Murphy’s Bye-Laws

According to Arlen Specter, people who have been angrily disrupting town hall meetings on overhauling the health care system are “not necessarily representative of America.”  Because when people don’t agree with the omnipotent seers of Congress, they obviously can’t be real or genuine, right? This is a common delusion among the “representatives” of the government, I mean the people, I mean…what do I mean?

Who are these people representing? Running around the country to meet citizens they are representing the government. The government represents those who have paid for it. Nobody but the citizens are representing themselves and nobody is listening to them. The disconnect between the people in the halls of power and the people who are duped into the silly process of voting for them is on open display over healthcare. One group is living amongst the hard realities of life, physical laws, and consequence while the other lives quite insulted from these.

“Rights can neither be created nor be destroyed”

The above law was prompted by the headline I saw on my Yahoo page this morning stating (paraphrased; I can’t find the headline now), “House bill to make health care a right” or maybe “…a right of all Americans.”  As any cognitive person who isn’t out to exercise control of others could tell you, the Bill of Rights – or any other declaration of rights – doesn’t establish rights at all, but only enumerated some of them. Rights cannot be legislated into existence because they existed before the legislation (Skipping for now the always contentious discussion of the existence of rights, natural law, etc in the first place. Try the discussion here for that.).

“Rights can neither be created nor be destroyed”

Looking at the LCR again, I’m reminded of something I read in Mises’ Human Action a few days ago about theorems and a priori knowledge.  “Aprioristic reasoning is purely conceptual and deductive. It cannot produce anything else but tautologies and analytic judgments. All its implications are logically derived from the premises and were already contained in them.” (Ch.2 Sec 3) In the case of rights, all rights are derived from the premise that we own ourselves. This ownership gives the owner exclusive control over the thoughts and actions in that domain, which happens to extend only as far as the next person’s domain. Trying to fabricate a right to health care isn’t correcting some trespass upon those not receiving such care, but initiating a trespass upon those who must provide it, i.e. pay for it via time or taxes. In other words, not a right at all because it cannot possibly be derived logically from the premise of self-ownership.

“Rights can neither be created nor be destroyed”

According to the LCR, rights cannot be legislated away, either. Free speech zones, gun bans, and prohibition don’t eliminate the rights to free speech, self-defense, or the pursuit of happiness but simply trespass against them. Suppression of the exercise of rights, such as those things listed previously, still doesn’t destroy the right.

Exploring further into this will surely lead to the dabate about rights’ existence and premises, but I’ll leave that for another time.  For now, let’s just leave it at the Law of Conservation of Rights, shall we?

The key to healing as many people as possible is to ensure that as many people as possible are broken.  Similar to the dictum that to ensure that as many people as possible fall under your authority in a “law and order” society you expand the law to cover everything under the sun.  We are all guilty of something broken in some manner; this is essentially the healthcare version of the broken window fallacy.

I have had the pleasure of having a rock thrown through my metaphorical window and wound up as shards in the dust pan of a doctor.  Apparently, I am going to drop dead of a heart attack any minute now (or 20 years from now or 50 years from now)(assuming I’m not killed in a gulag first).  I’ve been given this death sentence because there is some sort of metric devised that states what a healthy amount of lipids to have in one’s bloodstream is.  This metric, I’m certain, was devised about the average person across a certain population of a certain location or region by people being paid to drum up a market for drugs and/or treatment.  There is no mention of outliers.  Most statistical analyzes – which these studies are – have outliers that can statistically be ignored to get a reasonable probability of a certain outcome.  Statistics is also not a good way to separate cause and correlation.  Based on a metric devised in this manner, I am statistically safer taking some medication twice a day, everyday, for the rest of my life (sorry, liver, it is for our own good).

I’m not a person obsessed with organic or all natural products, but I do try to choose the more natural, less processed items the majority of the time.  Based on this habit, ingesting man-made chemicals (that aren’t nurishing and don’t even taste good) twice everyday seems kind of counter-intuitive.  I have no idea what long-term effects of these drugs are; they could be slowly exhausting my liver, interfering with other functions, and any number of little accumulating things.  All of this based on some statistics produced by the “science” of advocacy.

My personal statistics, based on observations of myself and my family, say that my body is meant to have such metrics concerning my lipids and such – or at least can handle it.  A similar condition runs pretty uniformly through my immediate family, regardless of variables such as activity, diet, age, and other ailments.  In counting these statistics, there has been one (non-fatal) incident with regards to these numbers before the age of 70.  The rest of the statistics say I will live to a ripe old age (excluding demise by gulag) in spite of the emminent danger posed by some numbers.

It is an uphill battle explaining myself to my family, my doctor, etc when the science (a.k.a. what the media reports on every other month about what is currently bad for our health before reversing themselves a few months later ad infinitum) that finds new reasons for taking pills everyday tells me I need pills.  The state of science, or as I called it earlier, the science of advocacy, leaves plenty of room for scepticism.  But skepticism is better served as the catalyst for science rather than the result of it.  I guess I’m taking my chances, but aren’t we all going to lose eventually?