Health

The controversy is as old as the Great Society. So why bring up the fluoridation question again? Well, my county in Florida just voted to fluoridate the water supply. Actually, the government officials in my county who are responsible for such things voted for it—neither I nor my neighbors were ever asked to vote on anything.

But rather than being the substance of a conspiracy theory, as is usually claimed, the question of fluoridation is a question of the proper role of government (federal, state, or local) in society.

The brutal punishing of adults for the substances they ought to be able to ingest, inhale, or inject at their own peril is based on a parochial and moribund prior restraint argument. Considering the extent and severity of its assault on otherwise peaceable people, the state's conduct in the war on drugs befits the conduct of a criminal class, albeit a criminal class that enjoys the protection of the law.

When there is a shortage of a good, it is safe to say that it is a result of government incursion into the economy. In the Cipro shortfall resulting from the current Anthrax scare, the likely culprits are FDA regulations and the patent system.

Alan Bock's book, Waiting to Inhale, gives readers an inside look at the forces behind the movement to give medical patients access to the legal use of marijuana.

Doctors and patients fed up with the current medical system are negotiating something entirely new, and the AMA is very unhappy. 

The purpose of the Patients' Bill of Rights is to destroy HMOs and pave the way for the complete socialization of American health care. William Anderson explains. 

There's a massive shortage of available kidneys for transplant. The solution is the free market, but the objections are mainly moral. Ninos Malek explains.

One of the modern hero-myths the State has cultivated about itself is that government vaccination programs drastically reduced some common communicable diseases in the twentieth century. For decades, the government has required certain vaccinations for entry into schools, and most parents have passively submitted to the inoculation of their children. Now, in response to increasing evidence that vaccines may not be the boon to our health that has been supposed, opposition to mandatory vaccination programs is building.

Government intervention designed to stop the spread of disease is making matters worse, by destroying property and institutionalizing a moral hazard. Christopher Westley explains.

The system is wide open to abuse, maltreatment, and even corruption, writes Hans Sennholz