Health

If there were justice in the world, Joan Claybrook, the head of the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration during the Carter administration, would be handcuffed to the steering column of a Volkswagen Beetle while an air bag was repeatedly blown up in her face. While in the government Claybrook forced on us the mandatory air bag rule. Then years later, after dozens of children were killed by air bags, she lied about her role in making them mandatory, as attorney Sam Kazman recently proved in the pages of the Wall Street Journal.

The human cost of price controls on livers.

The policy agenda of the Clinton administration is usually described as halting, pragmatic, and poll driven. But in its approach to the issue of medical insurance and the drive to socialize medical care, it has been systematic, principled, and highly strategic. The Clinton government is using the failures and internal contradictions of the welfare state to pursue a program of universal entitlements.

How government regulators turned the car into a deathtrap.

What the tobacco settlement implies about human freedom.

Having failed to nationalize health care at the beginning of its first term, the Clinton administration seeks to nationalize children in its second. With little opposition from Republicans, the administration has proposed spending tens of billions of dollars on subsidized day care, mostly through federal grants to state day-care bureaucracies.

Over the past ten years, the budget of the National Institutes of Health has doubled, and the government medical research outfit is demanding even more dramatic increases in the future. Scientists on the government dole gush about the possibilities for new discoveries—and last year's budget of $13.6 billion wasn't enough to bring them about.

Congress proved it: not even childbirth is off limits to federal mandates. Forty-eight hours will heretofore be the minimum hospital stay for new mothers, Congress said, double the time insurance companies used to cover. Who could disagree with such tender loving care, courtesy of D.C.?

Before the mid 1950s, there was no "retirement" as we use the term today. A 1950 poll showed most workers aspired to work for as long as possible. Quitting was for the disabled. Life did not offer "twilight years," two decades of uninterrupted leisure courtesy of the U.S. taxpayer.

Among the many excuses for government planning is that it makes life safer for one and all. The automobile bears the brunt of this central planning. Like most all interventions in the free market, the effect of mandates to make the car safer is nearly the opposite. Witness the recent air bag fiasco.