No reason

Just your ordinary everyday photograph of Ron Paul hanging out with neo-Nazis. No reason for posting it. Just felt like it.

-- Badtux the Random Penguin

Reminder

When Libertarians drone about state's rights and how government shouldn't interfere with private decisions, what they're actually defending is, as Rand Paul (R-States Rights) explains, the right of states and residents of said state to treat fellow Americans as second-class citizens and/or property.

'Nuff said on that. I believe people are more important than property. Libertarians, apparently, believe property is more important than people. So it goes.

-- Badtux the Civil Rights Penguin

Thought Experiment Part 2

Okay, so yesterday, we hired some scientists to do some studies examining claims by the makers of RM and PM, each of whom said that the other's product was bad for you. So our scientists did a bunch of hard work and found out that a) RM was causing hundreds of deaths per year, b) most of those deaths (roughly 80%) were of children, and c) RM had no advantages over PM, which didn't cause any deaths during the study period. So what's the next thing to do?

Well, our scientists then did an educational program where they convinced most of the vendors of RM to switch over to PM, pointing out that the product liability issues would be horrific if they continued selling RM. Most of the vendors of RM looked at the studies that our scientists had done, realized that they'd be toast if they got hauled into court, and switched to selling PM instead. This was made easier by the fact that it took only one piece of equipment to convert RM into PM so they didn't even have to change suppliers or anything, they just added that one piece of equipment to their processing plant and they were done.

But there were still children dying from sales of RM, mostly from fly-by-night vendors who had no assets and thus didn't care that they might get sued if their product made people sick. Rarity made RM more expensive (though it required less equipment to produce!), and thus more profitable, and there are always people willing to jump into a market selling harmful substances if they can make a buck doing so, especially if they still have all those old long-discredited studies showing that RM is good for you and manage to trick people into buying it as a "healthier" alternative to PM. If adults did this to themselves, that's one thing. Just call it evolution in action, yo. The problem was that 78% of the people dying from RM were children. So what now?

Well, I suppose we could say, "RM people, you can sell your stuff, but you have to put our warnings on it and include our studies with it." But the RM people would just slap a label on it saying "this was forced on us by those evil PM people, here's our *real* studies at our web site proving our product is good!" And some people would believe it. And since we have this devotion to something called "free speech", shutting up their false claims is problematic.

Or we could stop the RM people from selling RM. That would require hiring men with guns to enforce it, because RM is profitable. But it'd result in fewer dead children.

After a number of people whined that an outright ban on selling RM would be unconstitutional, a compromise was reached: Only interstate sales of RM would be outlawed. If a state wished it to be banned within its own boundaries, that state would have to pass local legislation doing so. Thus raw milk continues to sicken and sometimes kill children every year despite having no (zero) health benefits over pasteurized milk and significant health risks. But people keep buying it because it's "natural". Just like cyanide. And arsenic. And death. And we have to protect people's right to kill their children with it because, well, because it's Freedom(tm), I guess. But at least now the death toll per year can be counted up on the fingers of your hands, rather than being like our family cemetery from the first half of the 20th century, where the tiny little graves and tiny little headstones outnumber the adult ones.

And therein ends this exercise in Libertopian thought vs. reality, which tends to be messy and have those inconvenient little things like bodies of dead children. And by being non-Libertarian tens of thousands of children are alive today who would otherwise be dead. That's something I think about every time I hear a Libertarian whining about "onerous government regulations" and "Big Brother government". You're still free to buy your own cow and drink all the raw milk you want even in states that outlaw the sale of raw milk... you're just not free to sell this dangerous substance across state boundaries. Just like you're not free to sell arsenic-spiced toothpaste and other such dangerous substances across state boundaries. Bummer, eh, how that eeeeevil government is takin' away your right to kill other people!

-- Badtux the Lessons Penguin