The War on Responsibility

Editor’s Note: I am otherwise occupied this weekend, taking the sixteen hour firearms safety course mandated by NY State after the Supreme Court’s Bruen ruling knocked down its “we get to say no to whomever we want” concealed carry permit policy. Today, a follow-up to yesterday’s Who is the Safety Net Really For?

From February 2017 — P.

Sound the alarms! In just a couple decades, life expectancy in America will be no better than in that third-world, brown-person hellhole, Mexico!!

That last bit is sarcasm, of course. Mexico has been doing very well for herself and her people, and could do even better if America ended her idiotic drug war. But, lets set that aside for the moment.

Consider the balance of the linked article. Its obvious intent is to castigate America for not having socialized medicine, and it layers the claim that America’s infant mortality rate is also well above the norm (a statement that ignores the disparate rules for counting live births) on top of the lagging life expectancy argument. For good measure, it throws in the homicide rate – which should be factored out of any statistical presentation that alleges inadequate health care as a root cause for lower life expectancy, but that might undermine the argument. So, instead, it considers homicide the product of an “unhealthier lifestyle.”

That last bit, “unhealthier lifestyle,” is also touched upon by mentioning that Americans have a higher Body Mass Index than the other nations. “Unhealthier lifestyle,” like homicide, should be an excluded factor when assessing a nation’s health care system vis a vis life expectancy, but the article offers no such acknowledgment. Which poses the question: Do the authors and editors believe that sufficient health care can cure the detrimental effects of unhealthier lifestyles?

If I choose to live off a diet of chicken fried steak with sausage gravy, drink a gallon of cola a day, spend all day on the couch watching Netflix or playing video games, smoke a carton of Camel unfiltereds a week, and I swell up to four hundred sedentary, blubbery, lardaceous pounds, is it reasonable to believe that modern medicine can address all the health problems I’m far more likely to incur? Can I be expected to live as long as my neighbor, who eats a balanced diet, keeps his weight under control, and leads a more physically active lifestyle? I might get lucky, and he might die of a heart attack or a piano falling on his head, but, statistically, I’m likely to live a much shorter life, even if I win the lottery and could therefore pay for the best medical care money can buy.

Our society sends us very mixed messages about obesity and health.

On the one hand, fit and healthy sells. The diet industry has always thrived. Fitness celebrities are a thing. Lifestyle gurus are as well. There are more exercise regimens and fads than I can count. The aerobics, dancercize, jazzercise and Jane Fonda workouts of the 1980s evolved to Bikram Yoga, Pilates, Zumba, spin classes, Tae Bo, and many others. Home fitness equipment has been a staple of direct-marketing TV for decades, with bowflex, thigh masters, shake weights, body blades, and an endless stream of ab machines hawked relentlessly by people whose perfect physiques had nothing to do with any of those gizmos. Health crazes like cleanses, juicing, superfoods, alkalization, Garlique, grapefruit pills, and oxygen bars come and go.

On the other hand, there is a fat acceptance movement. We are told not to fat-shame people. We are told that we should find plus-size models as attractive as their thinner and leaner cohorts. We aren’t supposed to in any way blame the obese for the health problems they incur, and insurers are not permitted to set higher health insurance premiums for them.

Thus, you should want to be fit, lean, healthy and active, but if you’re not, you won’t be asked to shoulder the additional burden you impose on society. This dichotomy is but one facet of a broad message promulgated by the Left: that society will make up for your failure to take responsibility for yourself. Health, wealth, housing, food, leisure, education, et cetera and so forth: if you don’t see to these things yourself, even if you’re perfectly capable, don’t worry, the rest of us will pick up the slack, with no imposition on you.

The other half of the coin is that, in countless cases, society prohibits you from engaging in acts of personal responsibility. There’s a long list of foods you’re not allowed to eat, beverages you’re not allowed to drink, and substances you’re not allowed to place in your body. There’s an even longer list of such that you can only consume with another’s permission. The same goes for countless jobs, careers and activities: you are flat-out prohibited from many and you are required to have permission to do many more, even when the only risk incurred is to yourself. And, in instances where you interact with another, he or she is, in more situations than can be counted, prohibited from doing so even if both of you are adults of sound mind and willing to assume risk and responsibility.

In short, today’s society believes that you should not permitted to shoulder a wide range of responsibilities and that you should be absolved of the consequences of countless irresponsibilities. This war on responsibility has even infected our language. So many behaviors are now epidemics, diseases, and addictions, and while there are certainly individual instances where such terminology can apply, calling obesity a disease or an epidemic is in most cases a signal to the obese that their fatness is not their fault.

To pay for for the inevitable bad outcomes of all this, our society, via the blunt force instrument known as government, takes from those who manage to prosper despite all these impediments and counterproductive incentives in order to cover the (huge and growing) costs sown by its meddling. It also seeks to modify the bad behaviors it has encouraged with additional bans and punitive “sin” taxes.

This trend will not end well. Already, huge numbers of able-bodied adult men have dropped out of the work force, choosing instead to spend their days gaming and bingeing television. They are sustained in this by a growing welfare state, but whenever anyone dares mention trying to cut back on redistribution programs or imposing work requirements on the able-bodied, howls of protest about “inhumanity” come forth. It is also telling that the big health problem in poor communities is obesity, not hunger or malnutrition. The fingers of blame get pointed, of course, at fast food chains and at the supposed dearth of “healthy” food choices in their neighborhoods, not at individuals’ dining and eating choices. Politicians and social engineers seek to address this problem not by pulling back on the incentives that produce the irresponsibility, but instead by trying to force a “better” mix of dining choices via zoning, tax credits and the like.

Gun control advocates are also among the most guilty of warring against responsibility. Their language overwhelmingly blames guns themselves, rather than shooters, for crime and homicide, and ignore both statistics (why do parts of the country with the most guns not also have the most crime?) and the socioeconomic factors and government actions that are far more proximate influences on crime rates.

And lest one think I’m singling out the Left, lets consider that the entire War on Drugs, a bipartisan proposition that’s most strongly embraced by the Right, is itself predicated on the absolving of personal responsibility. A current subset of this War and another stab at personal responsibility, the effort to tighten access to opioid painkillers, is leading to more overdoses as people turn to the black market. The underlying premise of drug prohibition – that people need to be protected from bad choices – to many other voluntary and consensual behaviors. The war on responsibility absolves poor choices of countless sorts, and gets in the way of responsible behavior that might offend some people.

Then there’s the question of work itself. Not only is the choice not to work even if one is able absolved by the intricate web of social safety nets, but it is even encouraged in what is called the welfare trap.

And, to come full circle, there’s health insurance. The War on Responsibility took most of the ability to choose a health insurance plan that one felt was best suited out of individuals’ hands. Government action skewed the market heavily towards employer-provided insurance, and that led to, among other things, government mandating what must be covered by insurance plans. This drove the price of insurance up, leading many young, healthy people to opt not to carry insurance because it was too expensive and their odds of needing it too small. This drove per-insured costs up, which drove premiums up. The government, with ObamaCare, sought to solve this problem by forcing people to either buy insurance or pay a penalty. Simultaneously, the government sought to absolve people of responsibility for their failure to buy insurance by prohibiting exclusion or rejection due to pre-existing conditions.

It’s a death spiral, and not just in terms of health care and health insurance. A society that not only fails to demand some measure of individual responsibility from its members, but both restricts their ability to assume it and absolves them of negative consequences when they fail to, is a society that will eventually collapse. A permanently dependent class, one that has already arisen, will continue to grow, and an ever-smaller percentage of “the responsible” will be forced to care for the irresponsible and dependent.

The liberals who have driven both the societal and governmental war on responsibility will claim that they have done so out of compassion for the needy and less fortunate. They will claim that those who expect personal responsibility from people at the lowest socioeconomic levels is inhuman and immoral. They are wrong. Certainly and obviously, there are many in our society who do need a helping hand and a leg up. They should receive those from their fellow members of society, voluntarily and personally. That is the charitable way. That is the moral thing to do. That doesn’t get in the way of these people working to help themselves and taking responsibility for their lives, and that doesn’t create the counterproductive incentives that lead to negative results.

Individual liberty goes hand in hand with personal responsibility. To be truly free to make our own choices in a society, we must be responsible for their outcomes – good or bad. Absolving that responsibility necessitates the infringement of the liberty of others, and the moment society stops treating all its members as equals with regard to liberty, the very meaning of liberty becomes corrupted. As Aretha admonished Matt “Guitar” Murphy, people better think about the consequences of their actions. And, more importantly, they need to stop thinking that others should be free of those consequences.