistance has its uses too. I'm not morally bound to lay down and die if democracy is undone by fascism. http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/05/congratulations_to_judge_sonia.php#comment-1665184

So the only thing you can do is ensure, through institutional means, that they can't gain absolute power even when they're in the political ascendancy. If there are fifty thousand different authorities making local education decisions, then the fundies can't take over and control all of them.

Because fundies are required to wait for leftists to consolidate power for them. Where's my unicorn?

The betrayal of this principle has already led to problems.

Mmm. Now when are you going to admit that history's most consistent message is that it's impossible to prevent the betrayal of these principles?

"There are only two options in the world where I live: a government bought by the rich, or a government bought by the rich that can occasionally be subverted by democracy.

As long as capitalism exists, you cannot take government out of the hands of the rich. But you can take government out of the hands of the rest of us. When you rhetorically piss on democracy as you so often do, you are only arguing to eliminate the role of the lower classes, and consequently for a greater portion of government to be under command of the rich."

Posted by: Walton | June 2, 2009 3:47 PM

We have summary executions, eminent domain, a legislature that has abrogated its war powers for the last 60 years and an executive that grabs imperial power at every opportunity, torture of prisoners, multiple domestic spying programs monitoring innocent civilians, 1/100th of the population in jail or prison, corporate personhood with charters that are never revoked under the Fourteenth Amendment, and a peacetime war machine so large that our 34th president felt it necessary to explicitly warn us of its dangers in words that leftists are nevertheless ridiculed for repeating.

Yes, it has failed in several regards, though I'd question some of your list above: since when do you have "summary executions" in the United States? (In a country where those condemned to death go through an average of nine appeals and typically spend 15-20 years on "Death Row" before being executed, I hardly think "summary" is the word to use.)

But I will agree with you that the war powers granted to the President as Commander-in-Chief are too extensive (considering that they allowed, inter alia, Nixon to bomb Cambodia without even informing Congress). I will also agree that eminent domain is ridiculous (Kelo was the worst US court decision since Plessy v Ferguson, IMO); that the rates of imprisonment (particularly for non-violent offences) are absurd and counterproductive; and that the power of the federal executive needs to be drastically reduced. The US Constitution leaves some things to be desired.

But think about what it does do. The First Amendment, as applied by the Supreme Court, has protected free speech to an extent that most people in human history would find absolutely astonishing; the fact that the government cannot establish a state religion, and lock you up for blaspheming against it, was astonishingly innovative when first enshrined in US law. Furthermore, US law protects you from unreasonable periods of detention without trial; by contrast, the Labour government over here tried to bring in detention without trial for up to ninety days, to deal with "terror offences".

And, most importantly, your executive - while too powerful - is far less powerful than ours. In Britain, the House of Commons - which is always dominated by the government of the day - wields virtually all power. Since we have no primaries, MPs are selected by party committees and so are never independent of their parties; and the executive is drawn from the legislature and always controls a majority. We also have no state-level governments; local governments can be abolished at the whim of the Westminster Parliament (and have been in the past). And as we have no written constitution, our rights are not entrenched and can be retracted by Parliament. You are very lucky, in terms of political freedom, compared to us; and we, in turn, are very lucky compared to almost every country in human history.

So don't be too harsh to your Constitution. Compared to most countries' systems of government, it has served you well. Because your Founding Fathers understood the principle that seems, at times, to escape you: governments can never be trusted, and weaker government is better government.

The most egregious corporate abuses, in the US and other countries, are those which occur with the backing of corrupt government. As I see it, the greatest curse of your political system is the vast influence of corporate lobbyists and campaign donors, allowing the already-wealthy to monopolise various industries and government sectors to the detriment of the disadvantaged. But this is a failure of government, not of corporations. I know you don't seem to believe that it's possible to have a government which can't be bought by the rich. But not all countries' governments are dominated by financial interests to the same extent that yours is.

Posted by: Alex Deam | June 3, 2009 9:54 PM

Furthermore, US law protects you from unreasonable periods of detention without trial; by contrast, the Labour government over here tried to bring in detention without trial for up to ninety days, to deal with "terror offences".

I would just like to point out to you that the 90 day proposal failed, unlike what has happened in the US, what with the people who were locked up in Guantanamo Bay without trial, sometimes for much more than 90 days.

But I get that your overall point was that the habeas corpus right is an entrenched right in the US, whereas over here it is protected only by Act(s) of Parliament.

Because your Founding Fathers understood the principle that seems, at times, to escape you: governments can never be trusted, and weaker government is better government.

Walton, the rhetorical slogans really are tiresome. If the Founding Fathers had truly believed that, then they wouldn't be called the "Founding Fathers", since they wouldn't have formed a government at all.

Posted by: Kseniya | June 3, 2009 11:36 PM

Because your Founding Fathers understood the principle that seems, at times, to escape you: governments can never be trusted, and weaker government is better government.

Oh, please. The Founding Fathers didn't distrust government per se- in fact, there was some distrust of the ability of the common man to call the shots; hence the Electoral College. However, that's somewhat beside the point. The Founders distrusted tyranny and the union of church and state. They weren't libertarians or anarchists (no matter what King George might have had you believe).

It amazes me how myopic many conservatives can be about some of these basic points: They cite the Founders on some presumed philosophy of "less government is better government" while supporting astronomical military budgets and completely overlooking the fact that the Founders altogether opposed the idea of a standing army. Hello?

Posted by: Jadehawk, OM | June 6, 2009 12:12 PM

*sigh*

I started reading that Chapter 6 of Law's Empire, and after a couple pages I had to stop because the shallow, dichotomous way in which this man looks at reality was outright painful.

Posted by: Jadehawk, OM | June 6, 2009 12:31 PM

that's because libertarians and anarchocapitalists have the same position on societal superstructures that anarchocommunists have; it's in the means of community interaction that they differ; one want to forbid group-decision making, the other want to forbid the market; either way it's idealistic and unworkable, since some things work better as a democratic exercise, while others work better as a capitalistic one.

but then, I actually like a certain amount of societal superstructure; I like constitutions the same way I like clear rules about how to live in an apartment shared with many roommates: no basic rules generally means sooner or later the arrangement disintegrates into chaos, mayhem and general resentment on all sides. and as you so nicely noted, our societies aren't the kind of living arrangements we can just move out of when things go to hell.

Posted by: Jason | June 6, 2009 6:49 PM

Chemotherapy may or may not be the right thing for Daniel Hauser. But either way, the government should not be forcing anybody into such an emotional, painful decision. Just another way to force people into big medicine when there are other plausible cures out there, and more being developed.

Posted by: Walton | June 7, 2009 5:33 AM

For another, completely different, explanation of why there is no moral obligation, not even a prima facie one, to obey the law, see:

Raz, Joseph, Authority, Law and Morality, chapter 12

Raz is also a left-winger, and disagrees strongly with Dworkin about the nature of law; in many ways he's a much more sophisticated thinker than Dworkin, and his views are far more widely accepted among philosophers. Yet, although he is far from being a philosophical anarchist, he still holds that there is no moral obligation, in and of itself, to obey law.

Obviously, this should not be misconstrued. Everyone, even philosophical anarchists, agrees that there is a moral obligation to do certain things which happen to be required by law; for instance, virtually everyone agrees that there is a moral obligation to refrain from murder and rape. But this does not constitute obedience to the law; because there would still be a moral obligation to refrain from murder and rape even if those things were legalised. Rather, what we are talking about is whether disobedience to the law is, in and of itself, morally wrong. In common with most legal philosophers who have considered the question, I hold that it is not.

"Social contract" theory is a pile of wank. So are virtually all other justifications for the "legitimate authority" of law. It isn't just anarchists like Robert Wolff who recognise this fact; most serious legal philosophers who have written on the topic agree that it doesn't hold up to rational scrutiny.

This isn't to say that we should all instantly refuse to obey any orders of government - because there are times when the consequences of obedience to a bad law are less bad than the consequences of rebellion. But, in general, I would argue that a rational person should obey the laws only insofar as he believes that, morally, the consequences of those laws are good. Civil disobedience, and even violent resistance, are perfectly legitimate responses to a bad law.

(Hmm, I seem to have basically used this thread to write my legal philosophy essay for this week... sorry for anyone who's bored by this discussion.)