House of Eratosthenes

Teams buy high-tech equipment to get better results. Doctors prescribe all sorts of special medications if an athlete is injured. Competitors try dubious vitamins and “natural” food supplements.

But they better not use steroids.

The public supports this ban, but they rarely think it through. Why are steroids bad but eye surgery OK? (Tiger Woods did that to improve his vision.) Athletes will constantly try new ways to maximize their strength and endurance. Why is government even involved?

And I’m loving this rant against lotteries:

Running lotteries is one of the more horrible things our governments do. The poor buy the most tickets, and states offer them terrible odds. The government entered the lottery business promising to end the “criminal numbers racket.” Now states do what the “criminals” did but offer much worse odds. Adding insult to their scam, politicians also spend our tax money promoting lotteries with disgusting commercials that trash hard work, implying that happiness comes from hedonism.

I’ve heard so many variations of that Ben Franklin quote about purchasing temporary safety at the expense of essential liberty, since Congress first began discussing the PATRIOT Act.

It’s sad that, at the end of that decade-long stretch, I’m seeing so many of my fellow citizens in a high dudgeon about new laws, looking for things to ban. They don’t even seem to want to acknowledge any kind of a trade-off.

The public supports this ban, but they rarely think it through. Why are steroids bad but eye surgery OK? (Tiger Woods did that to improve his vision.) Athletes will constantly try new ways to maximize their strength and endurance. Why is government even involved?

I’m of several minds about sports, especially pro sports and the level of government involved in them. If there’s a political takeaway from pro sports — as it seems there must be — I’d much prefer it to be “sports are a business, like any other; businesses can be / should be regulated; we need to clearly understand both the intent and impact of regulations before we start.”

Pro sports could actually be a “teachable moment” (I hate that phrase) for folks otherwise disinclined to think much about politics. Start with the premise that sport is a business like any other. A certain amount of government regulation is necessary to ensure a free and fair market….

…and right there you’ve got every leftist in creation screaming at you, because you’ve demolished their favorite strawman. But yes, conservatives believe in some state oversight, because the maintenance of free and fair markets is one of the half-dozen things a representative government is covenanted to do.

In other words: You probably can’t get your average nonpolitical-but-naively-conservative fellow citizen into a discussion of constitutional theory for love or money, but if you phrase it as a question of whether or not the Yankees should be allowed to graft bionic arms onto their pitchers or something, and all of a sudden it has all kinds of interesting ramifications.

I’m very much in favor of amateur sports, especially Little League and their equivalents, simply because they’re the easiest way to hammer home some basic truths to kids. Yes, Johnny is better at baseball than you. No, that’s not fair. Fair has nothing to do with it. Now you face a choice: You can devote many, many hours to training in order to be almost as good as Johnny is with no effort whatsoever, or you can accept that you’re never going to make it to the big leagues and start devoting your time and effort elsewhere. Life IS a zero-sum game for individuals, and no amount of government-mandated make believe will ever make you as good at baseball as Johnny is.
- Severian | 02/08/2013 @ 08:35
Next time you are with a liberal sports fan, bring up the idea of having women pro football players to make the game more gender friendly.
- Captain Midnight | 02/08/2013 @ 11:37
That’s the problem, though — liberals tend not to be sports fans. Something about all that icky competition and rules and clear cut winners and losers. The only sport they generally pretend to like is soccer — oh, excuse me, “futbol” — because it’s European, and therefore sophisticated, and because you can “play” it all the way through high school without having to actually do anything athletic.
- Severian | 02/08/2013 @ 12:08
It IS odd though that there are no liberals clamoring for more woemen in football. Even as they clamor for woemen in combat. And, their Holy man-god-president murmurs His displeasure about men playing football because it’s too dangerous…while supporting the idea of putting the woemen in combat.

Seems to me they’re not so much trying to do away with sexism, as rearrange it a bit.
- mkfreeberg | 02/08/2013 @ 12:14
Stossel is a libertarian, and as such he believes in considerably limited, to point of often ridiculousness, government involvement. He wants gambling, steroids, prostitution, drugs (the last two not mentioned here but I’ve heard him before on those)…basically everything to be legal. And it’s a great concept and debate to have with conservatives.
On it’s face it all sounds good, “You can’t legislate morality…” etc, etc. But what about society, what about the general welfare of our fellow citizens? All those vices I mentioned do indeed affect more than the person engaging in such activities. Stossel never puts forth any solutions that are better, (legalize everything is not a solution). he just knows what he doesn’t want.

Yea, it gets complicated and I’m not putting forth enough right now as it deserves…I’ve actually changed my mind about drug legalization (pro to anti, though still…) in the last couple years. And what role do we want our government to play in our lives in such matters?

But as Hillary said, what difference does it matter? Our fellow citizens have spoken loud and clear. They want bread and circuses. Sigh.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Severian,

C’mon now. I played soccer, it takes an extreme amount of fitness to run around for 90 minutes. And it certainly has it’s share of physicality. (I played football and lacrosse, all great sports.) I turned out conservative.

Don’t get carried away with the lib versus conservative stuff, Morgan doesn’t like football (or any sports as far as I can tell) so there ya’ go.
- tim | 02/08/2013 @ 14:11
tim,

yeah, I know playing soccer competitively takes fitness. 🙂

The kind of “futbol” liberals love to sign their kids up for, though, involves lots of drifting aimlessly up and down the court (field, “pitch,” whatever), and none of that icky stuff like winning and losing or keeping score. It’s all so Snowflake can have a sport to put down on the “extracurriculars” section of her Bennington app.
- Severian | 02/11/2013 @ 04:39
I don’t understand the argument that “you can’t legislate morality.” What are laws against murder and fraud but laws enforcing morality? I think what people usually mean is something more like “you shouldn’t legislate either victimless crimes or ethical choices that are too private or too subtle to be easily subject to a simple, broadly applied rule.” There is room for a lot of disagreement over what is truly a victimless crime, of course, as well as over just how private and just how subtle a moral choice has to be before we think the state ought to butt out.

We know from long, bloody experience that it’s a bad idea to try to enforce religious belief with the criminal law, but once you get beyond pure internal conscience and into the realm of action, things get trickier. The British felt comfortable hanging Indian families who forced widows to join their husbands in death, even though that was widely accepted as completely moral and even mandated by deep religious conviction. But no one wants to return the days when you could be drawn and quartered for participating in a mass. Is that because we’re so evolved and tolerant now, or just because there’s hardly anyone left in the world with religious convictions so deep that they are capable of viewing the mass/no-mass controversy as having ultimate importance?

As C.S. Lewis said, we don’t burn witches any more, but that’s because we no longer believe in witches. If we literally believed that some people could kill their neighbors with spells, we’d probably bring back the death penalty for sorcery.

And of course, lots of people are very comfortable advocating the death penalty for high crimes like excessive carbon footprints or cruelty to baby seals or even just excessive right-wing beliefs, as you’ll see if you spend any time at all on a site like FireDogLake. These are the new “moral crimes.” They’ve replaced things like adultery, no longer considered even a social peccadillo.
- Texan99 | 02/11/2013 @ 16:16

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