{"id":248,"date":"2006-01-04T12:15:07","date_gmt":"2006-01-04T17:15:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=248"},"modified":"2006-01-04T15:31:59","modified_gmt":"2006-01-04T20:31:59","slug":"live-by-government-regulation-die-by-it-too","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=248","title":{"rendered":"Live by government regulation, die by it too"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Teresa Nielsen Hayden, a blogger and much-respected figure in the<br \/>\nscience-fiction community, is staring at the ruin of her life, and<br \/>\nshe&#8217;s <a href='http:\/\/nielsenhayden.com\/makinglight\/archives\/007140.html'>enraged<\/a><br \/>\nabout it.  And rightly so.  As her husband Patrick explains, she&#8217;s a<br \/>\nnarcoleptic, and the FDA has just banned the only drug that keeps her<br \/>\nfunctional.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m not personally friendly with the Neilsen-Haydens, but I&#8217;m friendly<br \/>\ntowards them.  They&#8217;re part of several communities in which I&#8217;m invested.<br \/>\nThey do good work.  I don&#8217;t like to see them hurt. I feel for Teresa.<\/p>\n<p>But I also think her anger seems curiously misdirected.  She&#8217;s<br \/>\nwishing death on Ralph Nader and his &#8220;Public Citizen&#8221; group, but it<br \/>\nisn&#8217;t Nader who banned Cylert.  The FDA did that.  And it isn&#8217;t Nader<br \/>\nwho has the authority to jail pharmacists who sell the drug and harass<br \/>\ncompanies who make it.  It&#8217;s the FDA.  More generally, what&#8217;s at fault<br \/>\nhere is not just any one pressure group, it&#8217;s the entire political<br \/>\nsystem that gives government control of what adults put in their<br \/>\nbodies in the privacy of their homes.<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t know the Neilsen-Haydens well, but I&#8217;m fairly sure their politics<br \/>\nare conventional for elite coastal-liberals of the NPR-listening variety;<br \/>\ngood-government leftism underpinned by a conviction that people need to be<br \/>\nregulated for their own good.  And even if I&#8217;m wrong about them, that<br \/>\ncertainly describes a lot of the people who have been offering them<br \/>\nsympathy.<\/p>\n<p>Teresa, even as I feel your pain, I&#8217;m wondering if you&#8217;re going to learn<br \/>\nthe right lesson. The Cylert ban isn&#8217;t an accidental failure of the<br \/>\nsystem, it&#8217;s an essential one.  It wasn&#8217;t perpetrated by villains, but<br \/>\nby well-intentioned people working the levers of a system designed to<br \/>\nelevate &#8220;public safety&#8221; above individual choice.  That system<br \/>\nfunctioned as designed; it&#8217;s the design that&#8217;s broken.<\/p>\n<p>I may have your politics wrong, and if so I apologize&#8230;but my gut<br \/>\nreaction when I read your enraged post was &#8220;those who live by<br \/>\nregulation get to die by it too&#8221;.  Welcome, Teresa, to the ranks of<br \/>\nthose who have been royally screwed by &#8220;good government&#8221;.  You&#8217;re now<br \/>\none with every homeowner who&#8217;s been raped by eminent domain, every gun<br \/>\nowner, and every overtaxed working stiff in the United States.<\/p>\n<p>UPDATE: Great Ghu, it&#8217;s an Instalanche!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Teresa Nielsen Hayden, a blogger and much-respected figure in the science-fiction community, is staring at the ruin of her life, and she&#8217;s enraged about it. And rightly so. As her husband Patrick explains, she&#8217;s a narcoleptic, and the FDA has just banned the only drug that keeps her functional.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-248","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=248"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=248"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=248"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=248"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}