If You Like Federal Curbs on School Bake Sales, You Are Going to Love the Results of Obamacare
From George Will, the logic behind what I call the health care Trojan Horse
Washington’s response to the menace of school bake sales illustrates progressivism’s ratchet: The federal government subsidizes school lunches, so it must control the lunches’ contents, which validates regulation of what it calls “competitive foods,” such as vending machine snacks. Hence the need to close the bake sale loophole, through which sugary cupcakes might sneak: Foods sold at fundraising bake sales must, with some exceptions, conform to federal standards.
So if school lunch programs are a platform for so much micro-regulation, how much regulation do you think the government takeover of healthcare will justify? If government is paying most of the health care bills, then any activity that might affect your health is then logically subject to government regulation, if for no other reason than to protect against additional costs. Motorcycle helmet laws have been justified for years on this logic that helmetless riders impose additional costs on government health programs. Well, if that works for motorcycling, why shouldn't government be heavily regulating skiing? Or for that matter, why should it allow people to drive cars at all? Perhaps we should have to get government approval before every car trip to make sure it is not "frivolous" and creating future health care costs through accident risk.
Or how about that most costly-to-health-care activity of all: sex. Sex spreads expensive diseases. It can lead to expensive procedures like abortion. And of course it can lead to costly pregnancies and, worst of all, new lives that have to be maintained for another 80 years by the government health care system. If funding school lunch programs leads logically to banning cupcake sales at schools, why won't Obamacare lead logically to micro-regulation of our every activity?
NL7:
Rich people and members of Congress go skiing, so it might be hard to get regulations when the people writing the laws are comfortable with the activity. We're most likely to see regulation ramp up for situations where younger and poorer people engage in something frivolous that older and richer people are less likely to do.
Video games, energy drinks, soda, fast food, payday lending, title lending, etc. Areas ripe for rules because the people writing the rules are more likely to see these as alien indulgences and mistakes engaged in by the less prosperous - and to conflate the correlation into causation. Not hard to spin most things into something about health - e.g. if activity X causes you to exercise less or to have more stress, then it's bad for your health.
August 21, 2014, 11:26 amSimonFa:
" If government is paying most of the health care bills, then any
activity that might affect your health is then logically subject to
government regulation, if for no other reason than to protect against
additional costs."
You don't have to look far to see how true that is. Here in Britain we've got all sorts of lying busybodies regulating us for our own because of "health costs".
To get a feel for it look at this post and have a general read around as Chris does some sterling work: http://velvetgloveironfist.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/we-will-push-for-law-if-we-dont-get.html
Then there's these people: http://www.actiononsalt.org.uk/ as being typical of what we have to put up with.
and as for alcohol, well its fast becoming the new tobacco now that health fascists have won that battle.
As CS Lewis said:
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good
August 21, 2014, 1:29 pmof its victim may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live
under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.
The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may
at some point be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good
will torment us without end for they do so with the approval
of their own conscience."
Mike Powers:
Oh, it's okay. The President will just issue an executive order declaring that they won't enforce those laws for certain people, in certain situations. And that'll solve everything because President.
August 22, 2014, 9:01 amTeleprompterOTUS:
It won't be long before there are federal laws requiring us to go to the doctor for vaccines, check-ups, mammograms etc,and requiring people to at least pay for prescriptions to help lose weight, stop drinking etc. I wonder if the Supremes will have the guts to limit this.
August 23, 2014, 4:49 amstevewfromford:
It will, and it should! Particularly for those "nasty" gay people who carry so many diseases and emotional malignancies that cost taxpayers so much. And the poor? Why being poor will definitely be illegal in the sanitary future of our progressive federal dreams. Those poor are just waaay too much trouble to be allowed to continue, blithely, to exist.
August 25, 2014, 6:29 amJoe:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSoWGlyugTo
August 27, 2014, 3:53 pm