The Intellectual Weakness Of Liberalism, And Its Wrong Direction

Three recent stories highlight inherent weaknesses in modern liberal concepts of governance. First, Muskegon Pundit notes that Nebraska's state Medicaid will no longer provide for penile implants, declaring sex medically unnecessary. (Get the government out of the bedroom! Erm...) I always knew liberals hated poor people, I just didn't know how much. But, I kid the system. Anyway, I think we can all agree that almost everything one does in life relates to one's health somehow. With government-provided medicine inching ever closer, we also inch ever closer to giving government authority to decide what we eat and how much we exercise and sleep; this article shows how it may come about that government may start deciding what's really necessary for you to do, and what's not necessary. (Nyah, nyah!)

A second story, passed along by Ed Morrissey of Hot Air, relates the problem of increased drunken driving that results from smoking bans in bars. Apparently, people who want to smoke in a bar will drive longer (surprise!) to get to a jurisdiction where it's allowed, and the result is more accidents from drunk driving. The law of unintended consequences strikes again! And it is this inability to predict all the results of legislation that makes ridiculous the concept that government can use legislation to control the amount of negative outcomes.

Finally, Allahpundit notes a case in which a Canadian court overturned a sentence they considered overly harsh...a sentence passed by a father and contested by his daughter. Specifically, grounding from a school trip for breaking household rules. This example of a completely inappropriate intrusion by the state into strictly family matters reminds me of Hillary Clinton's admonition that we have to jettison the concept of "someone else's child"--i.e. that parents have a special authority over their children. The doctrinaire rationalism and egalitarianism of the Left is incapable of dealing with children, who are indisputably not governed by reason and indisputably unequal in ability to adults. The Left's movement toward increased governmental authority to parent children manifests itself, in part, in insistence on universal K-12 public schooling and court rulings such as this.

More predictable news about the American Left? They're proposing to nationalize our oil refineries, Fox News reports. (H/t: Muskegon Pundit.) Conservatives have been predicting for years, and been ridiculed for it, that the Left would move toward increasing nationalization of industries as they come to be deemed "necessary," and thus inappropriate for private control. Well, health and oil are going. Food is already heavily involved in government. How much more, and how soon? Anytime you weaken property rights in favor of some social goal, you are on a slippery slope. We'll see how this turns out.