Liberty and Tyranny (12 page)

Moreover, millions of people might benefit more if they were not forced to participate in government-run “pension” and “insurance” programs. Perhaps they could find less expensive alternatives; invest the taxes deducted from their income to improve their overall financial situation; help pay for food and other necessities during economic setbacks; and hire more employees, who, in turn, can purchase private insurance; or reinvest the dollars into expanding the business. Most individuals know best how to use their own money, which they earned from their own labor. And most individuals are not self-destructive.

Edmund Burke said it well: “What is the use of discussing a man’s abstract right to food or to medicine? The question is upon the method of procuring and administering them. In that deliberation I shall always advise to call in the aid of the farmer and the physician, rather than the professor of metaphysics.”
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But it is the Statist’s purpose to make as many individuals as possible dependent on the government. Most Americans are, in fact, satisfied with what they pay for their own health care, the quality of the health care they receive, and their health-care coverage.
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However, the Statist continues to press for government control over the entire health-care system. He is not satisfied with constraining liberty today. He seeks to reach into posterity to constrain liberty tomorrow.

President Barack Obama’s first choice for “Health Care Czar” and Secretary of Health and Human Services was Tom Daschle, who was forced to withdraw his name from nomination due to failure to pay federal income taxes. Nonetheless, Daschle laid out the prototype for nationalizing America’s health-care system in his book,
Critical: What We Can Do About the Health Care Crisis
.
⁴⁹
He proposes the establishment of a Federal Health Board, which would make health-care recommendations binding on all federal health programs. However, as columnist Tony Blankley points out, Daschle writes that “Congress could opt to go further with the Board’s recommendations. It could, for example, link the tax exclusion for health insurance to insurance that complies with the Board’s recommendation.”
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That would effectively destroy private health care. Daschle proposes that the board be independent from “political pressure”—that is, from public input. Daschle also denigrates technological advances as a “technology arms race” rather than lauding their benefits to patients. And Daschle laments doctors’ using their best judgment in providing treatment.
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No more bothersome insurance regulations, doctor referrals, or co-pays. Daschle’s medical Politburo is truly a nightmare circa East Germany 1957: A few well-placed political appointees and their bureaucratic support staff ration health-care resources and decide who gets treatment and who does not and, ultimately, who lives and who dies.

For the Statist, this is the ultimate authority over the individual he has long craved. Once the individual is entrapped, the Statist controls his fate. The individual will be seduced by the notion that he is receiving a benefit from the state when in reality the government is merely rationing benefits. The individual is tethered to the state, literally and utterly reliant on it for his health and survival. Not only does the government have an ownership interest in private property, but it also has one in the physical individual. Rather than the individual making cost-benefit and cost-quality decisions about his own condition, the Statist will do it for him. And the Statist will do it very poorly, as he does most other things.

S
CIENCE, BROADLY DEFINED, IS

The pathology of the statist health scare works like this: An event occurs—cases of food contamination are discovered or instances of a new disease arise. Or, as is increasingly the case, government agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), or the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), or nonprofit organizations such as the Center for Science in the Public Interest or Sierra Club release a new study identifying a “frightening” new health risk. Urgent predictions are made by cherry-picked “experts” that the media accept without skepticism or independent investigation and turn into a cacophony of fear. Public officials next clamor to demonstrate that they are taking steps to ameliorate the dangers. New laws are enacted or regulations promulgated that are said to limit the public’s exposure to the new “risk.”

The examples of this pathology are numerous and include such “scares” as alar, sweeteners, bird flu, swine flu, dioxins,
E. coli
, listeria, the Ebola virus, formaldehyde, MTBE (methyl tertiary butal ether), BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy), salmonella attached to tomatoes/jalapeño peppers, and CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons). All were blown into huge panics, far beyond the actual scope of any health threat.

Economist George Reisman relates how advances in science make it possible to detect minute levels of contaminants in substances, which are misused in too many cases to destroy products. “The presence of parts per billion of a toxic substance is routinely extrapolated into being regarded as a cause of human deaths. And whenever the number of projected deaths exceeds one in a million (or less), environmentalists demand that the government remove the offending pesticide, preservative, or other alleged bearer of toxic pollution from the market. They do so, even though a level of risk of one in a million is one-third as great as that of an airplane falling from the sky on one’s home.”
¹

Indeed, the modern environmental movement was founded on one of the most egregious frauds in human history: that dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane, or DDT, is a human-killing poison when, in fact, it is a human-saving wonder chemical—a chemical compound developed in 1939 for use as an insecticide. DDT was critical in protecting American soldiers from the typhus epidemic and malaria during World War II.
²
In 1948, Paul Hermann Müller received the Nobel Prize “for his discovery of the high efficiency of DDT as a contact poison against several arthropods.”
³

DDT’s usefulness in combating malaria and other insect-borne diseases was unprecedented. San Jose State University professor J. Gordon Edwards, who was a longtime opponent of banning DDT, wrote in 2004: “Hundreds of millions have died from malaria, yellow fever, typhus, dengue, plague, encephalitis, leishmaniasis, filariasis, and many other diseases. In the 14th century the bubonic plague (transmitted by fleas) killed a fourth of the people of Europe and two-thirds of those in the British Isles. Yellow fever killed millions before it was found to be transmitted by
Aedes
mosquitoes…. More than 100 epidemics of typhus ravaged civilizations in Europe and Asia, with mortality rates as high as 70 percent. But by far the greatest killer has been malaria, transmitted by
Anopheles
mosquitoes. In 1945, the goal of eradicating this scourge appeared to be achievable thanks to DDT. By 1959, the U.S., Europe, portions of the Soviet Union, Chile, and several Caribbean islands were nearly malaria free.”
⁴

Journalist and bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell recounted the successful eradication campaigns waged in Italy, Taiwan, the Caribbean, the Balkans, parts of northern Africa, the South Pacific, Australia, and India: “In India, where malaria infected an estimated 75 million and killed 800,000 every year, fatalities had dropped to zero by the early sixties. Between 1945 and 1965, DDT saved millions—even tens of millions—of lives around the world, perhaps more than any other man-made drug or chemical before or since.”
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A few years ago,
New York Times
editorial page writer Tina Rosenberg explained that “today, westerners with no memory of malaria often assume it has always been only a tropical disease. But malaria was once found as far north as Boston and Montreal. Oliver Cromwell died of malaria, and Shakespeare alludes to it [as ‘ague’] in eight plays. Malaria no longer afflicts the United States, Canada and Northern Europe in part because of changes in living habits—the shift to cities, better sanitation, window screens. But another reason was DDT, sprayed from airplanes over American cities and towns while children played outside.”
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So effective is DDT that in 1970 the National Academy of Sciences announced that “to only a few chemicals does man owe as great a debt as to DDT. In little more than two decades DDT has prevented 500 million human deaths due to malaria that would have otherwise been inevitable.”
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But in 1962, Rachel Carson, an opponent of pesticides, succeeded in spreading widespread hysteria about DDT’s effects on wildlife and especially children. In her book
Silent Spring,
Carson decried the broad use of DDT.
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As
Reason
science correspondent Ron Bailey wrote, “Carson was…an effective popularizer of the idea that children were especially vulnerable to the carcinogenic effects of synthetic chemicals. ‘The situation with respect to children is even more deeply disturbing,’ she wrote. ‘A quarter century ago, cancer in children was considered a medical rarity. Today, more American school children die of cancer than from any other disease.’ In support of this claim, Carson reported that ‘twelve per cent of all deaths in children between the ages of one and fourteen are caused by cancer.’ Although it sounds alarming, Carson’s statistic is essentially meaningless unless it’s given some context, which she failed to supply. It turns out that the percentage of children dying of cancer was rising because other causes of death, such as infectious diseases, were drastically declining.”
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It is a sickening irony that Carson’s focus on children helped kill the use of DDT when malaria is the cause of death of millions of children living in undeveloped countries. In fact, nowhere in
Silent Spring
did Carson mention that DDT had saved tens of millions of lives, a widely known fact by 1962 but of no apparent import to her or her growing legion of adherents.
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The media gobbled up Carson’s alarmism. President John Kennedy formed an advisory committee to investigate her claims. Congress held hearings. The Environmental Defense Fund and the Sierra Club brought litigation to pressure the government to ban DDT. Although DDT has never been directly linked to even one human death (Gladwell recounts incidents of test subjects literally lathering themselves with DDT),
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the EPA, which had been established in 1970, banned DDT in 1972.
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Its use worldwide soon plummeted because the United States and the United Nations’ World Health Organization would no longer provide financial support for the lifesaving chemical’s use.
¹³

But even the manner in which the EPA banned DDT was an abuse of both the scientific and legal process. An EPA administrative law judge held several months of hearings on DDT’s environmental and health risks. In the end, Judge Edmund Sweeney found that “DDT is not a carcinogenic hazard to man…DDT is not a mutagenic or teratogenic hazard to man…. The use of DDT under the regulations involved here do not have a deleterious effect on freshwater fish, estuarine organisms, wild birds or other wildlife.”
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However, Sweeney’s ruling was rejected by EPA administrator William Doyle Ruckelshaus, who, in 1972, banned it anyway. Ruckelshaus attended none of the hearings and aides reported he had not read the hearing transcript before overruling Sweeney’s findings.
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At the time, Ruckelshaus belonged to the Audubon Society and later joined the Environmental Defense Fund, which, along with the Sierra Club, was a budding organization that brought lawsuits pressing for DDT’s ban.
¹⁶

Only recently has the world community begun to revisit the benefits of DDT. In 2006, the World Health Organization announced that it would reverse years of policy and back the use of DDT as a way to control malaria outbreaks.
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Better late than never, but the ban’s human cost has been enormous. In 2002, the American Council on Science and Health reported that 300 million to 500 million people suffer from malaria each year, 90 percent occurring in Africa. It is the number one killer of children there.
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Overall, the ban has resulted in the deaths of millions.
¹⁹

The EPA and its environmental-group masters conspired in a deliberate and systematic distortion of science, leading to genocide-like numbers of deaths of human beings throughout the undeveloped world. Today the Environmental Defense Fund and the Sierra Club, and scores of similar groups, raise tens of millions of dollars a year to promote their causes in Congress, the bureaucracy, and the courts, are relied on frequently by the media for expert comment, and make no apologies for the consequences of their success in banning DDT. Ruckelshaus, a Republican, rose through the executive branch and has received acclaim for his public service. He currently serves on the boards of numerous corporations and endorsed Barack Obama for president. After her death in 1964, Carson was the recipient of numerous honors and awards. Her childhood home is on the National Register of Historic Places and the home she lived in when she wrote
Silent Spring
was named a National Historic Landmark. There are no landmarks or memorials for those who suffered and perished from the banning of DDT. In the name of protecting wildlife and children, millions of human lives were needlessly sacrificed.

On its website, the group Earth First! declares that it “does not accept a human-centered worldview of ‘nature for people’s sake.’” It insists that “life exists for its own sake, that industrialized civilization and its philosophy are anti-Earth, anti-woman and anti-liberty…To put it simply, the Earth must come first.”
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Is not man, therefore, expendable? And if he is, is not the suppression of his liberty, the confiscation of his property, and the blunting of his progress at all times warranted where the purpose is to save the planet—or any part of it—from man himself? After all, it would seem that there can be no end to man’s offenses against nature if he is not checked at every turn.

National Park Service ecologist David M. Graber, writing in the
Los Angeles Times
in 1989, well articulated the perversity of this view:

If nature has “intrinsic value” then nature exists for its own sake. Consequently, man is not to be preferred over any aspect of his natural surroundings. He is no better than any other organism and much worse than most because of his destructive existence. And so it is that the Enviro-Statist abandons reason for a faith that preaches human regression and self-loathing. And he does so by claiming the moral high ground—saving man from himself and nature from man. Most individuals who are sympathetic to environmental causes are unwitting marks, responsive to the Enviro-Statist’s manipulation of science, imagery, and language. Over time, they self-surrender liberty for authority, abundance for scarcity, and optimism for pessimism. “Save the planet!” is the rallying cry that justifies nearly any intrusion by government into the life of the individual. The individual, after all, is expendable.