In the name of ‘fairness,’ everyone forced to pay for expensive chair lifts

By David McElroy · March 15, 2012

You might have noticed hotels and other public places with swimming pools making sudden changes to their facilities lately. They’re adding chair lift devices to pools and hot tubs. These devices can lift someone in a wheelchair from the ground and lower the person into the water.

Have the hotels suddenly discovered that there’s a hot untapped market in catering to people in wheelchairs who are hankering to use swimming pools? Not at all. They’re simply being forced to spend a lot of money to comply with new federal regulations handed down by the Obama administration in the name of the Americans with Disabilities Act. And the new rules might close some pools.

The new rules go into effect today. They cover lots more things than just chair lifts, but that’s one of the more prominent ones. The new lifts cost between $5,000 and $10,000 each. If a hotel has a pool and a hot tub — even side by side — it’s not enough to have one unit that can be moved between the two places. No, the regulations require one for the pool and one for the hot tub, even if nobody uses either one of them. And if a hotel fails to comply, the penalty can be as much as $55,000.

Many people are hesitant to criticize rules that are designed to “accommodate” people with disabilities, but there’s a very real and very fair question to ask. Is it right to force everyone to pay for very expensive modifications to hotels and other public facilities just to suit the possible needs of a tiny fraction of people? What gives those people a constitutional or moral right to demand that we pay for what they want or decide they need?

And it’s not just chair lifts. Rules handed down related to ADA compliance in the past have suddenly changed. For instance, it used to be that a light switch had to be located 52 inches above the floor. Why 52 inches? Who knows? Some bureaucrat decided that at some point, so it became law. Now a different bureaucrat had decided the proper height for the switch is 48 inches, so a switch installed at the old federally demanded height is now the new illegal height. Why do bureaucrats have the right to decide these things?

(Our overlords have graciously granted special dispensation on this point. Switches already built at 52 inches can remain there, but new ones must be at 48 inches. Does this mean people using the older rooms are being “discriminated” against?)

Other random changes for hotels are more difficult to comply with. If a hotel had formerly put all of its ADA-compliant rooms into one area, that’s no longer allowed:

One of the biggest changes is the location of accessible rooms within a hotel. They must be dispersed evenly throughout the hotel based on room type and other amenities. If a property offers rooms with king, queen and double beds, accessible rooms must offer the same. And hotels must make available preferred view rooms, such as those showing the ocean.

Why does the federal government — in the person of nameless bureaucrats — get to decide how a hotel runs its business and who it wants to cater to? It’s simply because somebody has decided it’s not “fair” that the world is a very different experience for some people. They’ve decided that what’s “fair” is for us to pay for their desires to modify the world — and they don’t really care to let the market work instead.

If you can justify these sort of coercive and arbitrary rules, are there any rules you can’t justify? If these are moral and legal, isn’t it just as moral and legal to dictate color schemes or types of background music or the comfort of restaurant seating? If you can justify the things demanded by the ADA, you can justify anything that any bureaucrat can dream up.

Life isn’t fair. It makes some of us less bright, some of us less attractive and some of us disabled. Choosing to steal from the rest of us doesn’t make life any more fair to the disabled. It just makes all of us victims of theft — and it turns them into a class of people who feel entitled to being treated as they demand.

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We are ruled by the dumbest and most incompetent people among us — and we have a system which allows stupid and irresponsible people to force the costs of their idiocy onto smarter and wiser people. Can we get away with that? Yes, for quite some time. But we eventually reach a point at which the dumbest of the dumb — who are habitual liars and mentally ill fools — lead us to the disasters and destruction that some of us have seen coming for years. We are approaching that point. And yet most of the idiots around us still wave their rhetorical banners of support for the evil people who are leading us to ruin — and all of them point their fingers at someone else, never noticing that their own enthusiastic support of evil is to blame. When things finally fall apart, blame yourself for your blindness to the evil, not whoever happens to be in power when it happens.

I’ve been making some changes to the site lately and there are more changes coming in the days ahead, so don’t be surprised if you some small differences. This is not a wholesale redesign, but rather the addition of some features. Since they’re smarter than I am, I’ve put Oliver and Alex in charge of the technical work, which you can see in this action photo from the control room of our media complex. I recently added a series of landing pages for readers who randomly discover the site from an Internet search. I’ve also changed the YouTube link at the top of the page to go to the new YouTube channel for video essays that reflect things I’ve already published here. (Here’s a little bit about both of the YouTube channels I’m working on.) In addition, I’m trying to move away from using Instagram, so I’m experimenting with photo plug-ins that will eventually allow me to host the pictures — cats, dogs, sunsets, whatever — that I often take. So don’t be surprised to see more changes. Thanks for your patience. Let’s hope Alex and Oliver know what they’re doing.

I have no use for the theocratic and repressive government of Iran. The people who run the country are cruel at best and evil at worst. The Iranian people deserve freedom. But I have no personal quarrel with anybody in Iran. While I’m not thrilled about a future Iranian government having nuclear weapons, I’m just as concerned about nukes in the hands of politicians in Israel, Pakistan, India, China and Russia. I’m not even thrilled with the U.S., Britain and France having them, either, because I don’t trust any politicians to be responsible with such terrible weapons. All I can say with certainty is that American taxpayers have no business attacking Iran, especially since we’re being forced to pay for this attack in order to benefit the politicians of Israel — and nobody else. If Middle Eastern countries want to fight among themselves, that’s none of my business. It’s not the business of the U.S. government, either. I have no quarrel with anybody in Iran — and having the government which claims to represent me launch an unprovoked attack against a sovereign country will only make all Americans less safe in the near future. This attack is poorly conceived and morally unjustified. Remember that when the Iranians launch attacks that we will then condemn as “terrorism.” What the U.S. is doing right now looks like terrorism to me. And let’s not forget that the attack is the latest in a long line of unconstitutional wars by various U.S. presidents — who have no legal power to declare war on their own, according to the U.S. Constitution.

A child having a tantrum understands only one thing: Did I get my way or not? He doesn’t understand the issues involved. He doesn’t understand the reasons that went into a decision. He doesn’t understand any of the things that mature and reasonable adults have to understand in order to live healthy lives. By his reaction to the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling to strike down his disastrous tariff scheme, Donald Trump shows himself to be — once more — a screaming child having a tantrum. Outside the world of mob bosses who expect to get their way every time, normal adults don’t act this way, but Trump isn’t normal. He’s an angry and vengeful man who has narcissistic personality disorder. And we are in danger as a result. Trump doesn’t understand the legal issues involved in this ruling. He doesn’t understand economics. He doesn’t understand rule of law. He doesn’t understand that he can ever be wrong. All he understands is that he didn’t get his way. And he is now a narcissistic and raging little boy who also happens to hold life-and-death power over most humans on this planet. He’s dangerous — and the system which gives him that power is even more dangerous.

Is it an attempt to blur the gender line between men and women? Or is it some weird tribute to the traditional Scottish kilt? It’s hard to say, but fashion designers keep pushing for men to wear skirts in the last few years. Both men and women in modern fashion seem oddly androgynous, as though it would be offensive for a man to look manly or for a woman to look feminine. A CNN article about the latest fashions from Paris caught my attention Monday and left me wondering about the ugly clothes the designers are hawking. If a man wants to wear a skirt — or a kilt — that’s OK with me, but I’ll stick with a traditional dark suit with a white shirt and tie. (Well, when I’m not wearing t-shirts and sweats, of course.) I always wonder who actually buys the outlandish garb from fashion designers anyway. I would be humiliated to be seen in any of this stuff, but I obviously have no sense of high fashion.

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