Brain Fertilizer

They want the sort of government interference/control of citizens' lives that results in things like this:

The reaction of that nurse to a patient's increased pain medication is the predictable result of concern shifted to the cookbook medicine now required by the payee. God help you if your problem isn't in the cookbook of prescribed--and proscribed-- treatments. Her reaction also indicates the danger a doctor puts himself in when treating a patient. Frankly, I'd prefer my doctor to be thinking about my care, not whether or not giving me adequate care will result in putting his license in danger, and being called on the carpet by some government agency.

Most people seem to think that this increased regulation and oversight by the government protects them somehow, but they are gravely mistaken. If you look at the record of performance of the government in almost any area you choose, this fact become readily apparent. A bureaucrat cares for his rice bowl just the same as everybody else. At least your doctor is there and is directly responsible to you, or rather WAS responsible. Nowadays, he carries his responsibilities, and those of the "disinterested" bureaucrat, who dictates much of what can and can not be done to care for the patient, but who won't lose his job no matter what happens.

That's an excerpt from a rant in the comments of this post.

You'll have to follow the link to get the story. But here's the author's bottom line:

The real problem here seems to be with a legal system that is unable appropriately to deal with risk. The truly interested parties – the parents, acting for the child – seem to ready and able to sign off with a full appreciation of the risks involved. And yet the legal system puts the risk on those who are essentially agents: they suffer the full weight of any failure, but get only a limited share of the benefit. This includes the firm, of course, which gets little benefit from the child's surviving, but bears a significant risk that the child's death will also kill the firm.

True dat.

I'm not a libertarian, but I certainly like to co-opt some of their precepts into my conservative philosophy.

The problem is, the market really doesn't help in this case, either, because there isn't much of a market when there is only one customer, the family of a dying 4-year-old. Still, relying on market forces prevents government interference from applying additional friction to the system.

One of brainfertilizer's rules of life: any time you try to draw a legal line to separate good, right, legal, acceptable (etc) actions from those bad, wrong, illegal, unacceptable (etc), you will exclude some actions unfairly. It's the nature of the beast. Some actions are good/right/acceptable only under certain circumstances...but law can't deal with special circumstances impartially...but justice cannot operate even halfway well without impartiality...

There's always an exception, and encoding exceptions into law just makes things unnecessarily complicated.

There shouldn't be legal punishments on failing in an effort to save someone's life.