We can't pay for freedom?

There are many arguments given by the major political parties for the existence of so-called consensual crimes, such as drug use and not wearing a seatbelt, among others. Some of them, in my opinion, merit at least some consideration, such as the fact that these “crimes” will create situations that motivate people to commit violent offenses, and there will be insufficient police resources to prosecute these . One argument that I almost immediately dismiss as holding no weight is the one that it is a legitimate purpose of government to use the force of law to prevent people from doing harm to themselves. A typical discussion with a non-libertarian (stylized from my own discussions with some of them) goes like this:

Lib: People should have the right to do whatever they want as long as it does not infringe on the rights of others. Behavior that might harm only the person who engages in it therefore cannot be legitimately prohibited by law.

NL: However, if people make mistakes and get into problems (i.e. overdose on drugs, get injured in an accident because they didn’t use a seatbelt, etc.), then it costs the taxpayers money to provide medical treatment (or another form of help) to these people. This is an unfair burden on the rest of society.

Lib: If it gets to the point where many people engage in an activity that creates problems for them, and they don’t have the money to pay for help, and it becomes a burden on the taxpayers, then some people will have to be denied the help that they need. The limited amount of free medical (or other) services is due a fundamental limitation of resources that no political philosophy, including a libertarian one, can solve. This does not mean that libertarians find this shortage to be a good thing, only that they don’t consider it grounds for government prohibition.

NL: Why do you oppose that free medical treatment be given to people injured in accidents when they were careless? Don’t you believe in giving people a second chance? The technology to provide such help is available, so it makes sense to use it if it means someone’s life is saved.

Lib: But you just said that giving such help to everyone who needs it and can’t pay for it would be an unreasonable burden on society. I have nothing against giving people a second chance. However, don’t you see how your reasoning is kind of contradictory? You say that a risky activity should be prohibited because someone who injures him/herself will need help from society, and people are not willing to pay enough in taxes to match the demand for such services in the case that the activity were legal and widespread. When asked why people would need to pay for those services, you say that they are much easier than letting people die.

I immediately see something strange about this reasoning, but listening to politicians clearly indicates that many do not, or act as if they do not. Most often, they keep such discussion covered up by the use of buzzwords such as “public health” and “providing for the good of the people.” In doing so, they take phrases such as “public health” (which when referring to illnesses like diabetes and cancer is an overwhelmingly positive thing) and turn them into political excuses for restrictive, paternalistic policies.

A questionable form of sex selection

I found this post on Blogging Baby.com yesterday following a link from the Netscape home page. It claims that parents can increase their chances of giving birth to a boy if one of them enters a profession such as engineering:

"Hoping for a boy? You or your spouse could improve your odds by switching to a ‘masculine’ profession such as engineering, mathematics, or another ‘systemizer’ line of work. According to calculations by a London School of Economics professor, the ratio of boys born to such ‘systemiser’ jobs is 140 to 100 girls, compared to 105 to 100 in the general population and 100 to 135 in ‘feminine’ jobs, like nursing."

The word "systemizer" as used here is undoubtedly a reference to the work of the professor of developmental psychopathology Simon Baron-Cohen. It refers to a type of cognition that concerns the behavior of systems of inanimate objects rather than the manner in which people act or interact, which he calls "empathizing" (note that this usage resembles more what has been popularized as "emotional intelligence" than the more specific everyday meaning of understanding someone's pain or sadness). One of his principal theories is that, individual differences aside, male brains are more adapted to systemizing-type reasoning than female brains, and that autistic brains are an extreme form of this. As someone who is interested in cognitive sex differences, and fits the systemizer type very well, I find his hypotheses quite interesting. However, the author of the post on Blogging Baby seems to be quite ignorant of the biology behind this theory. It is unclear what the factor is that causes engineers and mathematicians to have more sons, and I can't find the original survey results, so I don't know if the father's and mother's professions correlate equally with the child sex ratio, or one substantially more than the other. However, the fact that autism has a large sex difference in prevalence, according to Baron-Cohen, is due to an influence of sex on early brain development, producing a bias toward a systemizer phenotype. It seems from the current results that this may also bias the development of the male reproductive system, increasing the proportion of sperm with a Y chromosome. Also, while "systemizers" are found in large numbers in careers such as engineering, the term "systemizer" does not refer to a set of professions but a pattern of performance on a set of standard psychological tests. Simply taking up a job with Microsoft or Intel doesn't qualify. Therefore, the Lamarckian line of reasoning presented in the above paragraph is amusingly farfetched. It suggests that someone whose brain had not developed to display a strong systemizing bent, and therefore already shown a tendency toward engineering-type fields, would, by taking up a job in a high-tech field, reverse the biological process that links brain function and sex ratio to begin with.