Mark Twain On The Dictatorship Of Health
This post is originally from 9 November 2012, twelve years ago. It warned of the coming health dictatorship and the zeal of Experts banning whatever displeased them. Whether it displeased you was, and is, nothing to them. I invite you to add to the list of banned things. This was also, of course, before the covid panic, where medicine was mandated. So Experts got us coming and going.
I have quoted these words from Mark Twain many times. They never lose their relevance:
There are people who strictly deprive themselves of each and every eatable, drinkable and smokable which has in any way acquired a shady reputation. They pay this price for health. And health is all they get for it. How strange it is. It is like paying out your whole fortune for a cow that has gone dry.
I am willing to sink to my knees and plead with any bureaucrat to explain Twain’s simple meaning. I will not succeed and convert my audience more than five times out of every five hundred, but I will do my level best.
With the coming of Obamacare, the reign of the progressive mantra “Right to Choose!” is over—to be replaced by a “right” to listen to government “guidelines”, which will be mandatory. You may not choose to smoke. You may not choose to drink a pop over 16 ounces. You may not eat, drink, or smoke that which the government and its Enlightened advisors fears.
Why? Because health is all that matters. Quantity of life will replace quality of life as the ne plus ultra of medicine. Living here and now and for as long as possible, when all there is, as we will increasingly be told, is nothing but the here and now, will be our only goal.
Until one becomes too old. Paradoxically, once people pass an age where they are too unattractive, or deemed unfit to serve society, or it is gauged too expensive to prolong their lives, seniors will rightly fear having wandered into a 1970s-era Charleton Heston movie.
Here are just a sample of what we will see in the tsunami of regulations about to appear from Obamacare.
Ever-present calls for more spending. Bureaucracies are like malignant cancers which grow without restraint unless their food supply (money) is cut off. This has happened in every country which implemented socialized medicine.
An increase in disease. Rather, an increase in diagnosed diseases, and not necessarily in real rates. And a rise in the number of new, mostly mental diseases or mild but exaggerated somatic “syndromes”. These findings will lead back to #1.
Rules, bannings, regulations, and then more of the same.
As evidence of the last, this simple list built in just five minutes internet searching. I invite you to add to it. As the government will invite itself to do, ad nauseum.
Classic kids games like kickball deemed unsafe by state in effort to increase summer camp regulation
Deep-fried foods banned at NYC Health Department agency lunches.
Chicago school bans some lunches brought from home But what about the children!
Congress-approved calorie limits on school lunches went into effect in August. But what about the children!
Arkansas school bans peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches from home. But what… oh, hell, you get the idea.
National Physicians Group Pushes Banning Milk from School Lunches
Concord, Mass., the first US city to ban sale of plastic water bottles Oops. That’s “environmental.”
New York City bans food donations No calorie counts on donated foods, you see.
Ban Trans Fats: The Campaign to Ban Partially Hydrogenated Oils Hey, it worked in NYC, which may soon surpass San Francisco in number and kinds of bans.
Move to ban fast-food advertising on city streets In New Zealand, but Disney here already self-banned itself.
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I have noticed that many will go to tremendous lengths to save their body, but will scarcely lift a finger to save their soul.
That, in a nutshell, explains the current state of the human condition.
Health is not a government responsibility; it is a personal responsibility.