July 14, 1997
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TRB: TAKE YOUR MEDICINE |
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by Michael Kelly | |
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I no longer smoke, except for the occasional cadged party cigarette, and even
then I find I don't enjoy the old delivery systems as I did once. But on the
Fourth of July, I am going to say the Pledge of Allegiance and light up a
Marlboro, or perhaps an unfiltered Camel. It's my patriotic duty.
It's yours too, if you care about living in a nation predicated on the idea
that the citizen must be protected from the natural tendency of the state to
expand into his or her life. The proposed settlement between Big Tobacco and
Big Government epitomizes the new statism. It has been called the nanny state,
but that is far too kind a term. It is too cold, too cruel, too implacable,
too illiberal to be a nanny. It is the Nurse Ratched state.
The old statism believed in an activist government that sought to use the
power of the state for do-gooding social engineering: redistributing wealth;
improving the health, education and welfare of the citizenry; enforcing
equality under the law; sponsoring works that added to the safety and well-
being of the public (roads, hospitals, rural electrification); and warring
against threats to the public good (polio, organized crime, urban slums). The
old statism proved marvelously competent at engineering on the level of
specific and concrete goods (the Hoover Dam, Social Security, the Voting
Rights Act) and disastrously incompetent on the more grandiose level of
effecting changes in human behavior (the welfare programs, urban renewal,
school busing). Its failures eventually overwhelmed its successes, which
finally made pharaonic liberalism untenable as the operating philosophy of a
practical politician. Thus, President Clinton, the most practical of all,
declared in 1995 that "the era of big government is over."
Actually, what is over is the old model of big government. What is begun is
the new model. Projects such as Vice President Gore's National Performance
Review gave us hope that the new model would correct the flaws of the old,
that it would understand that government was good at the delivery of specific
goods and services, not revolutionary social overhauls.
It turns out that the new model is as devoted to spectacular schemes of social
engineering as the old one--and it has added the awful idea that these schemes
may be achieved not through legislation and federal funding, but through a
creative and brutal system of mandated behaviorism, in which the state uses
its immense powers to force targeted citizens and entities to "voluntarily"
accept a violation of their rights and an encroachment upon their liberties--
and to pay for this privilege.
The two principal methods by which the Nurse Ratched state achieves its aims
are both rooted in that power which the Framers wanted most to limit, the
power to criminalize and to punish, to deprive a citizen who violates the
state's wishes of his liberty or his property. The two methods, which overlap
in practice, are the expansion of the definition of actions as illegal
behavior; and the exploitation of this power to win submission through
extortion--that is, by threatening to extract or to deny large amounts of
money from noncomplying individuals and entities.
The schemes of the new statism have certain similarities. The idea in each
case is for politicians to identify a vaguely defined but universally
supported good (minorities should not be discriminated against, disabled
people should have a chance to work, children should not smoke), and then to
exploit public approval of this good to win acceptance of a new and vast
expansion of the state's powers, and finally to render illegal the opposition
to this expansion.
The fruits of this process are all around us. The efforts to sustain
affirmative action rest on these coercive methods. So, too, do the efforts to
enforce the decree that private workplaces be free of discriminatory,
harassing or even rude behavior. The intrusions resulting from the Americans
With Disabilities Act have mutated beyond sanity. And every day, it seems, the
boundaries are pushed further. The New York Times recently reported that the
National Transportation Safety Board (ntsb) has formally asked all fifty
states to criminalize the act of allowing a child under the age of 13 to ride
in the front seat of a car. The ntsb has taken this step as a response to the
fact that one of the government's previous efforts at making citizens do what
is good for them, the requirement of air bags in cars, has had the unfortunate
side effect of killing small children (forty in this decade) who were in the
front seat when the air bags deployed. The new laws should correct for that,
at the minor cost of making a lawbreaker out of every carpooling mother who
lets her child ride next to her. Nursie knows best.
Or consider the case of Kevin Gillson, a 19-year-old Wisconsin man who
recently ran afoul of the sex police. When Gillson was 18, he got his 15-year-
old girlfriend pregnant. The sex was consensual, and the young lovers wanted
to keep the child, marry and start their family. But Gillson's girlfriend was
a minor, and so District Attorney Sandy Williams decided that it was in the
people's interest to prosecute Gillson as a sex offender, a charge that
carried a sentence of up to forty years. She won a conviction from jurors who
later said they had been misled into thinking they had no choice but to
convict under the law. Gillson was sentenced to two years probation.
Now comes the tobacco fix. Under the concerted attack of federal government
forces led by the fanatical Food and Drug Commissioner David A. Kessler and by
the attorneys general from forty states, the tobacco companies knuckled to a
deal that will allow them to stay in their dubious business. With the states
threatening years of class-action lawsuits on the grounds that the companies'
products had cost the states money in Medicare and Medicaid payments for
diseased smokers (if anything, it has been argued, smokers die younger, saving
the government money), and with the FDA threatening to regulate cigarettes as
a drug, the companies agreed to pay $368.5 billion over twenty-five years to a
variety of groups and causes (including health insurance for poor children);
to accept various and drastic bans on tobacco advertising; to pay for
advertising campaigns against their products; to plaster 25 percent of each
cigarette package with dire warnings; to accept some FDA regulation of
nicotine; and, most unbelievably, to pay penalties of up to $2 billion a year
if they fail to effect a reduction in teen smoking going from 42 percent
within five years to 67 percent within ten years.
Kessler and his fellow Nurses were outraged at the deal. It didn't go far
enough, they said. For them, it never will.
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