Monday, February 9, 2015

All in the Family

Just because one's thoughts are banal doesn't mean they're true. Ideas that have been run round the block and back a dozen or more times are exhausted, but not necessarily toned in their intellectual muscularity. Take for example the proclamation by a number of anti-vaccination zealots that parents know what's best for their children. Rand Paul, United States Senator from Kentucky and alleged presidential aspirant, has gone even further down the road: “Parents own the children.” And, therefore, one presumes, can do whatever they wish to do to their little ones. 

And they have.

Bash, smash, shoot, stab, strangle, starve, poison, torture, crush, suffocate, drown, and drop from high places--what parents have done a lot is filicide, the murder of their offspring--so much so that it is the third-leading cause of death of children between the ages of 5 and 14 in the United States. According to Dr. Phillip Resnick, a professor of psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University,
one out of every 33 homicides in the United States is the killing of a child under 18 by their parent, or between 250 and 300 of the country's killings each year.*
USA Today has come up with an even higher number of filicides: 
three decades of FBI homicide data shows that on average, 450 children are killed every year by their parents.**
So, perhaps, offering one's child the opportunity to contract measles is, in comparison, an act of loving-kindness.
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Thursday, February 5, 2015

No Soap

It's like nagging your parents to let you go skiing when you hate the cold and the snow: urging voters to elect you to a government office when you hate government. Needless to say, there are voters dumb enough to do so, and thus we have the likes of Thom Tillis, senator from North Carolina.
This week Tillis opined that (as paraphrased by BBC.com) “restaurants should not have to make their employees wash their hands after toilet visits.” “Let them decide,” said Tillis, referring to the regulated businesses.
Tillis has a problem with government regulations and thinks that market forces should rule the world and would set everything right. He thinks that people would avoid non-washing establishments, which would quickly go out of business.* Until those disease-spreading eateries go under, of course, patrons will be in danger of becoming ill (and some may even die). But, even so, germs are better than government.
The next logical step would be for surgeons to be allowed to decide whether to free themselves from regulatory procedures prescribing scrubbing-up before operating. (Certainly from an economic point of view it would make sense to do so: they would free up time to perform more procedures, and more procedures=more money.) Of course, we would then be plunged back into the dark ages of surgery, before Ignaz Semmelweis discovered that hand disinfecting would reduce mortality rates in maternity hospitals. In an unregulated surgical marketplace, Tillis would undoubtedly argue, patients would vote with their feet, putting the unsterilized practitioners out of business—that is, except for those patients who were wheeled out feet first to the morgue.
But why stop there? How about letting all other businesses decide what regulations to follow? Like construction companies, for example. So what if a shoddily-constructed apartment building went up in flames, or a bridge of inferior design collapsed? It's all good for the marketplace (and the morticians). And if the plagues of Egypt were resurrected in this country because government regulatory agencies were toothless? Well, it would be OK, I guess; after all, we would be free to choose between boils and the death of our first born.
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*How would patrons know that a restaurant doesn't require staff to wash? Tillis, in the words of BBC.com, “suggested that restaurants that did not require hand washing would have to alert customers with prominently displayed signs” (itself a regulation, as BBC.com pointedly noted).
We could invent a new parlor game: create a Tillis sign. Just off the top of my head, how about:
HANDS SPRINKLED WITH PEE
MADE YOUR BLT
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Sources and Suggested Reading: