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Welcome
to REASON Express, the weekly e-newsletter from REASON magazine. REASON
Express is written by Washington-based journalist Jeff A. Taylor and draws
on the ideas and resources of the REASON editorial staff. For more
information on REASON, visit our Web site at www.reason.com.
Send your comments about REASON Express to Jeff A. Taylor (jtaylor@reason.com)
and REASON Editor-in-Chief Nick Gillespie (gillespie@reason.com).
REASON Express
June 26, 2001
Vol. 4 No. 26
1) Feds Move to Cripple Health Care
2) About That Brave New World
3) Holy Bleep! Can They Say That?
4) Quick Hits
- - Healthy Debate - -
When Bush the Elder left office he left behind two gifts that kept on
giving:
the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Clean Air Act. Both have
clogged
the courts and gummed up the economy like week-old bacon grease in a
drainpipe.
Yet George W. Bush seems poised to do the same thing--perhaps on an even
grander scale. A Patients Bill of Rights, a ban on
"discriminatory" genetic
testing, and opposition to research involving human eggs are poised to be
the trifecta for wrecking U.S. health care for years to come.
It was a foregone conclusion that Bush would support some kind of anti-HMO
legislation designed to demonstrate compassion via federal law. But the
administration has had a hard time explaining exactly why it opposes Sen.
John Edwards' (D-Trial Lawyers) version of the bill. As a result the
Democratic
plan to shop civil suits in as many state courts as possible--the better
to
wind up with a jury incensed that a faraway HMO makes money or that an
employer tries to save some--may well survive.
And with a need to again demonstrate his compassion as a backdrop, Bush
this
week launched into the issue of outlawing discrimination based on genetic
testing. In Congress, this has commonly been interpreted to mean making it
impossible for insurers to use the results of genetic testing to shape the
coverage they offer.
Taken to the extreme, a total prohibition would mean that consumers with
knowledge of their own genetic predisposition could load up on coverage
for likely ailments at prices that do not reflect their risk. If enough
people do
this, sooner or later the private health insurance industry goes belly up.
But that does not seem to concern Bush or most other politicians in
Washington. They have decided they know best how to answer the complex
questions of health and medicine. So as experts in the field, they'd do
well to consider the 62-year-old French woman who journeyed to California
for fertility treatment that is banned in France.
The French experts have decided that postmenopausal women have no business
having children, especially when so many "better" candidates for
the treatment are out there. The notion of "better" has to be
included in the equation
because the French health care system has to dole out treatments by some
standard other than price as the French have evolved beyond allowing mere
markets to allocate scarce resources.
This, presumably, is the way the Washington experts would like things to
work.
In addition, the Bush White House, in the person of top strategist Karl
Rove,
seems to have made its stem cell and therapeutic cloning decisions on the
basis of pure politics. The tough anti-research line appears calculated to
appeal to Catholic swing voters in states like Michigan and Pennsylvania.
In 10 or 15 years, when the United States has its own single-payer health
care
system with Uncle Sam as the ultimate gatekeeper for treatment and
research,
maybe Rove can tell us it was worth it and Dubya will know he bested his
dad.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/a
ponline/20010623/aponline154416_00
0.htm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/e
urope/newsid_1401000/1401070.stm
*************************************************
- - Revisiting the Revisited - -
A persistent feature of most every debate on gene therapy or genetics in
general is the invocation of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. The
usual
formation is, "Unless we stop blah blah blah, it'll be Brave New
World." This
is a sure sign the speaker has never read the book, knows nothing about
science, or--probably--both.
The terrifying part of Huxley's vision was a state that had seized control
over all aspects of human reproduction. Invoking that vision as a reason
for more state control over reproduction has it exactly backwards.
But let us assume that recognizing the theme of a novel and accurately
appending it to larger social issues is just too confusing for the average
anti-science zealot. We can then turn to Huxley's own commentary in Brave
New
World Revisited.
There Huxley says things that would not sit well with his recent boosters.
To
start with, Huxley, writing in 1958, reflected the assumption that the
world
was doomed to suffer extreme overpopulation.
Huxley declared the Sputnik-inspired exuberance about the future to be
"irrelevant and even nonsensical" and announced that "the
coming time will not
be the Space Age; it will be the Age of Overpopulation."
Although thanks to DDT, penicillin, and clean water the death rate had
come
down, the birth rate was still far too high. Further, such advances had
the
effect of allowing too many of the wrong sorts of people to live. Genetic
maladies and mutations were stocking the gene pool with inferior genes.
"Owing to the random but effective practice of dysgenics, IQs and
physical
vigor are on the decline," he said.
Huxley thought that when, in the near future, the Pill was invented, a
major
effort would have to be undertaken to persuade the right people to take
it.
The right people would be the poor of the undeveloped world so as to
counteract the effect of DDT, penicillin, and clean water.
This reading of Huxley implies that mankind needed to adopt a low-level
eugenics effort to avoid a catastrophic overpopulation that could usher in
the
suffocating police state of a Brave New World. Embedded in this is
the notion
that science can be molded and bent toward a particular goal by political
action.
This latter idea is really the only thing that unites Huxley to today's
technocrats who keep tossing his fable up as a reason to control science
and research as they see fit. Both want a scientific and political elite
to devolve society to a simpler, better way of life.
There is nothing new or brave about that.
Virginia Postrel writes that the feds are moving to erode parental rights,
destroy freedom of inquiry, and condemn millions of Americans to suffer
and die with new bans on genetic research at
http://www.reason.com/hod/vp062101.html
***************************************************
- - Bleeping Mess - -
A radio station is fined $7,000 for playing a "clean" version of
a rap song, Comedy Central broadcasts a South Park episode with over 150
unbleeped "shits," and MTV decides that "hashpipe" is
too ribald to survive unbleeped. Strange days indeed.
The struggle for hard and fast rules on content has left regulators and
their media targets confused while the public seems to muddle through it
all, demonstrating no great demand for someone to tidy it all up.
Arbitrary decisions like the one by MTV to turn Weezer's "Hashpipe"
into "bleeppipe" animate a hardcore group of outraged fans, but
for most people
such insanity seems to be taken as another sign that consuming pop culture
these days means doing it on your own terms and with one or two
workarounds in
place.
The quest to categorize and harmlessly segment entertainment has elevated
incidental elements to primary importance. A few syllables define a
"mature drama" and well-placed bleeps--not too many and never,
ever too few--displace beat and melody as keys to a chart topper.
And that's no shit.
http://www.inside.com/jcs/Story?article
_id=33297&pod_id=11&uiFiller=N
***************************************************
QUICK HITS
- - Quote of the Week - -
"If you're reasonably well off financially and want to pay $4 to $5 a
day to
avoid congestion, then you get to use these lanes. But if you're a working
person out there making $35,000 a year, an extra $25 per week is a lot of
money." Maryland Gov. Parris N. Glendening (D) on his decision to
kill a study on high-occupancy toll lanes. The HOT lanes allow solo
drivers to pay a fee to use HOV lanes previously reserved for carpools and
such.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy
n/articles/A30290-2001Jun21.html
- - Inside Job - -
A Fort Lauderdale police detective was arrested when he showed up to meet
the
14-year-old girl he had been Instant Messaging. He brought a teddy bear,
porn movies, and condoms. Instead, Byron Matthai, 52, was arrested
by a sheriff's detective and charged with one count of soliciting sex from
a minor online and four counts of promoting a sexual performance by a
child.
http://www.miami.com/herald/content/n
ews/local/broward/digdocs/094782.htm
- - Unintended Consequences - -
Two Maryland boys were killed when electrical current coming from a docked
aluminum boat leaked into the water. Their lake community bans gasoline
engines for aesthetic and environmental reasons. The boat was being
recharged
when the boys jumped into nearby water.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn
/articles/A36010-2001Jun22.html
- - PC Banking - -
The largest bank in Canada, Royal Bank of Canada, refused to open an
account
for an anti-gay group. The group, known as No Committee 2006, is against
bringing the Gay Games to Montreal in five years. "As a private
organization, we want to remain neutral. We don't want to look like we're
being supportive of such a group,'' a spokesman explained.
http://charlotte.realcities.com/rc/news/
docs/09202822.htm
- - The Name Game - -
Some of the 68 insults an Israeli legislator wants banned from
parliamentary debates: swamp fly, brain defective, degenerate, evil one,
fascist, father of
violence, filth, gang, government of murderers, gut-ripper and eye-gouger,
humbug, hypocrite, idiot, instigator of murder, Jew-hater, king of the
swamp,
leech, liar, loathsome, man of blood, may your name be blotted out, mental
case, monster, murderer, Nazi, nincompoop, occupying army, parasite,
Philistine, pig, PLO, poisoner of wells, racist, swindler, terrorist,
threat to the state, thug, total nonentity, traitor, ugly, venal,
worthless, and poodle.
http://www.usatoday.com/aponline/20
01062114/2001062114344300.htm
- - Video Nasty - -
The Swiss have a video game to help stop AIDS.
http://www.stopaids.ch/game/game_c
atch_the_sperm.html
#############################
REASON NEWS
The Scene! Check out Reason Editor-at-Large Virginia Postrel's frequently
updated observations on current events and ideas. Visit The Scene at http://www.dynamist.com/scene.html
For the latest on media appearances by Reason writers, visit
http://www.reason.com/press.html.
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