Via Reason, an article by George McGovern on personal choice.
Since leaving office I’ve written about public policy from a new perspective: outside looking in. I’ve come to realize that protecting freedom of choice in our everyday lives is essential to maintaining a healthy civil society.
Why do we think we are helping adult consumers by taking away their options? We don’t take away cars because we don’t like some people speeding. We allow state lotteries despite knowing some people are betting their grocery money. Everyone is exposed to economic risks of some kind. But we don’t operate mindlessly in trying to smooth out every theoretical wrinkle in life.
The nature of freedom of choice is that some people will misuse their responsibility and hurt themselves in the process. We should do our best to educate them, but without diminishing choice for everyone else.
That’s better than anything I’ve heard from any of the Democratic candidates. McGovern for President!!
4 responses so far ↓
1 Donna // Mar 8, 2008 at 11:09 am
Hear, hear! McGovern was the first person I ever voted for POTUS. I would prefer to vote for him again this year if my only other choices are Clinton, McCain or a write-in vote for Obama.
2 pax // Mar 12, 2008 at 9:57 am
The point of this article is that McGovern used to be a hopeless liberal who stood for more power for the government and deeper regulation of business, but now that he has been in business himself and tangled with the bureaucracy he has come to realize that more government power is not a good thing.
He has changed his mind. I don’t understand why anyone who would have voted for him in ‘72 would also prefer to vote for him this year unless that person also changed their minds drastically, which you haven’t.
3 Donna // Mar 12, 2008 at 3:50 pm
I have, of course, changed my mind to some degree since 1972. My comment was for the most part OT in the sense it was less in support of McGovern and more in support of the quandary I will find myself in if Hillary Clinton is able to steal the nomination.
4 pax // Mar 12, 2008 at 3:57 pm
What have you changed your mind about specifically?
I’ve changed my mind about lots of things in the past 7 or 8 years, but they’re mostly things that before that I had never educated myself about or read more than one side of. There’s a tendency in this country to be what I refer to as “default democrat”, where you’ve never really sat down and read both sides to determine which makes the better case, you just go with the flow given to you by public schooling and the media, which results in being a default democrat, because conservatives are always portrayed as cruel greedy heartless bastards.
Personally I am a conservative because I actually do care about the poor, and realize that governmental policies mostly just create more of them or perpetuate the poverty of those already poor, while the only institution that has ever been proven by history to reduce poverty is the free market.
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