FROM THE ARCHIVES.

15

YEARS AGO

May 2007

What do these four 'public health' problems--smoking, playing violent video games, overeating, and gamblinghave in common? They're all things that some people enjoy and other people condemn, attributing to them various bad effects. Sometimes these effects are medical, but they may also be psychological, behavioral, social, or financial. Calling the habits that supposedly lead to these consequences 'public health' problems, 'epidemics' that need to be controlled, equates choices with diseases, disguises moralizing as science, and casts meddling as medicine. It elevates a collectivist calculus of social welfare above the interests of individuals, who become subject to increasingly intrusive interventions aimed at making them as healthy as they can be, without regard to their own preferences.

JACOB SULLUM

An Epidemic of Meddling

20

YEARS AGO

May 2002

Human beings not only consume resources but make new resources with their fertile minds. People do not simply use up resources the way a herd of zebra would; they create new recipes to use resources in ever more effective ways. Coal, tin, fresh water, forests, and so forth may all be limited, but the ideas for extending and improving their uses are not.

RONALD BAILEY

Green With Ideology

The abuses of psychiatry are rooted in the fact that the doctorpatient relationship is frequently not one of service provider to customer but all too often a hegemonic one, with the doctor forcing treatments on the patient. Although no one keeps set figures on this, by cobbling together available sources it is safe to say that even today well more than half a million Americans a year are under the care (and control) of a psychiatrist by law rather than by personal choice. As [Robert] Whitaker is not the first to note (see the writings of Michel Foucault or of Reason Contributing Editor Thomas Szasz), the history of psychiatry fits more comfortably in the history of penology than of medicine.

BRIAN DOHERTY

Ill-Treated

25

YEARS AGO

May 1997

In a moment of ideological frankness, Assistant Secretary of Education David Longanecker blurted out this allegedly nonpolitical policy's goal: bribing Generation X and its successors to back big government. 'We want to make a very strong statement,' Longanecker said following the State of the Union Address, 'that it is worth it to this country to invest in these middle-class students. We believe it will help them re-engage in civic life and make...