Live by government regulation, die by it too
<p>Teresa Nielsen Hayden, a blogger and much-respected figure in the<br />
science-fiction community, is staring at the ruin of her life, and<br />
she&#8217;s <a href='http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/007140.html'>enraged</a><br />
about it.  And rightly so.  As her husband Patrick explains, she&#8217;s a<br />
narcoleptic, and the FDA has just banned the only drug that keeps her<br />
functional.</p>
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<p>I&#8217;m not personally friendly with the Neilsen-Haydens, but I&#8217;m friendly<br />
towards them.  They&#8217;re part of several communities in which I&#8217;m invested.<br />
They do good work.  I don&#8217;t like to see them hurt. I feel for Teresa.</p>
<p>But I also think her anger seems curiously misdirected.  She&#8217;s<br />
wishing death on Ralph Nader and his &#8220;Public Citizen&#8221; group, but it<br />
isn&#8217;t Nader who banned Cylert.  The FDA did that.  And it isn&#8217;t Nader<br />
who has the authority to jail pharmacists who sell the drug and harass<br />
companies who make it.  It&#8217;s the FDA.  More generally, what&#8217;s at fault<br />
here is not just any one pressure group, it&#8217;s the entire political<br />
system that gives government control of what adults put in their<br />
bodies in the privacy of their homes.</p>
<p>I don&#8217;t know the Neilsen-Haydens well, but I&#8217;m fairly sure their politics<br />
are conventional for elite coastal-liberals of the NPR-listening variety;<br />
good-government leftism underpinned by a conviction that people need to be<br />
regulated for their own good.  And even if I&#8217;m wrong about them, that<br />
certainly describes a lot of the people who have been offering them<br />
sympathy.</p>
<p>Teresa, even as I feel your pain, I&#8217;m wondering if you&#8217;re going to learn<br />
the right lesson. The Cylert ban isn&#8217;t an accidental failure of the<br />
system, it&#8217;s an essential one.  It wasn&#8217;t perpetrated by villains, but<br />
by well-intentioned people working the levers of a system designed to<br />
elevate &#8220;public safety&#8221; above individual choice.  That system<br />
functioned as designed; it&#8217;s the design that&#8217;s broken.</p>
<p>I may have your politics wrong, and if so I apologize&#8230;but my gut<br />
reaction when I read your enraged post was &#8220;those who live by<br />
regulation get to die by it too&#8221;.  Welcome, Teresa, to the ranks of<br />
those who have been royally screwed by &#8220;good government&#8221;.  You&#8217;re now<br />
one with every homeowner who&#8217;s been raped by eminent domain, every gun<br />
owner, and every overtaxed working stiff in the United States.</p>
<p>UPDATE: Great Ghu, it&#8217;s an Instalanche!</p>
