A Place to Stand

We are used to getting a new health scare story fed to us almost daily - passive smoking, AIDS, salt, obesity, butter, margarine, fish, meat etc etc - all of which require more government regulators to save us from by stopping us doing things we like to do.

Here is a scare, as damaging as real smoking (& infinitely moreso than the passive kind) which we have not seen blanket coverage of & perhaps coincidentally, is one which government bullying cannot ameliorate because it is responsible for it.

Researchers from Norway and the United Kingdom found that mortality rates for people suffering from depression are similar to those who smoke.

The joint study, conducted by research teams at the University of Bergen, Norway, and the Institute of Psychology at King's College in London, compared results from a 60,000-person survey with a mortality database. Scientists found that smoking and depression increased the risk of death by a similar margin.

In fact studies have shown that government control is a major factor in reducing happiness

The data show that neither higher rates of government redistribution nor lower levels of income inequality make us happier, whereas high levels of economic freedom and high average incomes are among the strongest correlates of subjective well-being.

This is on top of the previous BMA evidence that each 1% change in living standards leads to an increased/reduced death rate of 21 per 100,000. The government parasitism of all these regulators is paid out of the productive part of the economy seriously impoverishing us all.

Whatever all these nanny state bullies may do to increase government employment we can say with certainty that, unless the "problem" they are "dealing with" is significantly more dangerous than smoking (heroin might count) & they are clearly being successful (heroin obviously wouldn't count) they are not improving health but unambiguously making it worse.

Yet more proof that the purpose of government programmes is to pay government workers & their friends & that the official purpose of the programme is, at best, secondary & in this case the health fascist scares are known to be damaging to their nominal purpose.

Labels: economics, Fear, Media