It’s odd how ‘choice’ can mean ‘no choice’ with the state involved

By David McElroy · August 1, 2011

I don’t have any opinion about whether your health insurance plan should cover the cost of birth control or whether it should let you get the stuff with no co-pays.

If that’s important to you, then you ought to choose a provider who offers it (assuming it’s popular enough for someone to offer it). If it’s not important to you or if you’re opposed to birth control, you should choose a provider that doesn’t offer it — since the lack of that cost to the provider will lower your premium.

Simple, right? It’s the market making choices about what people value and are willing to pay for.

But that’s not the way it is when the coercive state is involved. The latest example came today when the Obama administration announced that starting in just under 18 months, insurance companies will be required to cover birth control. Further, the companies won’t be allowed to charge a co-pay. Even if it’s unprofitable, companies will be paying for birth control for any customer who wants it.

There are a number of different angles to this story. For some people, it’s all about birth control, either because they believe the choice of having access to birth control is important or because they believe birth control is wrong. For some people, it’s about the economics of people getting drugs that they need or want. Still others are most interested in the move possibly cutting the birth rate among people who can’t afford kids. But I’m just going to focus on the simplest one — choice.

The democratic state claims that it wants you to have choice, but that “choice” is frequently all about making sure that you’re coerced into making the choice that politicians and bureaucrats want you to make. In this case, the state is trying to give women an incentive to use birth control, so the people in charge don’t really care that it takes away choice from everyone.

I no longer have the option of buying health insurance that doesn’t subsidize someone else’s birth control. Only in an Orwellian world can offering choice mean that my choices are taken away about what options I am allowed to buy.

The problem isn’t about birth control or even economics here. The problem is the coercive state (again) deciding what you’re allowed to do with your own life and money. That’s immoral.

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I haven’t posted anything new in my YouTube series about narcissism in the last couple of weeks, so some people have been asking about it. There’s nothing wrong and I’ll be back soon. The issue is simply a technical problem because of a piece of equipment that died. Here’s a brief video I posted on YouTube to explain.

On a live awards show Sunday night, one man made a joke about a female celebrity. The husband of the celebrity was offended and hit the man who made the joke. Or maybe it was staged for entertainment. Who knows? Who cares? Social media is full of discussion — and even arguments — about this idiocy today. This baffles me. Let’s assume for a moment that the event happened as reported. People have been having such idiotic fights ever since there have been humans. Half the bars in the world see such brief dustups regularly. It simply doesn’t matter. The fact that so many people believe they need to talk about this — or even need to have opinions about it — is more evidence of the bizarre media brainwashing that convinces many to care passionately about brain-dead trivia. Your life will be happier and saner if you focus on yourself, your family and your friends, not on whatever scripted (or spontaneous) bilge that the media wants to pipe into your home.

I’m in the middle of migrating this website to new servers this week. This means you might encounter some unexpected behavior until I get all the bugs worked out. Clicking on my links (including this one) might cause your browser to give you the message that it’s a site without a current security certificate. It’s not actually unsafe, but there’s something which isn’t yet set up for the security certificate. I apologize for any such errors you might encounter while the process is going on. If you notice any problems with content which didn’t migrate properly, I would appreciate you letting me know the details at davidmcelroy@mac.com. Thanks for your patience.

I often wonder what animals think when they look at us and consider the society we’ve created. Yes, I know this is fanciful and unrealistic, but what if they could? Would they be astounded at how we treat each other? Would they be disgusted by the ugliness and pettiness which fill so many of our daily interactions? The truth is that I’m feeling pretty disgusted with humanity tonight. I made the mistake of reading some online interactions that I should have avoided — and it sickened me. The people involved appeared to be vile and stupid and arrogant. I wish I could pretend they’re a tiny minority, but I know better. It’s times such as this when I most need to escape much of “civilization” and disconnect from their world. If humans are going to be worthy of “ruling this planet,” we have a lot of growth to do. And I fear that growth is nowhere in sight. So my buddy Thomas, above, and all of his friends would be right to judge us harshly — and to think, “Why do you folks get to be in charge?”

I should have expected this, but I honestly didn’t. The article I wrote last week about disagreements over treatment for autistic children brought me angry emails. You could almost call it “hate mail.” Of the five emails about it so far, two have been to tell me that I’m wrong to even listen to critics of the most popular therapy for autistic children — and the other three tell me I’m wrong for not condemning the treatment as the “obvious” abuse it is. If you read the article, you know I didn’t take a position on the issue, because I simply don’t know enough to have an opinion. But by talking about the issue, I stepped into a heated controversy. The emails from the two sides convinced me of nothing. But they did give me even more empathy for the unfortunate parents who have to figure out for themselves where the truth lies for their children.

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