Limited Government Is Less Prone To This Flaw

I’m trying to figure out a way to criticize Michael Gerson’s column in yesterday’s Washington Post that properly registers the obliviousness to the contradictions of his protests. If I spent enough time to develop something pithy, it would be scathing. Instead, I’ll jump into his opening paragraphs:

There is a common thread running through President Obama’s pro-choice agenda: the coercion of those who disagree with it.

Obama has begun providing federal funds for international groups that promote or perform abortions overseas. He has moved to weaken conscience protections for health-care professionals. And he has chosen the most radical possible option on the use of embryonic stem cells — a free license for researchers, with boundaries set only by the National Institutes of Health.

So, when the president wants to use public funds to pay for abortion, we must think of those who disagree with abortion. But when the president wants to direct public funds to faith-based organizations, Gerson misses the flaw. When the president wants to direct public funds to pay for circumcising healthy African infant males, Gerson misses the flaw. What’s good to Michael Gerson is apparently all that’s good, and you should pay for it, too. But how dare you not place limits on government for issues that he opposes.

Michael Gerson is a hypocrite.

Linkfest

LINK: From the April issue of reason, Matt Welch addresses the ongoing topic of “liberalterianism” and how it’s doomed. The heart of his argument, which I agree with completely:

It is certainly no surprise that any party, let alone the Democrats, would want to use that fancy government once it held the awesome reins of power. Unified Republican governance this decade should disabuse even the most gullible from the notion that either of our two major parties is ever going to enact a small-government agenda, especially during a perceived crisis. But already during Obama’s first 100 days we’ve seen how quickly liberals will turn against libertarians once they’re no longer swinging at the same piñata.

Small-l libertarians will never find sufficient common ground with anyone interested in maintaining partisanship at the expense of ideas.

LINK: Also from reason Ronald Bailey discusses a free market approach to health care coverage proposed by University of Chicago economist John Cochrane.

So how does health-status insurance work? As Cochrane explains, “Market-based lifetime health insurance has two components: medical insurance and health-status insurance. Medical insurance covers your medical expenses in the current year, minus deductibles and copayments. Health-status insurance covers the risk that your medical premiums will rise.” Cochrane offers the example of a 25-year-old who will likely incur $2,000 in medical expenses in a year. His medical policy component would thus cost about $2,000 per year, plus administrative fees and profit. For purposes of illustration, Cochrane then assumes the 25-year-old has a 1 percent risk of developing a chronic medical condition that would increase his average medical expenses to $10,000 per year. In that case, he would be able to buy medical insurance for $10,000 per year—which is a big financial hit. That’s where health-status insurance comes in: It insures that you can be insured in the future.

I’m not fully convinced that this would work, but I’m not unconvinced, either. I don’t know enough. However, the idea seems to be based in personal responsibility. Life is unfair, so some of us get sick. There are costs involved. It’s unfortunate if medical costs cause financial distress. We should mitigate that, but provide individuals the options to do that for themselves. That is the right approach.

Mr. Cochrane also discusses how his plan would help separate health insurance from employer provision. That will be a feature of any responsible health care reform. (Transferring the incentive from employer to government does not qualify as that type of responsible reform.)

LINK: Harold Meyerson is an incurious propagandist:

But in the United States, conservatives have never bashed socialism because its specter was actually stalking America. Rather, they’ve wielded the cudgel against such progressive reforms as free universal education, the minimum wage or tighter financial regulations. Their signal success is to have kept the United States free from the taint of universal health care. The result: We have the world’s highest health-care costs, borne by businesses and employees that cannot afford them; nearly 50 million Americans have no coverage; infant mortality rates are higher than those in 41 nations — but at least (phew!) we don’t have socialized medicine.

Universal education is not “free”. The minimum wage costs jobs. Financial regulations overlooked obvious warnings of Bernie Madoff. “Nearly 50 million” uninsured is not true. Infant mortality is more complex than a quick comparison can demonstrate.

He also wrote this, so it’s clear that he’s interested in his narrative more than facts.

Take it from a democratic socialist: Laissez-faire American capitalism is about to be supplanted not by socialism but by a more regulated, viable capitalism. And the reason isn’t that the woods are full of secret socialists who are only now outing themselves.

We do not have laissez-faire capitalism. No amount of stating preferred explanations will make them true.

LINK: Steven Pearlstein defends President Obama’s budget in a way I don’t fully understand.

In the meantime, the federal government is one of the few entities that is still able to borrow in the current environment, and given the perceived safety of buying government bonds, the cost of that borrowing is about as low as it has ever been. From a purely cash-flow point of view, substituting 18 percent credit card debt with 3 percent Treasury bond debt is a positive development for the grandchildren.

The 18 percent credit card debt makes no sense here. Government borrowing isn’t replacing that. And my hypothetical grandchildren do not have any debt right now. Adding more, even at 3 percent, is hardly a positive development for them. The administration intends to grow the debt, not refinance it.

Refinancing costs are relevant, too. If the so-called positive development of new debt at 3 percent interest helps us, what will this new debt look like at 4, 5, or more percent when interest rates rise, as they will? Maintaining the apparently-permanent interest payments is a cost.

He continues with a bit about how infrastructure creates lasting economic value without defending it. Would the Bridge to Nowhere have justified its cost? Doesn’t matter, it seems. He reassures:

Strange as it may sound, there are times when it’s necessary to make things worse in order to make them better. Fighting a war to achieve a lasting peace. Making a patient sick to cure his cancer with radiation or chemotherapy. And, yes, taking on more debt to help get the country out of a debt-induced recession.

Unlike chemotherapy, where doctors eventually stop dosing a patient, what evidence do we have that politicians will ever believe we’ve reached the “ideal time for the government to deleverage and put its financial house in order”? The new deficit spending is permanent. The only open question once the budget passes is who will pay for it. Right now, the answer is “the rich” and the Chinese. Eventually, it will be the middle class, including all of our grandchildren.

LINK: Wanting an iPhone does not mean a consumer is entitled to an iPhone with the carrier of his choice.

The Consumers Union, the New America Foundation, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, as well as software provider Mozilla and small wireless carriers MetroPCS (PCS) and Leap Wireless International (LEAP), are lining up in opposition not only to the Apple-AT&T partnership, but to all manner of arrangements whereby mobile phones are tethered exclusively to a single wireless service provider.

Apparently a voluntary contract between two parties means nothing if it means a consumer has to then make a choice that she doesn’t like. I want an iPhone with Sprint, but I can’t get it. My response is to decide which has more value and act accordingly, not whine to the government.

More Consumers Union nonsense here and here.

Individual Incentives Can Be Skewed

When I wrote about comparative effectiveness research, I focused on the merits of including funding in the deficit spending bill as a path to more socialized health care. I haven’t changed my opinion on that, but it’s worth noting that the idea behind this research is reasonable. Do our interventions produce results?

Following that, here’s an interesting analysis of comparative effectiveness research that focuses on the relevant issues (link via Kevin, M.D.). The analysis contains useful examples, and is worth reading. I don’t think we’ll get what we expect from the newly-funded research unless we expect more decision-making power handed to bureaucrats. Still, the idea behind comparative effectiveness research is reasonable.

But the more useful, immediate discussion is this:

Here’s where things get dicey. A chief medical officer I know was once discussing unnecessary procedures in his healthcare system. In a rare moment of unvarnished truthtelling, one of his procedural specialists told him, “I make my living off unnecessary procedures.” Even if we stick to the correct side of the ethical fault line, doctors and companies inevitably believe in their technologies and products, making it tricky to get them to willingly lay down their arms. …

You can probably figure out that I’m going to discuss this in the context of infant circumcision. First, let me make this clear, in case anyone’s missed me saying it previously: I do not believe there is a conspiracy to circumcise infant males. It is a common, actively-pursued goal, but it does not fit the nefarious intent behind a conspiracy.

That does not mean that individual doctors are immune to the undeniable point that genital surgery is not indicated for most infant males. The ethical claim is impregnable to excuses based in cultural and moral relativism. What incentive does a doctor like Dr. Neil Pollock have to begin deferring to his patients’ needs rather than his own?

Dr. Neil Pollock, who performs about 2,500 infant circumcisions annually in Metro Vancouver, travelled to Rwanda in December to teach his circumcision method to local surgeons.
…

Pollock is hopeful that the painless [ed. note: Even if true, the ethical claim must win out.] nature of his technique, which takes less than a minute to perform, will persuade many Rwandan parents to consider circumcision for their infants.

Once again: When public health officials discuss the potential reduction in HIV risk from voluntary, adult male circumcision, they always forget voluntary and adult. Always.

Looking at comparative effectiveness research, Dr. Pollock is based in Vancouver, British Columbia, outside the realm of the deficit spending bill’s reach. He’s good anecdotal evidence, though, because he shows what it means to be uninterested in placing your patient’s needs and rights first. He’s built a practice around performing more than 12 infant circumcisions per business day. Will he readily give that up, since he’s so clearly invested in continuing the involuntary procedure?

Of course, the conclusion on infant circumcision is already in. Here’s what the Canadian Pediatric Society says about routine infant circumcision:

Recommendation: Circumcision of newborns should not be routinely performed.

I see no reason to believe there will be any difference in the US. Most American doctors already ignore the ethical case for protecting the rights of infant males. There are people invested in perpetuating the imposition of unnecessary genital cutting. No government study is going to change that.

“Get Out of the Way” is a valid choice.

Like most Robert Samuelson columns, I like significant portions and despise the rest. Usually I like his analysis and despise his proposals. The former rests on economics. The latter rests on government. Yesterday’s column is no different. His conclusion, which is the sanity:

All this is telling. The administration and Congress, though pledging to restore economic growth, care more about protecting foreclosure victims and promoting homeownership among the young and poor. Politics trumps economics.

That is spot-on. But his proposal is that the Obama administration and Congress are trying wrong sort of political interference in the economy. He suggests this:

The simplest way is to bribe prospective buyers not to wait. For example: Give them a 10 percent tax credit, up to $15,000, on the purchase of a new home. Anyone who bought a $150,000 home would get a $15,000 tax break. The credit would expire in a year. Waiting would be costly. Buyers would delay only if they thought home prices would drop as much or more.

The $15,000 tax break is problematic on its own. But the 1 year expiration date shows the true problem. This proposal is an attempt to manipulate the market into preferred behavior now, believing that the possible short-term boost will not result in a long-term letdown. But purchasing a home is not a spur-of-the-moment decision. Treating it that way politically and financially is a large reason we’re in our current mess. There are consequences of this behavior. For example, if artificially rising home prices encourages more people to attempt to sell their homes, are we better off?

Somehow, we need to cut bloated inventories (13 months of supply for unsold new homes), curb falling prices and stimulate new construction. …

In the short term, I doubt we can manipulate two of those at the same time. But cutting bloated inventories and stimulating new construction are mutually exclusive as concurrent political strategies. I vote against trying to cheat on either, but considering them demonstrates only a desire to promote home ownership over renting. Home ownership is not the valid choice for everyone, so this still places politics over economics.

Ron Paul is still not a libertarian.

Too many libertarians pounced on the promise of having a libertarian candidate for president. Hence, Rep. Ron Paul generated significant support from libertarians last year. He still receives many kudos. Unfortunately, Ron Paul is not a libertarian. The few labeling him as such harms us all. Yesterday Andrew Sullivan linked to a story about Rep. Paul with this introduction:

Even libertarians get their pork:

The story:

Rep. Ron Paul vehemently denounced the $410 billion catch-all spending bill approved last week by the House of Representatives.

But although the libertarian-leaning Republican from Lake Jackson cast a vote against the massive spending measure, his fingerprints were on some of the earmarks that helped inflate its cost.

Paul played a role in obtaining 22 earmarks worth $96.1 million, which led the Houston congressional delegation, according to a Houston Chronicle analysis of more than 8,500 congressionally mandated projects inserted into the bill. His earmarks included repair projects to the Galveston Seawall damaged by Hurricane Ike and the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway.

Rep. Paul is touted as Dr. No because he votes against what he believes to be beyond the legitimate powers of the federal government. That would earn my endorsement, except he behaves without principles. Yes, that money is going to be spent somewhere else if Rep. Paul doesn’t request it for his district. That does not mean he has to request it. He requests it, repeatedly, because he figures it might as well go to his district. His actions legitimize the illegitimate expansion of the federal government. He harms the credibility of libertarianism as a political philosophy.

This reminds me of something I posted early last year when the Ron Paul newsletter mess was in the news. It’s a quote from Wirkman Virkkala:It is an odd thing, trying to be a civilized person in the libertarian movement — or in modern society. You have to keep some independence of mind. You cannot allow yourself to become part of any cult. For all the leaders will betray you. All the prophets will prove false. All the gems will prove brummagem.

As libertarians do we really need to keep repeating this lesson? Shouldn’t we understand this by now?

**********

More from the Houston Chronicle article:

Earmarks, said Rep. Ted Poe, R-Humble, “allow lawmakers to have a say in how taxpayer dollars (are) spent.” His nine earmarks included $712,500 to mitigate airport noise at George Bush Intercontinental Airport.

“It is in the best interest of the taxpayers,” Poe said, “to have their member of Congress secure funding for local projects than to leave it up to unaccountable and un-elected bureaucrats in Washington.”

It is in the best interest of the taxpayers to have them make their own funding decisions for projects they endorse and deem necessary. Don’t act pious because you redistributed my money rather than a bureaucrat. Taking my money and giving it to someone else is still taking my money. Why should I pay to repair the Galveston Seawall, which is more than 1,400 miles from my home?

Prior Ted Poe nonsense here and here.

Capitalism improves. Social engineering punishes.

In yesterday’s Washington Post, E.J. Dionne wrote a column around this idea:

The central issue in American politics now is whether the country should reverse a three-decade-long trend of rising inequality in incomes and wealth.

Politicians will say lots of things in the coming weeks, but they should be pushed relentlessly to address the bottom-line question: Do they believe that a fairer distribution of capitalism’s bounty is essential to repairing a sick economy? Everything else is a subsidiary issue.

Apparently we can’t ask whether or not our current and prior attempts to achieve a “fairer” distribution of capitalism’s bounty contributed to our sick economy. Not that we have capitalism in the way that Dionne wishes to imply. The failings of a mixed economy do not prove that it’s time to toss the capitalism from the mix. Making that case requires a bit more than tossing around the undefined, subjective word fair and pretending that the argument is won.

As Dionne continues:

“Over the past two or three decades, the top 1 percent of Americans have experienced a dramatic increase from 10 percent to more than 20 percent in the share of national income that’s accruing to them,” said Peter Orszag, Obama’s budget director. Now, he said, was their time “to pitch in a bit more.”

Is there more direct proof that liberals view the rich as the nation’s piggy bank than claiming it’s time for the top 1 percent “to pitch in a bit more”? Does Orszag mean the top 1 percent who paid 39.89% of all federal income taxes in 2006? Dionne is saying that it’s okay to increase the existing unfairness in the tax code because the disparity in income at the extremes is unacceptable to his sense of fairness. He must ignore the question of whether or not the alleged victims of the unfairness of capitalism’s bounty are better off than they were in the past. He concludes:

Do we want to be a moderately more equal country or not? This is the question Obama has put before the nation. Let’s debate it without the distracting rhetorical sideshows designed to obscure the stakes in the coming battle.

I would ask something different: Do we want to be a more productive country or not? Does everybody gain, even if the distribution is “unfair”, or do we harm some to improve others in the short-term? Dionne has the wrong preference.

Searching for a Solution’s Problem

John Cole writes about the direction of health care in America (in response to an entry by Andrew Sullivan).

… Only a fool can not see the writing on the wall- we are going to have to move to single-payer at some point, because businesses can not compete and the largest problem for Detroit is… their health care obligations and other retiree benefits. Likewise, we spend an enormous amount of our GDP on health care yet have rankings that look third world on issues like infant mortality. Something has to give.

I don’t want to play the fool here, because I see that we’re moving to single-payer at some point. That’s the obvious political outcome driven by our unthinking, economically-illiterate public debate. This is a Bad Idea because of the problems everyone is glossing over, particularly those involving rationing.

But that’s not my quibble here. We do not have to move to single-payer. If part of the problem for American business is the cost of health care, the proper step is to separate health care from employment. Single-payer is one route to attempt that, but it is not the only route.

Do we have a national automobile insurance crisis because our employers do not provide subsidized auto insurance? The comparison is weak, as I’m happy to admit. The absurdity is intentional. But it points out that options exist beyond Employer or Government. The incentive system involved in employer-provided health insurance is flawed. We need to move beyond our limited mindset that if someone doesn’t take care of us, we’re all going to die a horrible, uninsured death.

Mr. Cole is more cautious about the possibility of success from that outcome than most, but he uses emotional justifications to support the national undertaking. For example, infant mortality is more complex than just reciting statistics. As the link shows, there are ways to look at the complexities that don’t prove that U.S. infant mortality rates are meaningless as a comparison. But this issue is too big and the outcomes too loaded with consequences to disregard the nuances and uncertainty in favor of a pre-determined solution.

I didn’t like President Obama’s speech.

I’m a bit behind on this, but I didn’t read the transcript of President Obama’s Tuesday speech to Congress until last night. The people who see little starbursts every time the President speaks scare me. Because they’ll listen to that speech and see change. They argue that we finally have an adult in the White House. Probably, but he’s still a politician. That speech was not change. It wasn’t even well written. It was political theater, a giant lie masquerading as the maturity of a statesman. It was drivel.

I pulled many bits out of the speech to highlight, but that review would be too long and too detailed. The general theme is the same from every point, anyway. I narrowed my focus to three passages that I think capture the essence of the charade. First:

In other words, we have lived through an era where too often short-term gains were prized over long-term prosperity, where we failed to look beyond the next payment, the next quarter, or the next election.
…

As soon as I took office, I asked this Congress to send me a recovery plan by Presidents Day that would put people back to work and put money in their pockets, not because I believe in bigger government — I don’t — not because I’m not mindful of the massive debt we’ve inherited — I am.

What was the deficit spending bill, if not the pursuit of short-term gains? President Obama made a case that he’s investing in the future, but the fear he used to quickly sell it suggests otherwise. Only productive activity puts new money in people’s pockets. The money the government seeks to put into people’s pockets today is money extracted from future productivity. It is borrowed, as our ballooned deficit proves. That is a short-term gain prized over long-term prosperity.

Packed in there is also the lie that President Obama does not believe in bigger government. If he believed that, his speech would’ve been very different. He wouldn’t have asked Congress to join him “in doing whatever proves necessary”. He wouldn’t have promised new ways that government would “rebuild” America. “Remake” would’ve been the accurate word choice. His call is for more government. For example, how else can he square this paragraph with his small government claim?

We know the country that harnesses the power of clean, renewable energy will lead the 21st century. And yet it is China that has launched the largest effort in history to make their economy energy efficient. We invented solar technology, but we’ve fallen behind countries like Germany and Japan in producing it. New plug-in hybrids roll off our assembly lines, but they will run on batteries made in Korea.

President Obama argues that “the largest effort in history” is how to measure what a country is doing. Forget benchmarks that would clearly show the Chinese much further behind us in modern energy technology. Forget future results from the efforts. It’s the largest effort in history. They must be doing it correctly. He’s shifted the debate to big actions that he will tell us only the government can undertake.

The real clue is the last line. If we make plug-in hybrids, that’s not enough because Koreans are making the batteries. A global economy involves exports and imports. President Obama is making a moral argument that we We should make batteries without making the argument that they They make the batteries less productively than We would make them. Nor does He he make the case that overall production is worse off. If we have a comparative advantage in making batteries, that’s interesting but incomplete. What else would we make if the Koreans freed us from making batteries? Or are the Koreans just supposed to wait for us to make everything and then they can buy our cars with… If we take over the world’s production, what exactly would they pay us with?

President Obama is a politician engaging in populist rhetoric. He shows this again when he gets to taxes.

We will root out — we will root out the waste and fraud and abuse in our Medicare program that doesn’t make our seniors any healthier. We will restore a sense of fairness and balance to our tax code by finally ending the tax breaks for corporations that ship our jobs overseas.

In order to save our children from a future of debt, we will also end the tax breaks for the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans.

There’s more that follows, and much of it reads as though he’s tacking fantastical lie after fantastical lie to his speech as he thinks of them. But these two paragraphs provide enough insight into his political goal.

First, it’s nonsense to think of jobs as “our jobs”. There’s more to economic success than Us Doing Something. Something has to be more than anything. What are we good at? What are others good at? These are economic questions to be sorted, not political questions to be dictated.

Second, President Obama is surely aware of how the income tax burden is overwhelmingly shouldered by the highest income earners in America. (There is a difference between wealth and income that President Obama ignores.) We have lost our sense of fairness and balance, but taxing the more productive members of society more will further distort the unfair imbalance, not rectify the problem. President Obama is a politician engaging in populist rhetoric.

KipEsquire provides a concise summary of why progressive taxation is inherently unfair, in the context of President Obama’s newly-proposed budget. Matt Welch explains how President Obama contradicted his statemen’s pose with his own words. Cato @ Liberty’s Daniel Ikenson explores a different explanation (e.g. the high tax burden faced by American corporations) for why American companies outsource “our” jobs.

Did you know you’d bought this?

Do you want to want to pay for another man’s circumcision? Too bad:

Top on the Ministry of Health’s five-year strategy is the free circumcision, to be made available in all public health centres.

Sh960 million from the US government has been injected into the project to buy surgical materials, mobilise communities and provide counselling. With a budget of Sh2,000 for each volunteer, the campaign targets 500,000 uncircumcised men in Kenya.

I’m not naive enough to think that men means males who’ve reached an age of consent. But I’ll assume that’s what it means for this story. Given that 500,000 is a very large sample, how many men do you think we’ll pay to develop this attitude?

The Kenyan government launched a campaign to promote male circumcision in 2008, but it has not yet reached most parts of the country. In the northwestern district of Turkana, where the practice is not part of the culture and few have even heard of it, IRIN/PlusNews spoke to Isaac Ikone, 22.

“The government has not yet come here to talk about male circumcision, but I have heard about it from friends. They say it prevents HIV and sexually transmitted diseases. If that’s true, I would definitely go for it so I can remain healthy.

“A while ago a friend and I found out we had the same sexually transmitted disease, and when I began to wonder how that happened, he told me he had slept with a girl I had also slept with in town. He is the one who told me that if we were circumcised, we would not have got sick.

“My girlfriend is still in secondary school and when she is not around I try to abstain from sex, but I’m not always successful. I don’t like condoms; if there is a better way to prevent HIV so that I can enjoy sex skin-to-skin, I will do it.

Yes, it’s anecdotal. It’s also where we end up when we push circumcision as a panacea for genital diseases. Responsible behavior gets lost. And I’m being forced to pay for this, which will ultimately further entrench a human rights violation when it leads to more infant circumcisions.

As it will, because the push for infant circumcision is purposeful. This is from Uganda, but the sentiment is universal:

Most men and women in Uganda support medical male circumcision as a way of lowering HIV risk, and up to 62 percent of uncircumcised men would consider being circumcised, a new study has found.

The study, conducted by Uganda’s Makerere University and Family Health International, which works to promote reproductive health, with funding from the United States Agency for International Development, surveyed 1,675 men and women in four districts; the results were released in the capital, Kampala, in December 2008.

Support for circumcising sons was even greater: almost 100 percent of circumcised men supported the circumcision of their male children, while 59 percent to 77 percent of uncircumcised men were in favour of having their sons circumcised, and between 49 percent and 95 percent of women wanted the procedure performed on their male children. [emphasis added]

I don’t think this is a conspiracy. Those public health officials who ignore what the individuals want probably have good intentions. They’re pursuing it because they know it works. Our government is happily joining the ride.

And what about those children who will be circumcised as a result?

“The purpose of the research was to find out what is on the ground regarding the capacity to conduct medical male circumcision, and its acceptability among the public,” said Dr Alex Opio, assistant commissioner for national disease control. “It was also done to pave the way for developing a policy, because all policies need evidence.”

An opinion poll somehow qualifies as evidence. What the individual wants is irrelevant, subjugated to the opinion of his parents. This is what it looks like to start with an outcome and create the necessary support.

Legislating for All Based on the Extremes

Oklahoma lawmakers think eyeball tattoos are a dangerous menace:

Senate Republican Whip Cliff Branan said, “Kind of a counter culture trend, the same folks may chose to pierce certain body parts, it’s kind of the next level up.”

Senate Bill 844 has unanimously passed through the Health and Human Services Committee. Oklahoma City Senator Cliff Branan says it was brought to him by the Oklahoma Academy of Opthamology. He says it’s becoming more trendy to tattoo eye liner or eye brows, but this goes too far.

“It is completely patently disgusting and crazy to do it. We as a good public health policy we felt it was important to stop that trend before it goes any farther here in the state of Oklahoma,” Sen. Branan described.

In 2006 Oklahoma’s infant male circumcision rate was 72%. Parents in Oklahoma may freely surgically alter their child’s son’s healthy genitals for any reason, and a majority do. That’s acceptable in Oklahoma. But an adult willingly choosing to tattoo his (or her) own eyeball is unacceptable because it is “patently disgusting and crazy”.

Our society is not sane.

Via Nobody’s Business.