The old NRA slogan says, “Guns don’t kill people. People do.”
That’s no fun, if you’re a “lawmaker” — odious name for a
representative, isn’t it? U.S. Representative Stephen F. Lynch
(D-South Boston), “has filed a bill seeking to pull the
controversial drug [painkiller Oxycontin] from the market,”
reported the Boston Herald Saturday, May 7.
In announcing his bill, Lynch referred to a recent robbery
attempt in an Arlington, Massachusetts pharmacy. Two would-be
thieves showed guns and demanded the druggist’s Oxy stash. Lynch
did not tell what happened next, which would have suited the NRA’s
purposes better than his. The pharmacist pulled an
under-the-counter piece and blazed away at the robbers. The robbers
shot back, then fled. Nobody got hit. No charges were filed against
the gun-wielding druggist, who, the Arlington police noted, had a
pistol permit and had been robbed before.
The story quoted an unintentional howler from a nurse who
objected to Lynch’s proposed ban. “(Oxycontin) has revolutionized
comfort for many of my patients,” the nurse said. Well, yes. Oxy is
comfortable stuff. I’ve taken it myself after my most recent
operation.
Here’s another pregnant quote from Robin Hogen, vice president
of public affairs for Oxycontin manufacturer Purdue Pharma, who
objected to the Lynch bill. “You’re really allowing criminals to
dictate health care policy.”
Tempting libertarian rant in there.
I WOULD NOT CALL thing-banners criminals. To get too serious about
their philosophical and practical foolery itself risks more
foolishness in turn. Carrie Nation was not a Communist. But boy, we
do have a lot of Carrie types, and we have always had. Combine them
with the Schumer sorts (“I have a passion for legislating”) and you
get a kind of horror-film creeping menace. It seems
unstoppable.
A movement against drunk driving was probably in order. Some
reduction in blood alcohol content (BAC) legal limits, too; it’s
down to .10 in most states. But now, as noted by John Doyle in an
opinion column in the May 7 issue of the New
Hampshire Union Leader, “Police have begun arresting people
with a BAC at just a fraction of the legal limit.” He cites three
recent cases of arrests made for BAC levels of .03, .02, and, in
one bust in Florida, a .00.
The decades-long battle to ban tobacco presents a sadly familiar
stretch, from set-aside no-smoking areas in restaurants to citywide
prohibitions. You can no longer smoke on windy Los Angeles beaches.
My grandmother, who had herself signed a temperance pledge at the
turn of the last century, used to love to sit near a man with a
good cigar at a baseball game. Alas, there are open-air ballparks
today that have never known the whiff, and never will.
Goofy all this thing-banning may be, but one must acknowledge
the sinister as well. What is the ultimate thing, after all?
Property.
THE INVALUABLE THEODORE DALYRYMPLE explains in a can’t miss
article in the latest City Journal,
analyzing post-World War II collectivism in Great Britain.
After the war, building on the nationwide consensus and
collateral good feelings that had developed from the coordinated
war effort, British thinkers almost uniformly came to believe that
government planning should be applied to creating peacetime
prosperity and fellow-feeling. Wrong-headed as that notion may have
been, the war being a unique experience, it captivated even such as
George Bernard Shaw (“We are all socialists now”) and
the-then-yet-to-be disillusioned George Orwell.
Dalrymple:
Orwell’s assertion that the state would simply
calculate what was needed airily overlooked the difficulties of the
matter, as well as his proposal’s implications for freedom. The
“directing brains,” as Orwell called them, would have to decide how
many hairpins, how many shoelaces, were “needed” by the population
under their purview. They would have to make untold millions of
such decisions, likewise coordinating the production of all
components of each product, on the basis of their own arbitrary
notions of what their fellow citizens needed. Orwell’s goal,
therefore, was a society in which the authorities strictly rationed
everything; for him, and untold intellectuals like him, only
rationing was rational. It takes little effort of the imagination
to see what this control would mean for the exercise of liberty.
Among other things, people would have to be assigned work
regardless of their own preferences.
Is it such a stretch from banning Oxycontin to embracing a
planned economy? Not really. The impulse proceeds from the little
to the bigger, as Dalrymple notes: “If we live entirely in the
moment, as if the world were created exactly as we now find it, we
are almost bound to propose solutions that bring even worse
problems in their wake.”
Take Oregon, for example. The lefty-greeny types there have
passed laws over the years encouraging fuel-efficient automobiles.
The citizens complied. Now comes the inevitable. The state’s
gasoline tax revenues are projected to start dropping as of 2014 as
gas-sipper cars consume less fuel. So a state task force has
recommended levying a per-mile tax on driving. Some 400 citizens in
the college town of Eugene have volunteered to have GPS devices
installed on their cars to monitor miles driven and to pay the
per-mile tax. Such virtue!
For an example of “solutions that bring even worse problems in
their wake,” see the numbing discussion of tax alternatives in the
lower paragraphs of this story this story by Seattle Times reporter
Eric Pryne, published July 3, 2004 (yes, it’s been going on that
long). Sample:
(The state panel) suggested a tax of 1.25 cents per
mile to eventually replace the state’s gas tax of 24 cents per
gallon. For a car that gets average gas mileage — 19.7 miles per
gallon in Oregon — the total tax bill would be about the same.
But few cars are average. A 2004 Honda Civic that gets 36 miles
to the gallon would pay more tax than today; a 2004 Range Rover
that gets 12 would pay less.
One can imagine the roars about “fairness” and “emissions
standards” that followed that determination. And it requires only
memory, not imagination, to realize that the new tax would rather
be added to, not “replace,” the old once reality sets in.
POOR STEVE LYNCH PROBABLY will not get to ban Oxycontin. But he’ll
keep trying. He considers himself a “directing brain.” So does
Chuck Schumer.
Imagine that.
Lawrence Henry writes every week from North Andover,
Massachusetts.
