Red Lights ...

I'm driving through a four way stop today, and I see that they are installing a red light. There is nothing wrong with this four way stop. I never have to wait long, coming from any direction, and I have never seen an accident there. Still, they are installing a red light. It occurs to me that this is the perfect symbol of increased government intervention.




Stop signs are necessary. They take messy little places on the road and give people a set of rules to follow which allows everything to proceed smoothly. You are trusted to use your own judgement, knowledge of the rules, and politeness to help things move more quickly for everyone. Most of the time, a stop sign is enough.



Red lights are annoying. Sure, sometimes they are necessary, like a stop sign is not going to be sufficient to direct traffic on a four lane highway, but the vast majority of the time, it hinders traffic. Putting a red light in in this intersection (which seems to be funded by the stimulus money), and in countless others, will cause what was once a smoothly running bit of road to turn into a chaotic mess. Unlike stop signs, which give you the rules and trust you to use your judgement and follow them to know when you should and should not go, red lights tell you when to go and when not to. Instead of trusting people to decide when they should and should not go, people are forced to obey some machine programmed by some guy on the basis of standardizations and predictions. Suddenly, your twenty minute commute is now a thirty minute commute, you find yourself backed up in traffic which never existed before, and you find yourself driving increasingly dangerously to attempt to get through before the light turns red. Sometimes, you find yourself the only person at the intersection in the middle of the night, waiting for the light to turn green, wondering if the traffic engineers were vindictive or incompetent. You are wasting gas, money, and time, and releasing all sorts of polution into the environment. Pretty soon, you see the first accident you have ever seen at that red light. They took a perfectly smoothly working place (oh sure, you ran into the occasional rude driver), and, because they didn't trust people to be able to exercise their own judgement, they turned it into this monstrosity. And the red light was expensive, too!

Abortion ...

A lot of people view abortion as a woman's rights issue, of whether or not a woman has the right to her own body.  I don't.  I view it as a question of when it is the state's responsibility to step in and protect a living being.  For me, the issue of whether or not abortion should be permitted by law is solely an issue of when the fetus is a baby, of when the fetus is alive.  If it is not alive, then the state has no business regulating it.  If it is alive, then the state must protect it, as it does infants and toddlers, etcetera.  There is a lot of black and white in abortion, like after the fetus is viable, I think that arguments against it being alive are pretty weak.  Also, after it is viable, it does not need the mother's body to survive, so arguments against it benefitting the mother are fairly weak (although I do not think that that should be the criteria for when an abortion is performed, unless it is a medical reason).  On the other end of the spectrum, I don't think that contraceptives or the morning after pill can justifiably be regulated by the state.  There is, however, a grey area.  That is the area after fertilization and before viability.  Science seems to increasingly show that there are strong signs of life in the second trimester, but the first trimester is very debatable.  It is in this grey area that the big question, I believe, comes, and that is whether or not the state has the right to mandate, in that first trimester, whether or not the embryo is a living being.  There are two sides to the debate about whether it is or is not living, and making abortion illegal in that first trimester is taking a firm stance on one side of the issue.  There can be very real, rational debate about whether or not abortion is morally or legally acceptable in that first trimester, and while I tend to believe that the embryo is alive at that point, it is possible that the state has no right to make that claim.                                                                                                             

That said, the issue of whether or not abortion should be legal is different from the issue of whether or not it should be funded by government money.  Apart from the obvious problem of forcing people to use their money to pay for things with which they do not agree, morally, there is also the fact that abortion is an elective procedure, and, in the majority of cases, not something which benefits the mother's health.  This makes abortion much more akin to cosmetic surgery.  If abortion is going to be paid for with government money, then so should nose jobs, breast implants, and botox.  While I do not disagree with any of those being legal, none of them are the best use of healthcare money.  The fact is that there is a finite amount of money which is available for healthcare, and, in a nationalized system, if one person uses it, it takes away from what another person can use, and that is one of the problems I have with that type of system.  People using federal money to cover abortion means less money available to use for necessary medical procedures.