To put it succinctly, the government’s “solution” for this “problem” was to mandate a new kind of inhaler, one that doesn’t contain CFCs and “cost twice as much and simply don’t work as well.”

Imagine that! Many doctors and the government insist they work just as well, but asthma sufferers such as Megan McArdle disagree.

ETA: A reader points out to me that it was not necessarily the American government mandating this change- it was actually an international treaty that America signed along with many other countries which forced the switchover to non-CFC inhalers. This is even more of a reason why many of the international treaties we agree to are completely worthless for what they’re meant for and should be avoided. The consequences are simply not adequately studied ahead of time, and are different than the intentions.

RP discusses his first year in Congress in 1976, when the government created a swine flu scare and initiated a mass inoculation program– which killed more people than the original swine flu had.

RP’s questions:
Why is the Department of Homeland Security getting involved in a medical issue and holding press briefings? (This emphasizes the fact that the DHS steps on areas that were already handled by other agencies and is mainly redundant in focus.)
Why are we more worried about the swine flu so far when there were more than 13,000 cases of tuberculosis (also a spreadable, contagious disease) last year?

It is my opinion that there will certainly be a pandemic at some point in not just the United States, but the world, so it’s good to be prepared even if the current crisis doesn’t morph into a pandemic. I’ve got Tamiflu stocked from the last scare (involving avian flu), but not too many other people do, even people I told to hoard a supply. People just don’t take things seriously unless it’s right here, right now, happening in front of their faces. When deciding on what kind of response to take, we should look back to 1976 and to 1948 and 1918, but we shouldn’t base our response solely on those flus (or on Twitter). This is a different flu that could have the potential to be worse or could turn out to be an empty threat.

In the future, though, pandemics will happen as they always have, and we do need to be ready for that. All the recent wildly infectious flus have come from human contact with livestock, and that’s certainly something that needs to be addressed. Meanwhile, you can just track this one.

The CDC is on top of any possible swine flu epidemic, according to NPR.

They are encouraging sick people not to go to work and issuing bulletins.

The Obama administration is handling the situation calmly, albeit with a dash of security theater.

Liberal bloggers are surmising that universal healthcare would somehow make a difference.

In other words, everything is proceeding normally.

Yet when looking at the CDC’s health advisory and FAQ regarding the swine flu, it’s painfully obvious that the obvious just isn’t being stated: that the whole thing has come about due to humans eating pigs for food. Waaaay at the bottom of the CDC’s FAQ, the very last question reads:

Can I get swine influenza from eating or preparing pork?
No. Swine influenza viruses are not spread by food. You cannot get swine influenza from eating pork or pork products. Eating properly handled and cooked pork products is safe.

This is like saying, “Your car crash was caused by a drunk driver, not alcohol.” It’s skirting the issue. The pigs wouldn’t have gotten flu or even existed if people weren’t eating them for food in the first place.

How did humans get flu from pigs? Most likely it was through the air, but the CDC can’t know that with 100% certainty at this point, when we don’t even know all the parameters of what we’re facing. Would you really eat pork from the original farm in Mexico where the four-year-old started this whole thing? Would the head of the CDC or the head of the USDA eat that pork? Maybe there’s no risk at all, but why keep eating porkchops in the meantime?

Indeed, another agency, the USDA, has rushed to say, as summed up by the Associated Press, “Fear of swine flu is a good reason to wash your hands, but not to take pork off the menu.” Raising pigs as food can kill the farmers and you, but no, for heaven’s sake, don’t stop eating it. Don’t hurt our pig farming lobbies!

Alex Avery at The Corner writes, “True to liberal form, NPR News just reported that ‘some’ are pointing the finger at Mexican ‘factory pig farming’ as a likely culprit. You’d never know that during the past half-decade the World Health Organization has been doing its utmost to get third-world farmers to abandon traditional mixed-livestock farming and to adopt modern confinement systems where animals are seperated by species and kept from interacting with wild animals. Too politically incorrect.”

Avery provides no evidence against the assertion that the first case of swine flu originated near a Smithfield mass pork production facility. He implies that the WHO’s preferred methods of containment would prevent infectious diseases such as the swine flu by keeping different species apart, but that’s hogwash. Avery, just how- in your expert opinion- should Smithfield Foods keep flies away from its massive, million-pig manure lagoons?

Pigs raised as food by farmers, by definition, cannot be separated from those farmers. Even if they never interact with any other species, the pigs will be interacting with a very important species to you and me: humans. We now know that swine flu is what we can get as a result, along with manure lagoons and bacon.

The AP writes:

” The thrifty measures Obama ordered for federal agencies are the equivalent of asking a family that spends $60,000 in a year to save $6.

Obama made his push for frugality the subject of his first Cabinet meeting, ensuring it would command the capital’s attention. It also set off outbursts of mental math and scribbled calculations as political friend and foe tried to figure out its impact.

The bottom line: Not much.

The president gave his Cabinet 90 days to find $100 million in savings to achieve over time.

For all the trumpeting, the effort raised questions about why Obama set the bar so low, considering that $100 million amounts to:

_Less than one-quarter of the budget increase that Congress awarded to itself.

_4 percent of the military aid the United States sends to Israel.

_Less than half the cost of one F-22 fighter plane.

_7 percent of the federal subsidy for the money-losing Amtrak passenger rail system.

_1/10,000th of the government’s operating budgets for Cabinet agencies, excluding the Iraq and Afghan wars and the stimulus bill.”

Of course, there are those who think that Obama’s doing all he can to restrain the budget.

Some libertarians may view Abraham Lincoln as a tyrant or a criminal (even a litmus test for whether or not someone is libertarian!), but I can’t agree. Maybe it’s because I’m from Illinois. At the same time, libertarians might get excited over the ideas of Darwin, and what that might mean for liberty.

I’ll probably save more Lincoln-related libertarian arguments for another day, but I’m shocked when I hear some people talking about Lincoln and drinking this “Lincoln was a tyrant” Kool-Aid. Let’s say that George W. Bush becomes governor of Texas again. The Texas government then decides that it wants to, say, attack Iran. The federal government says they can’t. Texas then announces that it is seceding from the United States effective immediately. Is Bush a hero for states’ rights or libertarian causes, or is he the tyrant?

I believe that the Southern states should have been able to secede if they had wanted to, but only if the matter was put to their citizens by referendum and won by a vast majority. That was not done in the South– and needless to say, they didn’t give the slaves a vote on the matter, either. Some might say that as elected representatives, the Southern legislatures had the right to do what they pleased in representing the people. Again, the slaves hadn’t gotten a vote on those representatives, had they? They seceded as soon as Lincoln became President, not for some liberty-related principle, but because they wanted to continue the system of slavery. That’s nothing for a libertarian to exalt, in any manner, but I see it done continually.

Sure, Lincoln expanded government powers to an unprecedented degree– but almost every President has done that, so why single out Lincoln (compared to, say, Teddy Roosevelt) when Lincoln was obviously well-meaning, freed the slaves, and was assassinated in office (so he certainly was punished for any mistakes he might have committed while in office)? Why disparage Lincoln while exalting those who would have kept slavery in existence, something that is the antithesis of libertarianism and freedom in general?

I don’t believe that the federal government has the right to interfere in state matters unless perhaps when rights under the Bill of Rights are being severely breached. Others may disagree. Who is going to enforce freedom of speech, or the press, or the other rights? Did the slaves have any of these rights? At that time, there wasn’t really a court system to deal with these matters, even for non-slaves. Do I think the DEA should be raiding terminally ill cancer patients, or anyone for that matter in no-knock drug raids? Of course not. Do I think that the federal government should be coming in when an essential freedom such as whether one is kept as a slave or allowed to be free is being breached? Perhaps. As one example of how far the federal government has come from defending these rights, take a look at Heller v. DC last year, when the federal government came down on the side of the District of Columbia’s handgun ban, which was clearly a violation of the Second Amendment.

Lincoln can’t be responsible for what people did after him; he, like all the presidents of the 1800s, would be astonished at the powers the federal government has now claimed for itself. There was no income tax in Lincoln’s day, few federal agencies, and of course, the president just went to the theatre with one security guard, imagine that.

Now, the problem with this is that it can be a slippery slope. Once the federal government got rid of slavery, then it wanted to get rid of other things. Now it wants to get rid of drugs (and even drugs in other countries!), interferes in neighborhood disputes (ex. a local group went to the Department of Housing and Urban Development when it thought the city should provide water services to its neighborhood), gets involved in every aspect of business and almost every aspect of personal life, and I could go on. It has exceeded things that are black and white such as, should people be owned by other people, and has greatly expanded its power beyond almost any comprehension.

I don’t think that Lincoln started that. He may have begun the framework, sure, but he had help– those expanded government powers could have been stopped by the Southerners who insisted on keeping slaves. I’ve even heard otherwise intelligent people refer to Lincoln as a murderer. Sure, maybe there could have been an alternative to the Civil War. Those most in charge of that were the leaders of the South, who seceded as soon as Lincoln came to office.

Anyway, let’s move on to the less controversial subject of Charles Darwin! (“The Great Disturber”??) First of all, local schools should be allowed to teach what they want. Involving entire states in what should be local education leads to problems like those seen in Kansas, Pennsylvania and Texas, where evolution is put on a level with, let’s say, time travel rather than with gravity. Teaching intelligent design in school, by the way, is the same as the governor of a state sending public school kids home with flyers about a kids’ health program (as Rod Blagojevich did in Illinois), teaching that taxes are good because they build roads (as I recently encountered when teaching a public-school approved curriculum to a student I tutor), etc. As Radley Balko once said,

“Intelligent design is to evolutionary biology what socialism is to free-market economics.”

Some Darwin quotes for Darwin Day.

In a case that has “long legal battle” written all over it, Sausalito, California might just find out. It’s banned medical marijuana dispensaries, establishments approved by both state and city voters by referendum– a referendum which of course goes against the DEA.

One thing the polished Miss Williams did buy into, something that seems to be gaining traction in the progressive hivemind, is the promise of “green jobs.” Senator Obama talked about green jobs and the promise of a new energy economy. I posited that government’s bipartisan management of ethanol, a single energy product, has been so clownish and corrupt as to bring into question goverment’s ability to manage an entire energy economy, one that will presumably have lots of products, many of them more complex than corn-gas, and most of which presumably do not yet exist. I ask if this gives Miss Williams pause. It gives her none. Her response, which is expected, is that if only we get the right people into office, government will be good at doing things that government has never been good at doing before. She really, really seems to believe this when she says it. Sen. Obama seems to believe it, too. I ask Miss Williams how the government should go about bringing us into the clear bright day of green jobs. She answers: training. I ask her if she means that the government should begin training people for jobs that do not exist. She answers in the affirmative. She smiles.

Update: Excellent article from “Reason” on the problems with Obama saying he’ll create green jobs.

No one except my American companions and I paid them any mind, as if it was completely a normal, everyday thing.

This leads to two questions: Why does Europe, of all places, allow huge dogs in restaurants when they are so highly regulated in other areas?

and

Why doesn’t America, land of the free and home of the brave and a country of dog lovers, not allow even small dogs in restaurants?

It turns out that this is not due to restaurant owners’ choice, or any problems with hygiene, but because of an FDA recommendation the whole nation abides by because states adopt the FDA Food Code. The reasons given are that the dogs could pee on floors and that people might pet the dogs and then prepare food. Toddlers and old people can pee on floors as well, but we don’t ban them, do we? I have never heard of an outbreak of restaurant diseases in Europe do to people bringing their dogs inside, have you?

It’s common practice not just in Austria but in all of Europe to bring dogs into restaurants of any level of service.

So the next time you think that Europe is more highly regulated than the United States, just think of all those poor little friendy puppies recommended by our federal government and forced by our states and localities to be left at home in order for their owners to patronize restaurants, while European dogs lie quietly under the table.

You can’t get very far in Austria without being reminded of the country’s Nazi past. Austria was invaded by Germany, although it accepted the invasion willingly at the time. Today, the country has erected a “Monument Against War and Fascism” in its capital city, Vienna, to commemorate victims of violence in all wars, but especially those who died at the hands of the Nazis during World War II. Many Austrian Jews, including the preeminent economist Ludwig von Mises, were forced to flee under the threat of being sent to concentration camps.

Austria learned that it is sometimes best not to take sides in a war, because you may very well be siding with evil.

One particular statue included in the Monument Against War and Fascism includes an image of Orpheus burying his head in the stone on the way to the underworld. According to Rick Steves, it “reminds Austrians (and the rest of us) of the consequences of not keeping their government on track.”

Steves goes on to write:

In 1955, after 10 years of joint occupation by the victorious Allies, Austria regained total independence on the condition that it would be forever neutral (and never join NATO or the Warsaw Pact). To this day, Austria is outside of NATO (and Germany).

Perhaps we in other countries could take a lesson from Austria in this way. Why do we need NATO? Why do we need countries meddling in other countries’ business? Austria allowed Germany to take it over because the Austrians thought they were doing the best thing possible for Austria.

Perhaps other countries are making these same mistakes right now. Yesterday I left Vienna for Innsbruck, but this particular lesson is not one that can be left behind.