08 June 2010

Nature knows best.. erh so I guess we're idiots then?

"We live in a world where modern, educated women are choosing to have their babies at home, feed their children unpasteurized milk and then fail to get them immunized against potentially fatal diseases because a bimbo like Jenny McCarthy has convinced them that immunizations cause autism (They Don’t!). A common consequence of NIB as it plays out in society is that it can lead unwitting individuals to believe ridiculous things that, ironically, could not be further removed from true nature."

I'm mostly fine with the raw milk movement. Because that strikes me more as a right of contract issue (and a means of breaking a public milk moonopoly). Many of the improvements are things like the processing, moving, and storage of milk as well as the health of the cows themselves in addition to pasteurization. If that's a consumer choice, even if it doesn't offer any advantage, in that case, let them play with their stupidity. And I think I agree with the home delivery caveat as well. As long as people are prepared to turn over the situation when it goes awry to medical expertise, in the interest of saving lives, go right ahead and try if that's so important to you. The difference for these is that for the most part, people who buy raw milk are not harming anyone but themselves (just as someone should legally be able consume cigarettes or alcohol or anything else that could be harmful). And with the child birth as long as any we can use health care services to deal with obvious risks to the infant during birth, we don't really care how it gets delivered because it's not much of a harms issue. Vaccines are a public externalities and public harms issue. You don't get your kid vaccinated, that's not just a "you" problem. That's especially a risk to people whose kids cannot get vaccinated (too young or have current health problems), and a risk to, well everyone else even the people who have been vaccinated. It's a terrible free rider problem in that it has not only costs on everyone else, in that they have to pay for you to sit around and be relatively protected health wise by their herd immunity, but potentially inflicts grievous harms on them as well in the event you end up sick.

But the big point linking all those things is that they're scientific or modernizing. It's becoming one of the times where we've got the unusual problem as libertarians of being, at times (especially on the milk or home delivery, not so much on vaccines), useful idiots for the real idiots.

(We've also got global warming on this boat. At least there there's a debate over how best to resolve it, but not so much among the rabble though)

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