“We are too fat, we are too much in debt, and we save too little for the future,” says philosopher Sarah Conly on the opening page of this book. Based on this, she strongly supports the idea that government should use coercion to prevent people from harming themselves.
The Antiplanner hasn’t read and is not going to buy the book, and only partly because the list price is an outrageous $95. More important, while it might provide some insights into how nanny-state supporters think, this is one book I don’t need to read to know that it is wrong.
Conly makes the same mistake as economist Joseph Stiglitz: after proving that private actions are imperfect, both go on to assume that government actions will automatically be better. After all, no government would ever get too fat (i.e., spend money wastefully), go too much in debt, or save too little for the future.
In reality, it is hard to find governments that aren’t at least sometimes guilty of all three. While no one thinks that the decisions we make for ourselves or free markets in general are always right, chances are that the results will be even worse if we let government make our decisions for us.
Make sure that you take the pill as per the viagra sale without prescription instructions of the health professional. It was samples viagra cialis also stated that some saddle designs were more damaging than the others. But samples of generic viagra if a patients experiences few other uncommon side effects like severe change in the patient in the form of new responses, attitudes, behaviors, or feelings. Inflammation Relief – A Whole Body Approach To buy levitra mouthsofthesouth.com COPD There is no cure for COPD. After all, if we don’t trust the judgment of our fellow citizens when they make decisions for themselves, how can we trust their judgment when they vote? If they make a wrong decision for themselves, they pay the cost; whereas if they make a wrong decision when voting, they share the cost with everyone else. If we don’t trust their judgment as voters, how can we trust that the government will make the right decisions when it chooses to forbid or compel certain behaviors?
Moreover, who really knows what is right or wrong? Ten years ago there were alarming reports that being even mildly overweight would take nearly a decade off people’s lives. More recent research has found that, short of being morbidly obese, weight has very little influence on lifespans. Yet we still have people like Mayor Bloomberg who want to control what we eat to supposedly protect us.
Once we open the door for the government to tell us what is good for us, where will it end? Shall we ban an recreational pastime that is not perfectly safe? Shall we force everyone to do 30 minutes of aerobic exercise every day? Shall we ban any religion that is too violent (such as any that quote frequently from the Old Testament)?
Once we open the door for government restrictions or compulsions for our own good, powerful lobby groups will press Congress to restrict or compel things that they want, regardless of whether they are really good for us. We already see this with rules mandating ethanol in gasoline. Even though it doesn’t really save energy, ethanol producers successfully lobby to keep the rules in place.
Then there’s the consequences of trying to ban things such as trans fats or cigarettes. We already know what happens when we banned marijuana and other hallucinogenic drugs: a murderous war on our border and the highest incarceration rate in the world inside our borders. The problems that stem from banning drugs are far greater than the effects of the drugs themselves.
The Antiplanner is glad Conly wrote this book because it proves that some people really do want to control the rest of us for our own good. True libertarians wouldn’t support this view even if Conly had developed a foolproof mechanism to prevent the problems I’ve described here. But she hasn’t, and the consequences of anyone following her prescription will be as disastrous for the economy as it would be for personal freedom.
Yet another Ivory Tower academic who didn’t learn anything from the results of Prohibition or the Drug War.
While some (Metrosucks most likely) like to accuse transit supporters like myself of trying to “force” people out of automobiles, it’s more like (1) yanking the massive subsidies that driving currently receive; and (2) regulating traffic through pricing and other “market” oriented means, hardly ANYTHING like academic morons like Conly want to do!!
msetty: it’s more like (1) yanking the massive subsidies that driving currently receive;
JK: Care to list some of those “massive subsidies that driving currently receive” that are not also received by transit. And give us dollars (or cents) per passenger-mile for “driving” and transit. Be sure to include the exact same subsidies in each.
Thanks
JK
Maybe someone should coerce this bitch to stop writing books.
If you like football, picture this. Football kills and maims more students than a depressed gun toting teenager. Next time you feel like worrying about fake violent video games and their supposed effects on our children, try a little Gedanken thought experiment: imagine that video games were invented 100 years before the advent of football. Try to imagine school video game teams and uniforms and cheerleaders. Now imagine after 100 years of extracurricular video game fun, football is invented and introduced to schools. Thousands of kids get real, no broken knees, legs, ankles, cervical trauma, heatstroke, and concussions. From 1931 to 2006 over 600 kids and teens have died as a result of injuries received while playing football and thousands more are injured annually. Worse off, this is not an unpredictable pattern, it’s real violence done to real children by other real children, all encouraged by schools and society. Are they gonna ban football and play chess all day like the Russians?
You can’t judge a book by it’s cover…………but if the book is titled “101 Reasons Why the Jews Deserved to be Exterminated”, I’m probably not gonna read it.
Well, if Sarah Conley is going to tell me how to live my life, I am going to dust off my fashion police badge and make her give that haircut back to the 1980s. It’s all wrong for that pointy face, and you can’t do the 1980’s look, fashion- wise, if you were born after 1979.
Seriously, between her book saying that having more than kid is wrong, and the coercive nanny state, what is the big difference between her and Chinese bureaucrats? Where do we draw the line? I can make a case against the private ownership of big dogs and against allowing a domestic cats outdoors but I never do because that is nanny-state behavior. It is my choice not to have a cat or dog, and I have a very limited right to regulate pet ownership (no tigers, no animal hoarding, leash law). I can make a case for making everyone vegan. I can make a case for putting philosophy professors to work in the fields for the greater good. Once you get into the nanny-state mentality, all of one’s personal preferences become great moral precepts to be foisted upon others.
Thall shall not kill………….why is that so hard.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmwBPsB0oaE
“Conly makes the same mistake as economist Joseph Stiglitz: after proving that private actions are imperfect, both go on to assume that government actions will automatically be better. After all, no government would ever get too fat (i.e., spend money wastefully), go too much in debt, or save too little for the future.”
The best riposte to this is ‘Nudge’, which shows the benefits of government paternalism at its best.
“Moreover, who really knows what is right or wrong? Ten years ago there were alarming reports that being even mildly overweight would take nearly a decade off people’s lives. More recent research has found that, short of being morbidly obese, weight has very little influence on lifespans. Yet we still have people like Mayor Bloomberg who want to control what we eat to supposedly protect us.”
Antiplanner is wrong on this point. There are real problems with what people are eating and drinking. Excessive sugar in products causes problems with diabetes, and sugar level swings. People who have reduced their sugar intake feel better as a result of ending the sugar induced ups and downs. Excessive salt can cause problems with blood pressure, leading to strokes, heart attacks, dementia and damage to eyesight and kidney function. Excessive weight causes both diabetes and blood pressure problems. Only unsustainably expensive interventions are keeping people alive, and limiting the damage they do to themselves.
Four months ago I had a full haemorrhagic stroke at the age of 40, as a result of high blood pressure, paralysing the whole of the right hand side of my body. I have now regained, slowly, most of what I had. It acts as a wake-up call. Do YOU know what your blood pressure is? If not, isn’t it about time you found out?
JK: You’re off topic. My point was that while driving clearly has benefits to those who drive, there also are a raft of harms and negative impacts caused by too much driving, to both individuals and society as a whole. This is why people like myself think auto subsidies–direct and the much bigger indirect subsidies–need to be yanked and usage managed through pricing, not “for your [e.g., drivers’] own good” like Sarah Conly’s brain farts would claim. Whether you think such problems exist or not is beside the point in this argument.
In 2009, I recall a presentation on food waste recycling on by something called “Sustainable Napa Valley.” After sitting through nearly two hours of varying quality presentations by the purveyors of various $8,000 to $20,000+ food recycling machines that had been test-installed in several Napa Valley restaurants, one person recounted how several college cafeterias had cut food waste by 50% or more almost instantaneously simply by getting rid of the trays traditionally offered for carrying food from the serving line to the eating tables.
Seems a few cafeteria managers simply observed what people did: in on average people carried a lot more food to their tables when trays were available than when trays were removed. This simple action reduced food waste by 50%+ and also dramatically cut overall expenditures, too.
After this experience I wondered why I wasted half an afternoon when the point could have been made in 60 seconds or less.
Well, in the sort of “it’s for your own good” universe of arguments, Sarah Conly is the heavy-handed seller of expensive food recycling machines, while Cass Sunstein is the guy who makes the point about the “light touch” of removing cafeteria trays, while also keeping the choice of going back for seconds if someone wants the choice to do so.
While Sunstein has gotten a lot of flak from libertarians, unlike Conly he recognizes and respects the acceptable limits to his ideas and understands that there are many conflicting values that have to be dealt when lawmakers and others decide these kinds of issues.
A lot of libertarian arguments are also like buying expensive food recycling machines vs. simply “removing the trays.” That is, they have lot of unnecessary ideological baggage or extremism when a “light touch” approach will do, while still maintaining a sensible balance between where the line must be drawn between individual desires and rules that benefit society as a whole. A lot of libertarians also don’t seem to understand that most imperfections and conflicts are usually resolved simply by “muddling through” as E.F. Schumacher was fond of pointing out.
M Setty,
You seem more cogent than many anti-car types- we do need balance.
When Portland pursues a policy of deliberate congestion, when anarchists brag openly of slashing dozens of car tires in SE but are not prosecuted, when the bike commuters successfully steer too much money there way- yes that is anti-transportation choice.
BTW- I walk or bike to my office. I have no health problems, and by the occasional honks I think I look okay on that bike 😉 I just don’t think I have the right to foist my lifestyle on others. And yes, my car means freedom and work for me. As the anti-planner noted, a reliable car is a greater indicator of a decent life than a college degree- if you are a black male.
It is unconscionable to force the young women working swing shifts at Boeing or Daimler to take the bus home in the rain, or to ride. The guys don’t want to ride home after their night shift either. The PDX anti-car types run the risk of unintentionally oppressing the working class by the discouraging the use of cars.
What do you need thousands of dollars of food recycling machines for? In one Vegas casino they’ve simply resorted to the lowest demoninator. The pig. All the leftover food is thrown in the garbage of course. At the end of the night, the waste is simply taken by a local farmer and grinded into a slop that he feeds his swine. Doing the resort a favor by taking care of a huge portion of it’s garbage and in return the farmer avoids the need to spend money on feed. Keep in mind this used to be steak, potatoes, asparagus, king crab, lobster…hell they eat better than most people; anything a human can eat, a pig can eat. A far cry from San Francisco who passed a mandatory composting objective, now plague’s the neighborhoods with rats and maggots because most people dont know much in regards to what they put in there.
Well, I’ll give Conly partial credit. She’s certainly more honest than most of the statists out there. Rather than couching her unpalatable rhetoric in more politically acceptable ways (it’s “good for the economy”, etc.), she just comes out and says that “I know better than you, and you can’t be trusted to make good decisions on your own behalf, therefore you should listen to me.” I don’t agree with her of course, but I appreciate the honesty.
Now, charging $95 for a book on a relatively uninteresting (to the layperson, at least) subject, that’s another matter. She must be using it as assigned reading for her own students.
Guys, let’s look at the bright side — the Kindle version is a rock-solid bargain at $60.80. Of course, the only people who can afford that are members of the stupid-smart Obama clerisy — MSNBC contributors, lawyers, doctors, academics, urban planners, Portland government officials, etc.
The world is getting better all the time. These people will soon start to learn what Mencken meant by getting it “good and hard.” I’ll be there to provide moral support for the clerisy when this happens, laughing at their despair and maybe throwing bread crumbs their way. I’ll do what I can.
@Lazy Reader
In my younger days, I worked at a restaurant that followed that same practice for quite some time. Food waste was separated from trash, collected in large plastic bins, and shipped to local farmers to use as pig feed. Eventually the practice had to be stopped, as certain non-food items (including everything from trash to small broken glass shards) found their way into the pig bucket. Not surprisingly, low-skilled dishwashers are not terribly careful about how they separate food waste from general garbage. It’s a shame — with a little effort it would be a very nice (and voluntary) recycling program.
Guys, let’s look at the bright side — the Kindle version is a rock-solid bargain at $60.80. Of course, the only people who can afford that are members of the stupid-smart Obama clerisy — MSNBC contributors, lawyers, doctors, academics, urban planners, Portland government officials, etc.
Expect an approving blog post from Matthew Yglesias on this very book within the next week or two.
MJ, Baby Krugman has all the insight into the morass of sh#t this world has become. He is a proud man.
And even though I can’t stand Little Yglesias, he did have a good smarmy line the other day — “anecdotal evidence is actually artisanal data.”
Thought that was kind of clever in a stupid way, considering the source.
Sarah Conly is the heavy-handed seller of expensive food recycling machines, while Cass Sunstein is the guy who makes the point about the “light touch” of removing cafeteria trays,…
If you think that Cass Sunstein argues for a “light touch” in anything government is currently involved in (or in many cases, not involved in), you seriously need to re-read his books.
A lot of libertarians also don’t seem to understand that most imperfections and conflicts are usually resolved simply by “muddling through” as E.F. Schumacher was fond of pointing out.
Well that’s not true at all. “Muddling through” (as opposed to centralized direction) and bottom-up types of knowledge discovery and conflict resolution (as opposed to centralized direction) are exactly the kinds of things that libertarians favor.
MJ, Baby Krugman has all the insight into the morass of sh#t this world has become. He is a proud man.
And, as always, pride precedes the fall.
And even though I can’t stand Little Yglesias, he did have a good smarmy line the other day — “anecdotal evidence is actually artisanal data.”
Thought that was kind of clever in a stupid way, considering the source.
Eh, I’d consider it intellectual theft and/or laziness. He’s just using $3 words to dust up an old expression that has been around for a long time: “Data is not the plural of anecdote”.
Conley is the new face of sexism. Sad to say, she may set the cause of birth control back in some communities on the cusp of accepting family planning. Wrong spokes-model for family planning.
Fortunately for us, politicians are hypocrites. We know this from their sex lives: The lawmakers who preach loudest about chastity and waiting until marriage to have kids are often the ones who later get caught using prostitutes or cheating on their wives with women half their age or legally underage; politicians….and generals. The movement’s creed may switch from sex to junk food but the hypocrisy is still there. Mayor Bloomberg has banned trans fats, pressure companies to cut salt use, and mandated public calorie counts at restaurants, restricting soft drink size. But the harder he presses, the more he’s outed. Caught salting pizza and bagels, even having a personal chef with a salt shaker for his popcorn. He drinks three or four cups of coffee a day and has smoked for years. Mike Crapo, senator caught driving under the influence despite being a Mormon. John Ensign who proposed banning same sex marriage being caught in a fling with Cynthia Hampton. Charlie Rangel, representative was censured for failure to pay federal taxes while accosting other for not paying federal taxes. Paul Ryan slammed Obama’s stimulus spending; didn’t stop him from earmarking over $700,000 for a transit center in his hometown. Michele Bachmann personally benefits from federal farm subsidies. So do lots of people that own more than several acres of land, if it’s by definition rural and capable or being used agriculturally, even if it’s not. Al Gore for living in a home that consumes 20x more power than the average American while telling other American’s that drastic reductions must be made for the sake of helping the planet and another strike for leaving his car running while he was attending a convention. Larry Craig despite being an opponent to same-sex marriage later caught soliciting in a airport men’s room or maybe he was just staring at his shoes, I dont know. Eliot Spitzer caught using the services of a $1,000 an hour prostitute. Despite being a firm pro-lifer, Tennessee representative Scott DesJarlais was later revealed to have had sex with a patient when he was a practicing physician and urged the girl to get an abortion afterwards and later urged his then wife to do the same. You cant buy that kind of entertainment.
The question to ask these pro-government people is how they would feel if the government mandate was designed around other people’s views. Most of these people live in NYC and want to force people everywhere to live more like the NYC lifestyle.
A good example is wetlands restrictions. Half of NYC is filled in wetlands. If we wrote wetland law that every city needed to have 90% of its natural wetlands, then suddenly NYC would look at those laws completely differently.
English Major: There’s a name for people who slash tires, and it ain’t “anarchist” (which means simply “no ruler”) ; it’s vandal.
Frank, local anarchists claimed responsibility for the tire slashing. Their statements are easy to find on the web.
I don’t know if you were talking down to me, as you are wont to do, or defending anarchists in general.
My statement was based on what groups like the Anarchist Black Cross say on social media.
I you live in Portland, check out the local anarchist websites. You’ll find out who smashed what.
I think the public purpose is clear when smoking has been banned in restaurants and other places open to the public, or even semi-public places like offices and other workplaces where smokers previously inflicted themselves involuntarily on others.
However, banning smoking outright in private homes including apartments and condominiums “crosses the line” beyond where there is a “public interest” in such bans, such as that proposed in a recent California bill linked here http://www.sacbee.com/2013/02/27/5223330/california-bill-would-ban-smoking.html.
First, there is little evidence that second-hand smoke actually is significant enough to impact those in other adjacent units. Second, such bans are heavy-handed and essentially unenforceable. Third, this is a blatant case of heavy-handed overreach of the “other people are harmed” argument for government regulation. Where smoking bans have already been adopted in cities, I think those are cases where politicians are reacting to extreme anti-smoking activists than anything else, e.g., the same type of activists who brought us Prohibition and would bring us a new Cigarette Mafia if they have their way.
Just out of curiosity, has anyone actually read this book? If not, how can you justify writing a review of a book you haven’t read?
Nobody actually reads an $80 book.