LEGO Update: What do the critics say?

Oi vey.

More libertarian delusions popped up today about The LEGO Movie, so I thought I'd look to see if I'm, in fact, right in my assumption that non-libertarians aren't seeing it through a libertarian lens. There are plenty of reviews out now - the film has an impressive 96% on Rotten Tomatoes - so I figured that a smattering of pull quotes from non-libertarian reviewers might be interesting.

Specifically, I wanted to grab anything that constituted a statement about themes & messages. There area few categories that these fall into. The most common seems to be related to my first-place noted theme "Play with LEGOs, they're super fun!!" plus several observations of the irony of a movie that is, itself, epic product placement with an overt anti-corporate message.

Note:

"Is it a touch off-message that—in connection with this giddy paean to individual imagination and not following instructions—Lego is releasing a series of complex movie-themed construction sets (The Getaway Glider, Cloud Cuckoo Palace, etc.)? Well, yes it is. But what can you do? It’s strictly business. Lord Business."
     -Christopher Orr, The Atlantic

"It certainly works as a feature-length Lego commercial, but it also doubles as a feature-length reminder of how toys can serve as catalysts for creativity, letting kids get lost in worlds the toymakers never imagined."
     -Keith Phipps, The Dissolve

"...the picture celebrates the product while sending it up and subverting corporate and consumer culture of which the The Lego Movie itself is a part."
     -Henry Fitzherbert, Express

"Mostly the film does the madness for you and it isn’t just a product-placing madness. A certain Danish toy giant will benefit – no one can doubt – from the flocking through turnstiles of the entire world filmgoing population (judging from box office returns so far). But in a 100-minute fit of colour, comedy and surreal invention, the good craziness overpowers the greedy kind."
     -Nigel Andrews, The Financial Times

Another thing a lot of reviewers talk about is simply the childhood nostalgia of it all.

"Most of all, the film reminds us that no matter how old we are, we can still tap into our childhood curiosity."
     -Rich Cline, www.contactmusic.com

"It's possibly one of the most entertaining films about nostalgia to emerge from the studio system since Disney decided to crank the The Muppets back into bittersweet action in 2012."
     -Chris Blohm, www.littlewhitelies.com

"The film functions as a massive homage to a shared childhood experience, amplified and projected on the bigscreen. So, while the result is undoubtedly the single most product-centric film of all time, it’s also just hip and irreverent enough to leave audiences feeling as though its makers managed to pull one over on the business guys. They’ve gotten away with something, upholding and expanding the worldwide Cult of Lego — the plot literally serves to cement the right and wrong way to play with the product — while good-naturedly skewering consumer culture at large."
     -Peter Debruge, Variety

Note here that the Variety reviewer (again, this is Variety!) sees 1) nostalgic fun of children playing LEGOs in a film that is built around LEGO product-placement; and 2) a moderately ironic anti-corporate/anti-consumer message. It's there... Though it is certainly not a terribly heavy or awful one.

That's not to say no one saw a free-play & creativity vs. control & fascism message. A few of them certainly recognized that:

"The movie also delivers a nice message about balancing creativity with a follow-the-rules approach to life."
     - Bill Zwecker, Chicago Sun-Times

"They must outsmart and outrun the evil President Business, better known as Lord Business, who wants the piece for himself to maintain order and separation between all the Lego realms. So yeah, he’s kind of a fascist tyrant. But in the hands of Will Ferrell, he’s also hilariously self-serious.
...
'The Lego Movie' message of thinking for yourself and trying new things may sound a lot like theme of “The Croods” last year, but it presents this notion in a much more lively and clever manner."
     -Christy Lemire, www.christylemire.com

But again, since President/Lord Business is the avatar of Fascism, what exactly is that saying to kids? "Think for yourself, try new things... Don't be a fascist, like those evil businessmen."

There's also a whole subset of reviewers who see the film - as I did - as certainly a lot of fun, but otherwise essentially mindless with a stock bad guy businessman.

"Serving as the idealistic heart of the picture is Emmet (endearingly voiced by Pratt) a sweet but generic regular guy of a LEGO minifigure with a prodigiously empty mind, blissfully content to let instruction manuals be his guide.

And that’s just the way President Business (Ferrell) wants it. A control freak of a CEO with world domination on his mind, his obsessive disdain for creative expression has turned him into the maniacal Lord Business, whose bidding his carried out by the swivel-headed Bad Cop/Good Cop (Liam Neeson)."
     -Michael Rechtshaffen, Hollywood Reporter

So............ I say again. I do not see an obviously libertarian message here. It doesn't appear that very many reviewers - certainly not the mainstream ones - see it either. The little bit of free-society jive in the movie is overshadowed by several far more important themes, and the lesson for little kids are basically what I said in my first post.

I'm not saying it's not a fun movie, or that you shouldn't go see it. By all means... Go! Have fun. Apparently, you should see the 3D, because I'm told it's great. But good lord, libertarian friends... Quit reading hidden messages into anything and everything.

At least, don't assume that anybody else is seeing what you see.

Hey ACLU, why not try reading the bill first?

Apparently the ACLU writer, Jenny Lee, who wrote a recent article titled: "Alabama Hospitals To Pregnant Women – "Sorry, honey, we won’t help you here." couldn't actually be bothered to read the bill she was reporting on.

Her article kicks off with some first-rate fear mongering:

"It's what every pregnant woman fears. There she is excited to be pregnant for the first time. She is finally getting over the morning sickness, and she and her husband have just shared the happy news with their friends and family. Then, one night the unimaginable happens. She is lying in bed and she begins to feel immense pain and cramping. She knows something isn't right. She goes to the bathroom and she sees blood. Quickly, she wakes up her husband and the two of them rush to the emergency room.

All miscarriages can be devastating. But, for women in Alabama, this nightmare could soon get a lot worse. This week, the Alabama Senate is set to consider a cruel bill (HB 31) that would permit the hospital staff, including any doctor, nurse, counselor, or lab technician, to refuse to participate in any phase of patient medical care related to ending a pregnancy, even if that is what a patient like this woman needs to protect her own health and future fertility.

Yes, you heard that right. Under this law, if you or a loved one is pregnant and go to an emergency room in Alabama because of serious complications, every medical professional in that emergency room could refuse to help you if the care you needed to protect you from serious harm to your health required ending the pregnancy."

But.................... In reality, you did not "hear that right". Or perhaps more accurately, she lied to you.

Unlike Ms. Lee (and virtually everyone on Facebook who passed along her horror story), I decided to follow the link through to the bill itself and see what it actually had to say. Turns out, while I have some major criticisms of it as a libertarian, it absolutely would not do anything that the ACLU is claiming it would do.

If you want to follow along from the source, check out "HB31: Health Care Rights of Conscience Act".

Fortunately for me, I was waiting for a new documentary edit session to render, so I had a little time to kill, and the bill ended up only being 7 pages long, so it was actually a fairly quick read. As a result, I felt compelled to do a breakdown of each section of the bill on Facebook, and since I've already done the work, I'll share it here for posterity.

The following are direct quotes from the bill itself, along with my editorial comments, starting from the top.

A BILL TO BE ENTITLED AN ACT

Relating to health care, to allow health care providers to decline to perform any health care service that violates their conscience and provide remedies for persons who exercise that right and suffer consequences as a result.

BE IT ENACTED BY THE LEGISLATURE OF ALABAMA:

Section 1.
This act may be known and cited as the Health Care Rights of Conscience Act.

So far so good. Making sure that people are free to make their own decisions and follow their own consciences regarding what they do for a living. This is a good thing if you don't like slavery... and I don't.

But, of course, the "stated purpose" of laws usually isn't the same thing as what it will actually do. So let's see what the new rules actually say, shall we?

Section 2.
The Legislature finds and declares:
(1) It is the public policy of the State of Alabama to respect and protect the fundamental right of conscience of individuals who provide health care services.
(2) Without comprehensive protection, health care rights of conscience may be violated in various ways, such as harassment, demotion, salary reduction, termination, loss of privileges, denial of aid or benefits, and refusal to license, or refusal to certify.
(3) It is the purpose of this act to protect religious or ethical rights of all health care providers to decline to counsel, advise, provide, perform, assist, or participate in providing or performing certain health care services that violate their consciences, where they have made their objections known in writing.
(4) It is the purpose of this act to prohibit discrimination, disqualification, or coercion upon such health care providers who decline to perform any health care service that violates their conscience and who object in writing prior to being asked to perform such health care services.

(1) One would think it would be their policy to make sure everyone in EVERY field was uninhibited from pursuing their own values in their private and professional lives, but fine, good...

(2) I don't entirely agree that all of these things qualify as a rights violation - since an employer also has rights and should be able to fire you if you refuse to do the job they want you to do, but since this is just establishing a set of premises from which the law is being written, cool...

(3) Again, stated purpose vs. results? We'll see... But I am totally behind the stated purpose. You cannot morally compel someone to participate in something they believe is immoral. Just as it is horrific to conscript an army, surely it is also morally appalling to conscript health care workers into performing acts against their will. Doing so is, in fact, tantamount to indentured servitude/slavery, which any libertarian should obviously oppose.

(4) Now here's where things get a little tricky... Anti-discrimination laws are problematic because they are often violations of the rights of employers. However, as anti-discrimination laws go, this one doesn't seem so bad.... What it's saying here is that a hospital or clinic administrator can't punish or force someone to perform a procedure against their will, but also, the employee has to establish their objection *in writing* in advance.

As far as I can tell, this is just establishing that people have the right - as they should - of negotiating a contract that establishes which procedures they're willing to do and which they aren't. For example, if a doctor refused to perform circumcisions, he could write that into his contract and no hospital administrator could force him to do so afterward.

That's good, right?

Section 3.
The following words and terms shall have the meanings ascribed to them in this section, unless otherwise required by their respective context:
(1) CONSCIENCE. The religious, moral, or ethical principles held by a health care provider.
(2) DISCRIMINATION. Discrimination includes, but is not limited to: Hiring, termination, refusal of staff privileges, refusal of board certification, demotion, loss of career specialty, reduction of wages or benefits, adverse treatment in the terms and conditions of employment, refusal to award any grant, contract, or other program, or refusal to provide residency training opportunities.
(3) HEALTH CARE PROVIDER. Any individual who may be asked to participate in any way in a health care service, including, but not limited to: A physician, physician's assistant, nurse, nurse's aide, medical assistant, hospital employee, clinic employee, nursing home employee, pharmacist, researcher, medical or nursing school faculty, student, or employee, counselor, social worker, or any professional, paraprofessional, or any other person who furnishes or assists in the furnishing of health care services.
(4) HEALTH CARE SERVICE. Any phase of patient medical care, treatment or procedure that is limited to abortion, human cloning, human embryonic stem cell research, and sterilization, and is related to: Patient referrals, counseling, therapy, testing, diagnosis or prognosis, research, instruction, prescribing, dispensing or administering any device, drug, or medication, surgery, or any other care or treatment rendered or provided by health care providers. Health care service does not include notifying a member of a health care institution's management of a patient inquiry about obtaining a health care service that a health care provider believes may violate his or her conscience.
(5) OBJECT IN WRITING. To provide advance notice in 16 a signed written document to an authorized agent of his or her employer, board, or other oversight agency of a particular health care provider. The notice shall be provided within a reasonable time, but in no case less than twenty-four (24) hours prior to any service or procedure objected to under this section by the health care provider.
(6) PARTICIPATE. To counsel, advise, provide, perform, assist in, refer for, admit for purposes of providing, or participate in providing, any health care service or any form of such service. Participate does not include compliance with a health care institution's policy and procedure which states that a health care provider must notify a member of the health care institution's management of a patient's inquiry about obtaining a health care service that the health care provider believes may violate his or her conscience.

Definitions of terms are good. I'm sure there could be some debate around this, but I have no objections here. They're even pretty specific definitions compared to most bills I've ever read.

Here comes the real meat of this thing...

Section 4.
(a) A health care provider has the right not to participate, and no health care provider shall be required to participate, in a health care service that violates his or her conscience when the health care provider has objected in writing prior to being asked to provide such health care services.
(b) No health care provider shall be civilly, criminally, or administratively liable for declining to participate in a health care service that violates his or her conscience except when failure to do would immediately endanger the life of a patient.
(c) It shall be unlawful for any person, health care provider, health care institution, public or private institution, public official, or any board which certifies competency in medical or health care specialties to discriminate against any health care provider in any manner based on his or her declining to participate in a health care service that violates his or her conscience, where the health care provider has made his or her objections known in writing. Provided further, students may be evaluated based on their understanding of course materials, but no student shall be required to perform a health care service or be penalized because he or she subscribes to a particular position on one or more of the four health care services.
(d) Notwithstanding any other provision in this act, in a life-threatening situation where no other health care provider is available or capable of providing or participating in a health care service, a health care provider shall provide and participate in treatment, care, or procedures until an alternate health care provider capable of providing or participating in the emergency treatment, care, or procedures is found or otherwise becomes available.
(e) Except as otherwise provided in this section, a hospital, as defined in Section 22-21-20, Code of Alabama 1975, or other health care entity, and any employee, physician, member, or person associated with the hospital or other health care entity is immune from liability for any damage caused by the refusal of a health care provider to participate in a health care service defined in this act at a facility owned, operated, or controlled by the hospital or other health care entity.

(a) Good! If you object to performing certain actions, and do so in writing (ie. establish legally binding contractual terms that exclude you from certain procedures) then no one has a right to violate that contract. This is excellent.

(b) You're not liable for the consequences of not doing X procedure when you've objected (again, in writing, prior to the request for service) on moral or conscientious grounds. Naturally, this makes sense. Again, taking the circumcision example. If I was a doctor, and said up-front that I would absolutely not be performing any circumcisions, families could not sue me over this... And they shouldn't be able to. You cannot compel me to perform a service I find morally objectionable - unless you're prepared to endorse slavery, and I hope you're not.

(c) NOW HERE'S THE PROBLEM!!!

If I have a right to pick which services I will and will not perform, a hospital manager/owner has the right to only hire people who are willing to perform all the procedures that they want to provide at their hospital... If I object to abortion, then you can't compel me to perform one. But if you run a hospital and you want to be sure you offer abortions, I can also not rightfully compel you to hire me.

Again... From a libertarian perspective, this is all about giving individuals their own autonomy. No slavery. It's really quite simple... But in Section 4, provision C, this bill goes too far.

That said, government funded/run hospitals confound matters somewhat. More on that if anybody asks.

(d) HERE'S ANOTHER PROBLEM (ISH):

In this provision, people's moral objections are suspended and indentured servitude is instated in times of life-threatening emergency. Strictly speaking, this is anti-libertarian and problematic. Like the problem in provision C, this problem would be solved by fully private clinics and hospitals, but to be honest, it seems like a pretty decent compromise.

The hospital can't discriminate against you or fire you for not agreeing to perform certain procedures that you find morally objectionable, BUT, you have to perform them no matter what, in the event that someone is about to die.

Not the worst thing that's ever happened. But it's basically two wrongs trying to make a right. It could be better, but it's not that bad.

(e) Limited liability for people who have contractually refused to perform certain services. Again, this is fine. You should not force someone or legally punish someone for electing not to do something they find morally objectionable.

Now... Sections 5-9 are perfunctory stuff that I don't really have any real comments on. As I said, the meat of it is what's written above, so I'll stop there and you can read more if you'd like

In the final analysis, here's what I found.

1. This bill does not make miscarriages, or indeed, ANY procedures "illegal".
2. This bill does not prevent people from seeking abortions, circumcisions, stem cell treatments, or literally any type of procedure that exists anywhere on planet earth. There is no restrictive language what-so-ever that would make any specific procedure illegal.
3. It does attempt to guarantee that health care professionals are not treated as slaves or indentured servants and forced to participate in procedures that they find objectionable. Chalk up several points on the libertarian scoreboard for Alabama on this attempt. Slavery is wrong, m'kay?
4. It does have a major weak spot in two ways..
   a. It prohibits hospital administrators and health care employers from discriminating against people who do not share their beliefs, which violates their right to association, and subsequently means that they may have to keep people on staff who refuse to perform procedures that are officially offered by the hospital/clinic/etc. This is unfortunate.
   b. The prohibition in (a) is partially made up for by a second clause that forces people to perform morally objectionable procedures in life-threatening situations, which means that from a patient's standpoint, the worst they should legally be able to experience is the minor inconvenience of asking one doctor to do an abortion, or a circumcision, or whatnot; being told "no", and subsequently needing to find a different doctor for the same procedure. However, if they're in real trouble, say they need an abortion or the mother and baby will die, then the doctor has to perform that procedure anyway, regardless of his beliefs.
   
   But... To my mind, (a) + (b) more or less cancel each other out... Again, two wrongs don't make a right, but in this case, they add up to a bit of a wash for actual consequences.
5. Even if the bill did anything remotely like what was claimed by the ACLU, the likelihood of a majority of doctors literally anywhere in the United States actively trying to deny treatment for miscarriages is a ridiculous claim that I'd challenge anyone to provide some shred of support for... I'm certain that support won't be coming from the ACLU's writing staff.

All in, I'd say this bill isn't that bad. Could be better, but it does not - in any way - say what the ACLU headline said it did, nor what the lady who I originally saw posting about it claimed.

I'm getting rather tired of a media culture built on outrage and misinformation... Aren't you?

"Let's just wait and see what happens..."

Once upon a time (by which I mean, 2009), I stumbled on a great essay by Georgetown Law Professor, Jonathan Hasnas that purported to describe what it feels like to be a libertarian. In it, he wrote:

"I’ll tell you. It feels bad. Being a libertarian means living with an almost unendurable level of frustration. It means being subject to unending scorn and derision despite being inevitably proven correct by events. How does it feel to be a libertarian? Imagine what the internal life of Cassandra must have been and you will have a pretty good idea."

Hasnas goes on to say...

"Libertarians spend their lives accurately predicting the future effects of government policy. Their predictions are accurate because they are derived from Hayek’s insights into the limitations of human knowledge, from the recognition that the people who comprise the government respond to incentives just like anyone else and are not magically transformed to selfless agents of the good merely by accepting government employment, from the awareness that for government to provide a benefit to some, it must first take it from others, and from the knowledge that politicians cannot repeal the laws of economics. For the same reason, their predictions are usually negative and utterly inconsistent with the utopian wishful-thinking that lies at the heart of virtually all contemporary political advocacy. And because no one likes to hear that he cannot have his cake and eat it too or be told that his good intentions cannot be translated into reality either by waving a magic wand or by passing legislation, these predictions are greeted not merely with disbelief, but with derision.

It is human nature to want to shoot the messenger bearing unwelcome tidings. And so, for the sin of continually pointing out that the emperor has no clothes, libertarians are attacked as heartless bastards devoid of compassion for the less fortunate, despicable flacks for the rich or for business interests, unthinking dogmatists who place blind faith in the free market, or, at best, members of the lunatic fringe.

Cassandra’s curse was to always tell the truth about the future, but never be believed. If you add to that curse that she would be ridiculed, derided, and shunned for making her predictions, you have a pretty fair approximation of what it feels like to be a libertarian."

I've long known Hasnas' frustration. I feel it day in and day out.

And lately, with the flood of people losing the insurance coverage they used to have and being forced into dramatically higher insurance plans or onto the mostly non-functional government-created and subsidized "exchanges", this frustration is starting to boil over. I want to scream at people sometimes. Because starting way back in 2007-2008, when people started getting really excited about so-called health care "reform", I started writing and debating about that issue with anyone and everyone, and did so through the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

Search this blog for "Healthcare", and you'll find a trove of essays and articles, most of them complete with citations and links to supporting documentation and economic arguments.

I've done my best to be fair, and to present the opposing case as accurately as I could, and I've stayed away from sensationalizing the issue or talking unnecessarily about "death panels" or "socialism" in the crass sense. I don't even like using the term "ObamaCare".

I'm not that kind of a thinker or a writer. I never have been.

But I have been sounding the alarm against what should have always been the perfectly obvious consequences of the legislation for years. And now many of those consequences are here biting people in the ass. Millions of people are losing their insurance coverage, which is a predictable consequence of a law that made their existing policies illegal to sell or buy.

Isn't that kind of... well... the point?

The PPACA created conditions where people who were voluntarily selling a particular set of health care insurance coverage at a price other people were voluntarily willing to pay were no longer allowed to do so. The politicians - Obama, Pelosi, Baucus, and everyone else - implicitly claim that they know better than those people.

The buyers were stupid. The sellers: Immoral.

Voluntary exchange be damned, Americans weren't wise or smart enough to make their own choices in an already severely restricted and government-controlled insurance market. The little bit of choice they had left had to be taken away... For their own good. At least that's the sales pitch when stripped of it's doublespeak.

Now Obama is sad. He's "sorry" that millions of people have been losing their insurance plans. Not sorry enough to admit fault, of course, but certainly sorry enough to lay out some new platitudes about how unfortunate this all is and level yet another populist bromide against those awful, mean insurance companies. It's their fault, don't you know?

It's not the fault of the law that literally made the more affordable plans they'd offered illegal and forced them to create new - compliant - plans that had to cover dozens more treatments, throw out all sane actuarial models, and cover people who we already knew were going to be extremely costly to the other members of the insurance pool.

None of that could possibly have made insurance less affordable, even though anyone who can do a tiny bit of arithmetic might have realized it would.

And of course, the fact that the law also requires people to buy these expensive health care plans or pay a fine couldn't possibly increase the demand for services, which even a cursory understanding of economics suggests would increase the price. That is, unless the supply of health care services went up as well, but thanks to new taxes on medical technology, heavy handed regulations on producers of medical services, and no actually positive incentives for health care providers to join the industry... the supply of health care technology and services is just going down.

As I've said approximately 87 billion times in the last few years:

More Demand + Less Supply = HIGHER PRICES.

Really, guys. It's not that hard. I promise.

And that brings me to the title of this post. "Let's just wait and see what happens" is the incessant refrain from people who have absolutely no counter argument to reality, but who desperately - and from what I can tell, purely partisan reasons - cannot bring themselves to believe that the utopian policy promises their favorite politicians have made won't come true.

Obama is an upstanding, smart man. He's charismatic. He's well-meaning. The goal of making sure as many people as possible in America can get whatever health care they need to stay in tip-top shape is noble, right? Promises were made and they sounded good.

But that's not how reality works. 

The problem is, instead of addressing the counter-arguments sufficiently (if at all), and instead of observing the data rolling in that's right in front of your face, you say, "Hey, man, let's just wait and see what happens!"

Yes.

Let's just keep pushing out the timeline. Eventually things will turn around, and the reality that you don't want to be true will - from nothing but wishful thinking - stop being true. And it's not just about this issue. It's been the same thing over and over, throughout the past several years.

Cash for Clunkers won't stimulate the economy, you say? "Wait and see what happens." Oh. Ok... Fine, let's wait around to find out that, yep, it was worthless. See the Washington Post:

"But, as it turns out, the critics were on to something. A new analysis from the Brookings Institution's Ted Gayer and Emily Parker found that the program was fairly inefficient as economic stimulus and mostly pulled forward auto sales that would have happened anyway. It also cut greenhouse-gas emissions a bit — the equivalent of taking up to 5 million cars off the road for a year — but at a steep cost."

What about the auto bailouts? "Just wait and see what happens, man." Waited... And what do we find? Yet again, costs grossly outweigh the benefits. Cato and others have done excellent analysis on this point.

"Any verdict on the auto bailouts must take into account, among other things, the illegal diversion of TARP funds, the forced transfer of assets from shareholders and debt-holders to pensioners and their union; the higher-risk premiums consequently built into U.S. corporate debt; the costs of denying Ford and the other more worthy automakers the spoils of competition; the costs of insulating irresponsible actors, such as the autoworkers’ union, from the outcomes of an apolitical bankruptcy proceeding; the diminution of U.S. moral authority to counsel foreign governments against market interventions; and the lingering uncertainty about policy that pervades the business environment to this day."

...and don't forget about the $55 billion hit American taxpayers are taking on that "investment" as well.

What about government "investments" to help other key industries like energy? We waited and found Solyndra, They failed and cost taxpayers millions with nothing to show for them.

What about minimum wage hikes? Again, we wait, and they raise unemployment rates, lower hours worked by part-time workers, and generally price the most vulnerable people in society right out of the labor market.

What about bank bailouts and general stimulus packages? Didn't they save the economy? Sure... If by "save", you mean prolong the pain for 5+ years and set us up for even bigger financial problems in the future, yeah.

Each time someone tells me that we should just "wait and see what happens", they're ignoring what has happened repeatedly throughout recorded economic history and they're ignoring the arguments actually being made that explain why their genius plans are doomed to fail. So they fall back on this position of ignorance, like we just can't know or even make an educated guess about what will happen. Logic and evidence is irrelevant when your vision is unconstrained by reality.

I'm tired of it. I'm exhausted and frustrated. It doesn't feel good at all to say "I told you so", when what I told you was that millions of people would be harmed by the policy you support.

I don't want to see millions of people hurt by other people's stupidity anymore.

Sadly, it's only the tip of the iceberg on the harm coming from insane policies that have only been expanded and strengthened over the past several years. Spending most of your life watching a train-wreck unfold that no one bothers to understand well enough to stop, even though you're screaming at the top of your lungs telling them to avoid the pain, takes a toll.