More Public Health Fascism

The state of Pennsylvania has proven once again the injustice of arbitrary rule. Incidentally, in a state that regulates liquor in a way that would make the Soviet Union proud, we see a man's private enjoyment of liquor becoming a state issue, with no reasonable cause for the prying. I am truly disgusted.

Don't drink and...stay home?

Read it, then let me pick it apart for you.

Keith Emerich described himself as the typical blue-collar worker who enjoyed a six-pack of beer every day after work.

This is absolutely stunning. The fuss was over a man's enjoying one six-pack of beer after work. Perhaps PennDOT is full of lightweights who can't handle their liquor, because one six-pack of beer is really nothing to get worked up about. Stunning, like I said.

Except for a drunken-driving arrest 23 years ago, Emerich said he has no arrests and a clean driving record.

It certainly looks like this guy is a real threat on the road, doesn't it? Twenty-three years with a clean driving record. It just occured to me that, depending on the guy's weight and the type of beer he's drinking, a six-pack might not even be enough to put him over the legal limit. Why should that matter to the People's Republic, though? I'm giving them too much credit by even suggestingthat they viewed him as a real threat, since it was never really an issue whether he could be expected to drive drunk, only that this naughty man was drinking more than was good for him. The state knows best.

“There’re no signs that I’m this great menace to society that PennDOT is making me out to be,” Emerich said.

Poor naive bastard. No one in PennDOT even feels it necessary to prove that he's a menace. After all this the man still expects his state to rule with justice and reason.

“We do give drivers due process,” said PennDOT spokeswoman Joan Z. Nissley.

No, you don't. Due process includes the presumption of innocence, and the man has not committed a crime and his license was still revoked. In addition, though I disagree with it, due process now includes the right to privacy. The Supreme Court will be amused.

Care to see what a couple of collaborators think of all this?

However, he said the state law requiring doctors to report dangerous medical or physical conditions should supersede the federal confidentiality requirement.

That's nice. Perhaps you should tell the Supreme Court that 200 years of supremacy clause precedent should be thrown out the window. See what they think of you then.

“The state pre-emption law applies when the state law is stricter than the federal law,” Kauffman said. “HIPAA does not preclude physicians from reporting when they are required to report by state law.”

I guess HIPAA makes allowances for fascist state governments' infringing on the privacy rights of their citizens. Of course, that simply means that HIPAA is essentially a meaningless protection of privacy, since any state can decide it simply thinks that confidential medical records should be under its purview. Let's not overlook the doctor's role in this; he was so conditioned by paternalism that he thought it was his responsibility to reveal confidential information about a patient's harmless habit. A six-pack a day? How can anyone judge that to be a real problem, unless the judge has succumbed fully to the campaign to make everyone miserable, to make sure that no one can enjoy himself in a way that might just do some harm (though only to himself). One day we will live to be one hundred years old, living in misery and dying in misery, because we can't light up, can't enjoy a drink, can't have a damned burger, because it'll hurt us. What a truly miserable way to live one's life.

Quem dei diligunt, adulescens moritur.

Hyperbolic, but I find it very difficult to avoid hyperbole in the face of these insidious busybodies who are keeping an hard-working, good man from driving himself to work.

-Vernunft