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Our Mom the state
Did John Knox have a point about the Monstrous Regiment of Women? It seems so, at least when it comes to ladies from small Northern European countries. We’ve spoken about the misdeeds of Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland and current UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. Another enemy of humanity is Gro Harlem Brundtland, former prime minister of Norway and (somewhat addlepated) director of the World Health Organization, who found time in the ’80s to invent “sustainable development” as an influential movement. Now one of her (female) operatives is telling us that the couch potato lifestyle is worse for your health than smoking. The advice is unexceptionable. What seems more troubling is the program for doing something about it: “Telling people to eat more fruit and vegetables and to take exercise did not work if there were no policies to help people change.” The state as Mom writ large is aided, it appears, by having Mom actually run it. Posted by Jim Kalb at September 03, 2002 08:27 AM | Send Comments
If the government (whether the national government or, as Brundtland proposes, a world government) is to be responsible for everyone’s health, then it follows logically that the government must ensure that everyone live a healthy life-style so as to cut down on medical costs. The requirement that people have proper diet and engage in regular exercise must be obligatory and enforceable on individuals. Once during a fairly heated discussion about national health insurance, in order to find out how far this idea would really go, I asked a left-wing in-law of mine if he would support the idea that the federal government should require people to exercise. Without hesitation, he said yes. He had no embarrassment about supporting an idea that is best known from Orwell’s 1984 and from the People’s Republic of East Germany. Posted by: Lawrence Auster on September 3, 2002 10:27 AM |