39 lines
2.8 KiB
Plaintext
39 lines
2.8 KiB
Plaintext
Live by government regulation, die by it too
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<p>Teresa Nielsen Hayden, a blogger and much-respected figure in the<br />
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science-fiction community, is staring at the ruin of her life, and<br />
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she’s <a href='http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/007140.html'>enraged</a><br />
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about it. And rightly so. As her husband Patrick explains, she’s a<br />
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narcoleptic, and the FDA has just banned the only drug that keeps her<br />
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functional.</p>
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<p><span id="more-248"></span></p>
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<p>I’m not personally friendly with the Neilsen-Haydens, but I’m friendly<br />
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towards them. They’re part of several communities in which I’m invested.<br />
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They do good work. I don’t like to see them hurt. I feel for Teresa.</p>
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<p>But I also think her anger seems curiously misdirected. She’s<br />
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wishing death on Ralph Nader and his “Public Citizen” group, but it<br />
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isn’t Nader who banned Cylert. The FDA did that. And it isn’t Nader<br />
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who has the authority to jail pharmacists who sell the drug and harass<br />
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companies who make it. It’s the FDA. More generally, what’s at fault<br />
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here is not just any one pressure group, it’s the entire political<br />
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system that gives government control of what adults put in their<br />
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bodies in the privacy of their homes.</p>
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<p>I don’t know the Neilsen-Haydens well, but I’m fairly sure their politics<br />
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are conventional for elite coastal-liberals of the NPR-listening variety;<br />
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good-government leftism underpinned by a conviction that people need to be<br />
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regulated for their own good. And even if I’m wrong about them, that<br />
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certainly describes a lot of the people who have been offering them<br />
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sympathy.</p>
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<p>Teresa, even as I feel your pain, I’m wondering if you’re going to learn<br />
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the right lesson. The Cylert ban isn’t an accidental failure of the<br />
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system, it’s an essential one. It wasn’t perpetrated by villains, but<br />
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by well-intentioned people working the levers of a system designed to<br />
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elevate “public safety” above individual choice. That system<br />
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functioned as designed; it’s the design that’s broken.</p>
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<p>I may have your politics wrong, and if so I apologize…but my gut<br />
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reaction when I read your enraged post was “those who live by<br />
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regulation get to die by it too”. Welcome, Teresa, to the ranks of<br />
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those who have been royally screwed by “good government”. You’re now<br />
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one with every homeowner who’s been raped by eminent domain, every gun<br />
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owner, and every overtaxed working stiff in the United States.</p>
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<p>UPDATE: Great Ghu, it’s an Instalanche!</p>
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